The Dark Site

Kelli Hoffarth, The Dark Site, Photoshop Montage, February 20^th, 2015

Technical

For my assignment I use lots of different techniques in my montage including converting a lot of the photos to black-and-white, dodging and burning, used the brush techniques, changed the opacity of layers, cutting and pasting, and downloading text into the program.

Idea or Concept

My idea for this piece of art was the under world of the Internet the dark side that no one really knows about.  In the darknet it’s hard to find where people are because they use different computers to send things through so they never have the same IP address.  I wanted to put the photos together so you could see a deeper meaning in the montage.  While putting together there was quite a bit of changing of my ideas and photos so I could get the deeper meaning I was going for.

Influences

I didn’t really have any artists that influenced this piece of art.

Composition

I tried to balance this photo and sort of make it symmetrical, I made sure there was nothing directly in the middle.  The movement in this photo when you first look at it is that it starts in the bottom right corner goes up and circles around the whole montage.  It all works together by changing the opacity of some of the photos so they all blend together and mold so they all smooth together and are not choppy so your eye can wander around the page.  I also think the people in the bottom right corner really start your eye off and is the main attraction in this piece. 

Motivation

My motivation this piece wasn’t very strong because I found it difficult to think of ideas and points for some of the subjects given, it was also hard to find the right photo to bring the whole montage together. My initial motivation when I finally found the right topic started out good until I got near the end and was almost done but had to still do a lot of fixing to bring it all together.  I wanted to explore and find out how the dark net worked without being shut down, and how all these people couldn’t be found or caught.

Critical Assessment

I think my most intriguing element was the silhouette I made a group of people sitting around a computer, and the MacBook in front of them made to look like it was glowing. I think this makes it look very suspicious and you wonder what they are doing.  Some other elements I think I was successful on was making the picture flow with the smoke and blending the photos in together.  I think the very tedious part of this task was making sure I had a big photo that stood out. Also it was a struggle making sure all the other photos were not the same size.  With more time I think I would have fixed the numbers up a bit and change up some of the photos.