A little Rain, Some LED's, A bit of Drawing, and My Name

This week I found a really cool art installation while I was looking for some more inspiration for another Conceptual Interactive Experience for my Human Computers Interactions class.

It is called, Rain Room which you can see a video of here. This is a really cool installation where you walk into this complete area of rain and sensors track where you are and turn off the rain above you so you never get wet.

This is so aesthetically pleasing to me for some reason. I love the lighting and I just have a huge connection to water so this piece is definitely something I have added to my bucket list, although I kinda wish afterwards you could just be like okay now let me get soaked because I would totally want to feel that too.

While my piece I came up with really has no connection to this, I still thought they were worth sharing and if you want to check out what I did come up with you can check out my blog post "Yesterday's Company. - Conceptual Installation"

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For Human and Computer Interactions I also had to come up with a working arduino sketch and component setup that used multiple LEDs and the dial potentiometer. I decided that I would put together a row of LED lights and try to use the potentiometer to make the light travel back and forth through the lights as you turned the dial. You can see more about this project in my blog post Led's & Potentiometer - HCI Arduino Uno Build

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This week I gathered a lot more pictures into my pinterest boards and put together some photo collages with Photoshop to help get more of the layout of the backgrounds. From there I started the line drawings for my two pieces. I really wanted to line up the pieces in a way that when they are being scratched off they have similar horizon lines so the whole water/wave section in the ocean painting lines up with/ turns into a large concrete guardrail. This means the turtles crawling across the sand can align with the turtles crawling across the road as well as the light source will be lined up, changing from the moon to the city. There will be much more contrast between the moon and sky vs. the city and sky, since the city sky will be much lighter from the light pollution. Here are the two base sketches in progress.

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Another interesting thing I spent time on this week was looking more into how different artists have done in regards to changing/not changing their name upon when they get married. It is something I have thought about before but now that I am going to be doing this huge project I feel like it could be a potential start of a bigger chapter in my art career. Most of what I saw said that most artists keep their maiden name so they do not have to go through "rebranding" so to speak and they also don't want to change it because they feel like they are "losing a part of their own identity", "conforming to society's sexist social standards" etc. I get these points and I think they are very valid.

However, the truth is I want nothing more to be Brooke Cormier and to leave Brooke Elliott behind in the dust forever. In all aspects of life I want to, art world included. Without going too into my personal life too much I see Brooke Elliott as a person who was beaten, manipulated, abused, weak, didn't stand up for herself, hated herself, wanted and tried on several occasions to leave this world. Brooke Elliott was always hurting, fearful, and desperately lonely. I hate my past and who I was. The memories of Brooke Elliott's life haunt me, they tear me apart, even now I am shaking and crying. I wish so much could just be erased from my mind. I understand why things happened and who I was but I hate it, and yes there is probably some super deep issues here that this is a sign I need to work on but becoming Brooke Cormier is a new start, a needed change for me to move forward.

I am not yet married to Thomas, but I feel like I became Brooke Cormier years ago. When I found a new family, people who accepted me as I was, people who listened when I needed to just cry, people who would hold me and help me and never harm me. It was a huge turning point in my life, I began to work on myself, I started liking things about myself, liking me.... still working on the loving me but I can't love her, I can't love my past self even though I know that is probably what I/her need to truly heal. Even admitting that though I just feel like I really need to just move on, move forward, and be Brooke Cormier.