John DeVeaux – Portfolio

To download a high-res PDF version of my portfolio, please click the link below (17 MB in size):

http://www.ecuad.ca/~jdeveaux/john_deveaux_portfolio.pdf

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About the Artist

John DeVeaux is a third year Film, Video and Integrated Media student at the Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Classifying himself as a Digital Artist with future aspirations to be an accomplished professional in either the film or video game industry, his work focuses on combining a wide range of media including crowd sourcing, data capture, film/video, installation, storytelling and internet blogging.

Artist Statement

clean   [kleen] -er, -est, adverb,  -er, -est, verb –adjective
1. characterized by a fresh, wholesome quality: the clean smell of pine.
2. free from all writing or marking: a clean sheet of paper.
3. complete; unqualified: a clean break with tradition.
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sim·ple   [sim-puhl] -pler, -plest, noun –adjective
1. easy to understand, deal with, use, etc.: a simple matter; simple tools.
2. not elaborate or artificial: a simple style.
3. not ornate or luxurious: a simple gown.
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ef·fec·tive   [i-fek-tiv] –adjective
1. producing the intended or expected result: effective steps toward peace.
2. creating a deep or vivid impression; striking: an effective photograph.
3. able to accomplish a purpose: an efficient secretary.
=
de·sign   [di-zahyn] –verb (used with object)
1. to plan the form and structure of: to design a new bridge.
2. the combination of details or features of a picture, building, etc.: the design on a bracelet.
3. to intend for a definite purpose: a scholarship designed for foreign students.

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World of Warcraft: The Burning Addiction
Research Project – ECUAD Creative Process 2007

For this project, I wanted to focus on what extent people would spend time from their real lives on their virtual ones. I then went to the Alcoholics Anonymous website and took their manifesto of questions that they ask potential addicts (ie: Have you ever missed school or work due to alcohol?) and then remixed the questions to ask my fellow Warcraft players (ie: Have you ever missed school or work due to Warcraft?) and was amazed at how honest their responses were.

Click the link below to download the full project PDF and explore the addictive qualities of video games in greater detail (1 MB in size):

http://www.ecuad.ca/~jdeveaux/addiction/addiction_print.pdf

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World of Warcraft: Haikus
Video Editing and Production – ECUAD Video Art 2009

This Video Art project required us to use found footage and splice it together within the theme of a haiku and I chose to focus again on World of Warcraft. Several different scenes from official game play trailers were used along with my own poem sequences in order to create its own unique storyline set to a haunting yet beautiful soundtrack.

I also received some additional publicity from a major World of Warcraft fan blog and as a result, have now had over 6,000 views on YouTube:

http://www.wowinsider.com/2009/05/12/wow-moviewatch-world-of-warcraft-haikus/

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Medal of Honor: European Assault
Poster Design – ECUAD Design Essentials 2005

With creative control to choose our own subject matter, I decided to create this poster for the soon to be released add-on of the popular Medal of Honor video game using World War II imagery and incorporating pertinent graphics and typeface layouts, with the centerpiece being this iconic image of the D-Day landing.

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Emily Carr Foundation Exhibition
Poster Design – ECUAD Digital Basics 2008

In my Digital Basics course, our instructor challenged us to create our own poster design that would be submitted for that year’s Foundation Exhibition. The design that I chose focused on a clean and precise grid layout, with the typeface echoing this overall theme as well.

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Read Between the Lies
Poster Design – ECUAD Visual Communication 2008

With an overall political theme required for this project for my Visual Communications course, I decided to focus on the ongoing tragedy occurring in Iraq. I wanted my critique to be bold and biting, yet symbolic at the same time by using George W. Bush’s own words being contradicted by documented facts on the ground within the layout of the American flag.

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The Starlight Express
Poster Design – ECUAD Design Essentials 2005

One of the first poster design projects that I worked on in the Design Essentials program at ECUAD and BCIT, I wanted the overall theme to reflect a bygone age in which the Royal Hudson train serviced passengers from Vancouver to Squamish. This was all tied in with the upcoming 2010 Winter Olympics along with using Futura as the typeface.

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International Campaign to Ban Landmines
Layout Design – ECUAD Design Essentials 2005

This layout design was created to reflect on the tragedy that landmines cause in third world countries by mirroring two family units. Where the Nuclear Family is shown with the requisite two parents and two children, the Landmine Family is shown with obvious limbs missing and the daughter being replaced by a tombstone due to a landmine explosion.

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Tribeca Film Festival
Layout Design – ECUAD Design Essentials 2005

Utilizing still images from the films playing in that year’s festival, a double-sided handbook spread was made highlighting film screenings and appearances in a clean and elegant design.

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Phoenix Rising v1.0
3D Design – ECUAD Design One 2007

These sculptures were created for my Design One class as the project called for us to construct new and unique 3D sculptures by combining a singular object in a repetitive fashion so that the original object would get lost in the sum of the whole of the new piece. Version 1.0 is a freestanding structure and able to balance on the tips of plastic spoons.

Phoenix Rising v2.0
3D Design – ECUAD Design One 2007

Version 2.0 was created as an alternative and two interpretations that I have with this sculpture are that of a Phoenix Rising out of flames (hence the title of the pieces) or of a frame-by-frame rotation of a high board diver tucking in as he falls to the water below.

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OBSCENE
Flipbook – ECUAD Digital and Interactive Arts 2008

Wanting to play on my audience’s moral standards, this flipbook showcased a woman performing an otherwise overtly sexualized activity, yet because I enlarged and hyper pixilated the original video footage, the viewer is not able to immediately ascertain what they are viewing. On initial viewing, they may in fact realize what they are seeing, but due to their personal embarrassment, may not give in to such puerile thoughts.

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HDR Porteau Cove
HDR Photography – ECUAD Digital and Interactive Arts 2009

On a very windy and cold January afternoon, my girlfriend and I drove up to Whistler from Vancouver and stopped briefly at the Provincial Park in Porteau Cove where I wanted to capture the incredible whitecap waves and this beautiful island in the distance. I took my original shot into Photoshop and digitally manipulated it in order to create this much richer and vibrant image.

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Oppositions
Design Exploration – ECUAD Design One 2007

Playing around in Illustrator for one of my Design One projects in 2007, I became transfixed in creating artificial 3D perspective illustrations on a digital 2D plane that draws the viewer in to mesmerize and make them dizzy.

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Compression
Typography Exploration – ECUAD Visual Communication 2008

For this typography exploration, I decided on taking words at their literal meaning and creating abstract illustrations out of the words themselves. Compression being a thematically delicious word to utilize in such a fashion, the word is repeated and imploded without end into itself.

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Poster Girl
Illustrator Project – ECUAD Design Essentials 2005

One of my first major digital illustrations, this image has always been a favorite of mine and its title harkens back to the process of origination by using the Posterize tool in Photoshop to create the initial blueprint and then cleaning it all up within Illustrator.

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ROLEX Submariner
Illustrator Project – ECUAD Design Essentials 2005

Another of my digital illustrations, I spent over 20 hours on this perfecting every detail in order to match the precision of the original watch itself. Created entirely in Illustrator, this illustration could substitute for the original any day.

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Idris Salih Photography
Website Design, Identity, Logo 2005

One of my freelance web design clients back in 2005, I was originally hired to just design and produce his portfolio site, but after seeing the logo and identity that he had been using, I challenged myself to provide him with a new one which would reflect the high contrast and starkness that is representational of his b/w portraiture photography and he loved it.

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John Fortunato Photography
Website Design 2005

Another of my freelance web design clients from a few years back, his work reflected a lot of what my design philosophy entails as well: clean + simple + elegant = design. With that in mind, I decided to use a clean palette with a lot of white space and simple, yet intuitive navigation, in order to allow the photographs to stand out and have greater impact on the viewer.

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Mad World – which version do you like best?

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One of my all-time favorite sons, Mad World, originally by Tears for Fears has been redone countless times and in each new interpretation, artists have brought their own passion and truth to what is in my opinion a very haunting and provocative song. I was amazed to find that the song has been used to the extent that is has been – see below and enjoy!
– FlashAddict

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– fan made Machinima trailer that covers the entire song – was inspired after watching the original trailer above

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All around me are familiar faces
Worn out places, worn out faces
Bright and early for their daily races
Going nowhere, going nowhere
Their tears are filling up their glasses
No expression, no expression
Hide my head I want to drown my sorrow
No tomorrow, no tomorrow
And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I’m dying
Are the best I’ve ever had
I find it hard to tell you
I find it hard to take
When people run in circles
It’s a very, very
Mad World
Mad world
Children waiting for the day they feel good
Happy Birthday, Happy Birthday
And I feel the way that every child should
Sit and listen, sit and listen
Went to school and I was very nervous
No one knew me, no one knew me
Hello teacher tell me what’s my lesson
Look right through me, look right through me
And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I’m dying
Are the best I’ve ever had
I find it hard to tell you
I find it hard to take
When people run in circles
It’s a very, very
Mad World
Mad World
Enlarging your world
Mad World.

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Background

“Mad World” began life as the intended b-side for Tears for Fears’ second single “Pale Shelter (You Don’t Give Me Love)”. The band decided, however, that it may be something people would like to hear on the radio and held back its release, instead waiting to issue the song as a single in its own right after re-recording it with Chris Hughes.

That came when I lived above a pizza restaurant in Bath and I could look out onto the centre of the city. Not that Bath is very mad – I should have called it “Bourgeois World”!

—Roland Orzabal

“Mad World” was the first single off the finished album. The intention was to gain attention from it and we’d hopefully build up a little following. We had no idea that it would become a hit. Nor did the record company.

—Curt Smith

Meanings

Lyrically the song is pretty loose. It throws together a lot of different images to paint a picture without saying anything specific about the world.

—Roland Orzabal

It’s very much a voyeur’s song. It’s looking out at a mad world from the eyes of a teenager.

—Curt Smith

“Mad World” is a song by the British band Tears for Fears. Written by Roland Orzabal and sung by bassist Curt Smith, it was the band’s third single release and first chart hit, reaching #3 on the UK Singles Chart in November 1982. Both “Mad World” and its b-side, “Ideas As Opiates”, would turn up on the band’s debut LP The Hurting the following year. The song would eventually become Tears for Fears’ first international success, reaching the Top 40 in several countries between 1982 and 1983.

Two decades later, the song made a popular resurgence when it was covered by composers Michael Andrews and Gary Jules for the soundtrack to the movie Donnie Darko. This version reached no.1 in the UK in December 2003.

Michael Andrews and Gary Jules version

“Mad World” would achieve a second round of success beginning almost twenty years later, after it was covered by Michael Andrews and Gary Jules for the film Donnie Darko (2001). While the Tears for Fears version featured various synthesizers and percussion, the Andrews/Jules version was stripped down. Instead of a full musical backing, it used only a set of piano chords, a cello, and modest use of a vocoder on the chorus. Their version was originally released on CD in 2002 on the film’s soundtrack, but an increasing cult following spawned by the movie’s DVD release finally prompted Jules and Andrews to issue the song as a proper single. The release was a runaway success in late 2003, becoming the Number One single over the Christmas holiday in the UK, a feat Tears for Fears themselves never accomplished. The music video has been very popular on Youtube, garnerning over 11 million views as of 2009.

Popular culture

In late 2006, a condensed version of the Andrews/Jules cover of “Mad World” was featured in the award-winning commercial for the video game Gears of War. The advertisement has been credited with helping propel the song to #1 on the iTunes sales chart. In addition to its usage in numerous advertisements and fan-made YouTube videos, the Andrews/Jules cover has also become a popular choice for background music in television dramas, having appeared in the following series:

Cold Case CSI Emmerdale ER Jericho Judging Amy

Las Vegas Line of Fire Medical Investigation Nip/Tuck Silent Witness Smallville

Station X Tatort The Cleaner The L Word Third Watch Without a Trace

In 2006, the song appeared on Broadway as the closing number in Butley starring Nathan Lane.

Other versions

In addition to the Andrews/Jules version, “Mad World” has been recorded over the years by the following artists:

• French artist Nicola Sirkis, frontman of the new wave band Indochine, on his solo album Dans La Lune… (1992).
• American industrial rock band Kill Switch…Klick, on the Cleopatra Records compilation New Wave Goes To Hell (1998).
• American alternative rock band Finch, on their EP Rolling Stone Acoustic Session (2002).
• British singer-songwriter Alex Parks, on her debut album, Introduction (2003).
• American industrial act Brainclaw, downloadable on their website (2004).
• American metalcore band Evergreen Terrace, on their album Writer’s Block (2004).
• German punk rock band Die Toten Hosen, on their live DVD Rock am Ring 2004 (2004).
• Australian art rock band The Red Paintings, on their EP Walls (2005). This cover features an acoustic cello and guitar arrangement. While they modified the lyrics from the original version, in live performances they are known to enunciate words in different fashion giving it an altogether unique sound.
• German DJ Jan Wayne, on his single Mad World (2005).
• American singer-songwriter Sara Hickman, on her double album Motherlode (2006).
• Canadian rock bassist Ken Tizzard, on his album Quiet Storey House… An Introduction (2006).
• German a cappella group Wise Guys, on their album Radio (2006).
• American dark cabaret duo The Dresden Dolls, on their live DVD Live at the Roundhouse (2007). The performance features Trash McSweeney of Australian art rock band The Red Paintings.
• Canadian folk-singer Tara MacLean, on her EP Signs of Life (2007).
• German vocal band Gregorian, on their album Masters of Chant Chapter VI (2007).
• Vietnamese-Canadian singer Kristine Sa recorded a cover of the song.
• Israeli actress and model Melanie Peres recorded a cover of the song, as the theme song of Reshef Levy‘s film, “Lost Islands“.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_world

Commentary: How Bush botched war on terror – by Peter Bergen

I found this commentary a very compelling read given the fact that Peter Bergen has personally interviewed Osama Bin Laden – if anyone were to have an insight into the method behind his madness, it would be Bergen…

– FlashAddict

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By Peter Bergen
CNN National Security Analyst

Editor’s note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst and a fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington and at New York University’s Center on Law and Security. His most recent book is “The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda’s Leader.”

Peter Bergen says it’s crucial to correctly frame the nature of a war before beginning it.

WASHINGTON (CNN) — President-elect Barack Obama and his foreign policy advisers and speechwriters are wrestling with one of the most important speeches of his presidency, his inaugural address.

One of their toughest conceptual challenges is how to describe and recast what the Bush administration has consistently termed the “war on terror.”

The dean of military strategists, Carl von Clausewitz, explains the importance of this decision-making in his treatise “On War”: “The first, the supreme, the most decisive act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish…the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into something that is alien to its nature.”

Clausewitz’s excellent advice about the absolute necessity of properly defining the war upon which a nation is about to embark was ignored by Bush administration officials who instead declared an open-ended and ambiguous “war on terror” after the United States was attacked on September 11, 2001.

Bush took the nation to war against a tactic, rather than a war against a specific enemy, which was obviously al Qaeda and anyone allied to it. When the United States went to war against the Nazis and the Japanese during World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt and his congressional supporters did not declare war against U-boats and kamikaze pilots, but on the Nazi state and Imperial Japan.

The war on terror, sometimes known as the “Global War on Terror” or by the clunky acronym GWOT, became the lens through which the Bush administration judged almost all of its foreign policy decisions. That proved to be dangerously counterproductive on several levels.

The GWOT framework propelled the Bush administration into its disastrous entanglement in Iraq. It had nothing to do with 9/11 but was launched under the rubric of the war on terror and the erroneous claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

The theory was that he might give such weapons to terrorists, including al Qaeda to whom he was supposedly allied, and that he therefore threatened American interests. None of this, of course, turned out to be true.

The Bush administration’s approach to the war on terror collided badly with another of its doctrines, spreading democracy in the Middle East as a panacea to reduce radicalism.

It pushed for elections in the Palestinian territories in which, in early 2006, the more radical Hamas won a resounding victory, propelled to power on a wave of popular revulsion for the incompetence and corruption of the Fatah party that had dominated Palestinian politics since the 1960s.

Imprisoned by its war on terror framework, the Bush administration supported Israel in a disastrous war against Hezbollah in Lebanon in the summer of 2006. Hezbollah is not only a terrorist group but is also part of the rickety Lebanese government and runs social welfare services across the country, yet for the Bush administration its involvement in terrorism was all that mattered.

As is now widely understood in Israel, the war against Hezbollah was a moral and tactical defeat for the Israeli military and government. Events in the current Israeli incursion in Gaza will determine whether history repeats itself.

Under the banner of the war on terror, the Bush administration also tied itself in conceptual knots conflating the threat from al Qaeda with Shiite groups like Hezbollah and the ayatollahs in Iran.

In 2006, for instance, President Bush claimed that “the Sunni and Shiite extremist represent different faces of the same threat.” In reality, Sunni and Shiite extremists have been killing each other in large numbers for years in countries from Pakistan to Iraq. The groups have differing attitudes toward the United States, which Sunni extremists attacked in 1993 and again on 9/11, while Shiite militants have never done so.

So, how to reconceptualize the GWOT?

Contrary to a common view among Europeans, who have lived through the bombing campaigns of various nationalist and leftist terror groups for decades, al Qaeda is not just another criminal/terrorist group that can be dealt with by police action and law enforcement alone.

After all, a terrorist organization like the Irish Republican Army would call in warnings before its attacks and its single largest massacre killed 29 people. By contrast, al Qaeda has declared war on the United States repeatedly — as it did for the first time to a Western audience during Osama bin Laden’s 1997 interview with CNN.

Following that declaration of war, the terror group attacked American embassies, a U.S. warship, the Pentagon and the financial heart of the United States, killing thousands of civilians without warning; acts of war by any standard.

Al Qaeda is obviously at war with the United States and so to respond by simply recasting the GWOT as the GPAT, the Global Police Action Against Terrorists, would be foolish and dangerous.

What kind of war then should the United States fight against al Qaeda? For that we should learn some lessons from the conceptual errors of the Bush administration.

Nine days after 9/11, Bush addressed Congress in a speech watched live by tens of millions of Americans in which he said that al Qaeda followed in the footsteps “of the murderous ideologies of the 20th century…They follow in the path of fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism,” implying that the fight against al Qaeda would be similar to World War II or the Cold War.

For the Bush administration, painting the conflict in such existential terms had the benefit of casting the president as the heroic reincarnation of Winston Churchill and anyone who had the temerity to question him as the reincarnation of Hitler’s arch-appeaser, Neville Chamberlain.

But this portrayal of the war on terror was massively overwrought. The Nazis occupied and subjugated most of Europe and instigated a global conflict that killed tens of millions. And when the United States fought the Nazis, the country spent 40 percent of its gross domestic product to do so and fielded millions of soldiers.

In his inaugural address, Obama should say that the United States is indeed at “war against al Qaeda and its allies,” but that as Roosevelt said in his inaugural address in 1933, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. If Americans are not terrorized by terrorists, then the U.S. has won against them.

Al Qaeda and its allies are threats to the United States and Americans living and working overseas, but they are far from all-powerful. Barring an exceptional event like September 11, 2001, in any given year Americans are more likely to die of snake bites or lightning strikes than a terrorist attack.

Despite the hyperventilating rhetoric of Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda’s amateur investigations into weapons of mass destruction do not compare to the very real possibility of nuclear conflagration that we faced during the Cold War. There are relatively few adherents of Binladen-ism in the West today, while there were tens of millions of devotees of communism and fascism.

Obama should also make it clear that instead of the Bush formulation of “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” the Obama administration doctrine will be, “Anyone who is against the terrorists is with us.”

After all it is only al Qaeda and its several affiliates in countries like Iraq, Lebanon and Algeria and allied groups such as the Taliban that kill U.S. soldiers and civilians and attack American interests around the globe.

Everyone else in the world is a potential or actual ally in the fight against al Qaeda and its affiliates, because those organizations threaten almost every category of institution, government and ethnic grouping.

This is the first of two commentaries on the war on terror. Read the second piece, Peter Bergen’s commentary on what principles Barack Obama should follow in waging war against al Qaeda and its allies, Friday, January 9 on CNN.com

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/01/07/bergen.war.terror/index.html

Wednesday’s DIVA 200 class

Sorry that I have been lax in updating my blog, but I got food poisoning last Friday, which morphed into a lovely bouquet of influenza due to my immune system being shot to hell, so I have been a little under the weather of late.

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TROIKA + GLOWLAB

the cloud

tetris + knight rider on office building windows

– starbucks has the largest wireless cloud in the world – they are now an entertainment channel
– doing the same with internet connection as they did with music cds
– war chalking / war driving
– hobo culture / signs / graffity to communicate and warn one another
– marks on buildings to let people know where free internet access is around the city
– notion of privacy of how much of your life is public and how much is private
– google is keeping track of every single search that we do
– web crawler and cyber squatters flipping internet domains

drift.relay in san jose by glowlab
“information wants to be free” = guiding moto of open source movement
book called “The Long Tale” – by Chris Anderson who is the editor of Wired Magazine
– digital content (sitting on a hard drive) versus brick and mortar inventory in a store
– there will be a market for my work
– eventually you will be able to buy the license to a piece of content that you have already paid for (cd, dvd, blue-ray, next gen…)
– digital has transformed everything
– google is the single largest data mining enterprise in the world – save every search until 2038

– google knol – is this the precursor of the CIC (Central Intelligence Corporation – Snow Crash)?
– knol = unit of knowledge – go and get information and if you want more, you can pay for it
– Google is giving you information that they THINK you may want
– civil liberties = main concern: aggregation of personal data in commercial databases
– government databases are subject to privacy act
– commercial databases fall outside of privacy act, and the use of contractors has transformed law enforcement
– ChoicePoint or Seisint, aggregate data from commercial transactions with public records (prescriptions, groceries, travel plans, criminal records)

– potential for abuse
– concentrated target for hackers, identty thieves and authorities otherwise constrained by privacy act
– Seisint compiled a list of 120,000 based of a “terrorist quotient”, a profile they created including ethnicity and religious beliefs and handed it over to law enforcement
– Florida relied on ChoicePoint to identify convicted felons registered to vote – as many as 1 in 7 were wrongfully expunged from the voters list (voter margin in 2000 was 537 votes)

RFID – Radio Frequency Identification
– shock bracelets with EMD Technology (Electro-Muscular Disruption)

Privacy and Social Networks
Google’s Value Proposition – “is to figure out what people want, but to read our minds, they need to know a lot about us”
– will pull ads containing certain keywords, but will not state what those keywords are
– handed over user-records of Orkut to Brazilian government for an investigation
(orkut is a social networking service which is run by Google and named after its creator, an employee of Google – Orkut Büyükkökten. The service states that it was designed to help users meet new friends and maintain existing relationships.)
– censored and constrained its Chinese search-engine to gain access to that market
– the Chinese government is in the process of saving SKYPE messages that pass through mainland China and now SKYPE has ended their relationship with their Chinese affiliate

Google Streets – recorded some random kid who saw the Google van drive by and he ended up wiping out on his bike
“Don’t Be Evil”

Second Life Lawsuit
http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/005816.html

The Worst of Real Made Virtual
– the covenant of Extropia
– A Declaration of the Rights of Avatars – by Ralph Koster

189 Satellites that don’t officially exist (spy satellites CIA, KGB)
iridium satellite flashes – search when the satellite will flash on the web
– Russian town had 400 people show up in yellow raincoats and stood in the town square when the google satellite went overhead

Top Secret – Nigel

Very clever my darling!

Top Secret – GRENAD!!!

Top Secret song compilation 5 – Hit that rug tonight

How do we know he’s not Mel Torme?!?

Top Secret song compilation 4 – Tutti Fruitti

Met a girl named Sue – she knows just what to do!

Top Secret song compilation 3 – Are you lonesome tonight

Shop at Macy’s and love me tonight!!!

Top Secret song compilation 2 – Skeet Surfin’

I got a gun rack in my Chevy!