Eli Miller

I was lucky enough to attend a wonderful artist talk in the Lawrence University Wriston Gallery this past week conducted by the esteemed Jiayi Young: A multi-disciplinary new-media artist, associate professor of design at the University of California, Davis, and to top it all off... a Lawrence University Graduate herself. She walked around the gallery which she reported was displaying her work at about a fifth of its usual scale which should be taken into account. The first piece she introduced titled "What does the Bot say to the Human" quantifies the frequency of non human interaction on websites like twitter and visualizes it as fluorescent green liquid dripping through mechanically stoppered tubes into a system of small lights. The movement of the lights begins almost natural but slowly becomes corrupted and speratic. I believe the word she chose was "Irritated" which felt super congruent to what I was watching. Personally I found myself fascinated at the w...

When considering the different configurations for the plating of a dish or when imagining the aesthetics of seven or more different ingredients as a finished product, sketches and the imagination can really only go so far. For my project I am experiemnting with AI image generation software because it sits in a strange pocket of the uncanny valley especially in terms of food. The ability to generate a seemingly photo-realistic imagination of the description of your course is helpful in one way, but ChatGPT or ClaudAI will never be able to taste or see an ingredient at all, which bleeds through into the image generation heavily. Lets take a close look at this example AI image which I fed the doccument I have been brainstorming my 5 course meal ideas into. Certain things will catch your eye immediately: To start, the labels look absolutely insane and list odd mixed letters for the top two courses, labeling them both as the first-bite. As we know, text is still and will likely fo...

I found myself helplessly caught by the theater of fine dining and more specifically Micheline starred course meals that showcase creativity in the flavors, textures, and overall showmanship of the dining experience. I have always wanted to design a meal like one of these and prove that anyone can make fine dining accessible if they get creative enough. I will find a playful theme that ties all the courses together and brings in the reading for our New Media in Art Class: Image-Music-Text by Roland Barthes to inform intentional decisions about the guests' expectations of the food and how to subvert them. I will doccument the process with a journal and through photography. I also intend to make a professional menu on good paper and really go all the way with it. With my sketchbook/journal in particular, I plan to draw out ideas for plating, and brain dump flavor combinations and cross out what I think will or wont work. Many professional chefs use a big white board but that is f...

 For my final project I wanted to do an investigative photography series about something I had been thinking about alot. I had been thinking mostly about the immense presence of alcohol in Appleton Wisconsin as the country's most drunk city. More specifically, I wanted to look at college avenue which is the main drag of bars that leads right up to the college Lawrence University. Over three sessions at different times of day, I walked down college avenue taking pictures of bar signs and intense displays of alcohol for sale as a way of collecting the evidence of this presence of alcohol. I am not making a moral statement here, instead I am showing the viewer a visceral retelling of Appleton's drinking culture. I have two parts to this project, the main part is called bar crawl where I experimented with the shutter speed of my camera to give the intoxicated, blurry look to the bars I passed. I also took pictures from a low and intimidating angle for thematic emphasis. My second p...

       My time preparing and experiencing my classes art exhibit was experientially very new and exciting for me. We framed our works and showed initiative by all volunteering to do different things in order to see our exhibit up and running. I got to make the vinyl letters for the exhibition sign and see what goes into placing the different works appropriately on the wall. Inviting my friends to see the works as well as looking at everyone's photobook design choices was a big full circle moment for me. Looking at my two main photography inkjet prints in frames with their own labels next to them took them out of the hypothetical and into the art world which is the kind of thing you need to see as an amateur to start trusting your gut on artistic choices in the future. Overall, outside of my new media in art class I would love to finish projects to this same level even if I don't choose to present them in the end at all.        In preparation for t...

 "...The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accord with nature, in her manner of operation."  "Everyone is in the best seat." "Everything we do is music." (John Cage quoted in McLuhan pp.118) McLuhan and John Cage both understand the importance of sound as a medium we can't escape in life.  "Cold Milk" Original photograph "We simply are not equipped with earlids." (McLuhan 111). Importantly, since visual art has the capacity to be abstract or even non representational, sound is allowed to be dissonant or even exploratory in a way where the main take away is how the listener feels.  Taking my inspiration from John Cage's "Water Walk" I decided to use strange liquid sounds as a way to challenge the listener while also leaving the door open for them to laugh if they can't listen past the strangeness. Where my project differs is that I wanted to trigger an intense feeling in my listeners. I ...