For my Digital Imaging class, I was assigned to make multiple scans based around a story I listened to on https://www.mythpodcast.com/listen/. I chose to listen to the Brothers Grimm’s “King of the Mountain”. Below are the five scans I made in order to represent what I took out of the story.

Artist Statement

My image is about how a boy sold by his father would eventually be thrown away again in life after doing what he thought was a good decision. On the Myths and Legends Podcast website, I listened to the story by the Brothers Grimm called “King of the Mountain”. My image relates to the story I listened to by using my visualizations of characters from the story, including the dwarf, the sold child, and the cursed queen as a snake. I only drew the queen as a snake because of her coldness to her husband, the boy, after breaking a simple promise for good reason, to which she took everything away from him and chose to marry soon after. I chose to scan two drawings of the queen as a snake in order to show the two personalities she was shown to have, a caring side and a selfish side. 

I scanned an ornamental egg, a fake pearl bracelet, a necklace, spare coins, a receipt, a pen, a box cover with gold coins on it, and drawings I made of the characters. I placed a sheet of black cloth behind my items in order to create a dark background which I felt fit the background of my story. I used the bead part of the necklace to create a continuous movement from the top blue section of the scan to the dark bottom section in order to simulate a good beginning to a dark ending. I placed the money, receipt, and the pen next to the dwarf in order to show what the dwarf promised to bring the father when he signed the contract that the dwarf offered. 

I felt that creating conceptual material after listening to an audio file was a very interesting concept, especially creating an image inspired by a story we chose ourselves. I was able to easily find items that fit my story and helped build a visual summary of the story. I feel that this assignment was a successful experiment because it allowed us creative freedom over our first big project which helped me stress less over what I was doing. 

New media played a major part in this project with us using scanners to scan our items and turn them into a single scanned image. The connection I made during this project to Lev Manovich’s “What is New Media”, was the digitization of our items and turning them into numerical data. The process involved us sampling our items using the scanner to capture our images and then quantifying our items into photoshop.