I thought seeing Kevin L. Ferguson’s digitally surreal images of movies was very intriguing.  I don’t think I knew that looking at a movie in such a way would produce anything but noise. I was surprised to see (after he pointed it out. I couldn’t tell before he talked about it) that the images made absolute sense in terms of composition compared to the movie. This really did allow him to look at the movie in a different way than someone just closely analyzing the movie would be able to.

I was especially taken with his analysis of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. That image has green on the left and more orange/brown on the right, and Ferguson explains this by saying the orange comes as no surprise as there’s a lot of very vibrant, warm-toned scenes, not to mention the credits fit into that color, but the green comes from Quasimodo’s hunch practically only ever occurring on the left side of the screen. I just thought it was such an interesting way to prove that more than just Quasimodo is asymmetrical–the entire film is. I could see some Film Studies minor agonizing over finding scholarly sources to back up his or her claim that this is so, before landing delightedly upon Ferguson’s work

Ferguson’s Hunchback image can be found in his article here: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/11/1/000276/000276.html

The article about the art gallery that practically stole Ferguson’s work (well, maybe not stole but…) made me kind of angry. It’s probably because Ferguson seemed so open to sharing his process and being very transparent, and it seems to me as if this other artist took that for granted and saw a monetizable situation. Reading about it just left a bad taste in my mouth. I found it a little funny that Ferguson went so far as to lay out step-by-step instructions for creating our own, though. Seems like it was done out of spite to me, but I don’t blame him.