Mindscape In Cyberspace

Black Robert Journal is an Art and Literature Journal that defines itself by saying, “We subscribe to the notion that there is lots of vital work not being shared, from a spectrum of hills, and we intend to provide contrary voice to the mediocrity of same-same/different-different.”

In their current issue, they have published one Bangla Visual Poetry of mine, titled “Sin” (see the image below) and also an interview with me. The interview was conducted by the poet and vispo artist, Alexander Jorgensen, the Managing Editor of Black Robert Journal.

View my vispo piece here
Read my interview here

Venereal Kittens is a collective, conceptualized and edited by artist-poet Matina L. Stamatakis and dedicated to archiving and preserving innovative works by writers and artists of the 21st century, with a strong preference for experimental, avant-garde,post modern poetry and art. They say very clearly that they are not interested in mainstream writing or art.

They have already featured great artists and writers like, Alexander Jorgensen, Kane X. Faucher, Theoni Tambaki, ek rzepka, Carmen Racovitza, Ted Warnell, John Moore Williams, Angela Genusa, Javier Kronauer, Marco Giovenale, Raymond Farr, Anna Christina, Mauricette Beaussart, Drew Kunz, Nico Vassilakis, Linh Dinh, Robert Chrysler, Catherine M. Bennett, Michelle Detorie, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, Mark Lamoureux, Bruna Mori, Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, Philip Jenks, Diana Magallon, Jeff Crouch, etc.

Recently they have added my digital paintings and visual poetry to their archive. It feels really nice to be featured on a journal with all those great artists who are shaping the art and literature of 21^st century.

Find the thumbnails of my paintings and vispos that are featured on Venereal Kittens, below:

Entangled

… and Birds and Birds

Comics

Park Street Junction

Watching TV - Emotinally Red

Take a look at my works on Venereal Kittens at following locations:
http://venerealkittens.blogspot.com/2008/10/samit-roy.html
http://venerealkittens.blogspot.com/2008/02/samit-roy-continued.html

This work of mine, titled as ‘jeebanjuddha‘ or ‘Struggle of Life’ has been published on Otoliths, issue 11.

Click here to view this image on Otoliths

Otoliths is a contemporary art and literature journal (or A Magazine of Many E-things, as they say), published quarterly from Rockhampton, Australia and edited by Mark Young. Mark has been writing and publishing poetry for nearly 50 years. He started Otoliths with an intention to come up with a magazine for the art and literary work that ‘can be loosely described as e-things’. Many well-known contemporary poets and artists have been featured on Otoliths. It surely feels good to be there with them.

Few months back while flipping through the pages on Flickr, I bumped upon a series of nice line drawings, said to be drawn by The Scribbler. I explored more and found this small but lots-of-fun-to-do tool, The Scribbler - an on-line application that allows user to draw freehand simple line drawings, and create a complex and interesting line drawing, automatically, from that.

The Scribbler, created by ZeFrank, takes simple vector based input and creates its own drawing on top of it based on a number of simple rules. When a new scribble line is created it chooses a few numbers at random that eventually determine what sort of line it will draw. As it begins to draw it fine tunes those values to the type of drawing that you’ve made. Because there is randomness built into the program, each scribble is unique.

In the on-line version, user can adjust some of the values that Scribbler would normally choose at random, such as line thickness, line color, and the maximum length of a scribble line.

Once drawing is reached at the desired stage, the user needs to ‘Pause’ Scribbler and take a screen shot. Well, it seems, that this is the only way to save your Scribbler art. Take a look at Scribbler gallery to check Scribbler art created by people at the Scribbler gallery. Some images are really impressive.

I could not resist myself to try my hands on fun toy and found that this small tool can create amazing results, if one can collaborate with the application. If you follow the logic that the application is using to create the complex lines and eventually form a complex texture from those lines, it will be easy for you to draw the right curves, that might create a nice output, once Scribbled.

Following are a series called Scribbler Earth, that I have created using images generated through The Scribbler. I was trying to doodle on the application, and thinking about earth. These are what came out, after I manipulated those scribble screen shots and added some color on them. Of course, being a first-timer my scribble skills are not so well, but I think I will improve and come up with more Scribbler arts.

Scribbler Earth 01

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Scribbler Earth 02

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Scribbler Earth 03

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Scribbler Earth 04

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Scribbler Earth 05

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Flickr is one of the most popular on-line platform to showcase and share your images with millions of users from various corners of the world. Though, primarily Flickr is meant for sharing Photographs (and now video, too), however many artists, painters, calligraphists, print makers, and designers share their artworks, illustrations, paintings and other non-photographic images on Flickr. If you visit specific groups dedicated to non-photographic visual art, like paintings, graphics, digital art, illustrations, you will find thousands of artists showcasing their artworks and providing an amazing spectrum of visual culture, across the globe.

Here is a list of 20 Flickr groups dedicated mainly to non-photographic art, which I find very interesting:

1. Art and Artist »
2. Art is Art »
3. Art Directory »
4. Art District »
5. Art - Drawing and Painting »
6. Art Now »
7. Art Vision »
8. Artists Without Borders »
9. contemporary fine A R T S + Culture »
10. Digital Art »
11. Global Urban Art »
12. Graphic Design »
13. Illustration »
14. Illstration Now »
15. Obsessive Drawing »
16. Painting »
17. Paintings from you… THE ARTIST »
18. Sketches »
19. Urban Artist Collective »
20. Your Art - Not Photography »

Book Cover: Ceiling of Clouds
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Being an avid reader of Bengali poetry and an Bengali literature enthusiast, I always take special interests in the design initiatives that are related to Bengali literature and language. I have designed covers and illustrations for many Bengali poetry collections, novels, short story collections, literature magazines and other similar Bengali publications. Though, I always enjoy working for Bengali books and magazines, I often get really excited if I am working on books that are written or edited by my favorite Bengali authors and poets.

All the covers featured in this post are for poetry collections or novels written by my favorite Bengali authors and poets. It was more than mere professional satisfaction, when I received accolades for these covers from the writer or poet, himself. Quite natural for a designer who loves literature, isn’t it?

Book Cover: The Other Side of the Bread
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Book Cover: Eh Lulu!
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Digital Illustration
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This is another illustration type I have drawn for the anti-human trafficking project for UNIFEM/Equations. At the visualization stage I tried to come up with a various illustration forms with different emotional quotients. The illustration I have shown in one of my previous post was less emotional and more associated with logical deduction of actual activities and its physical references. Unlike the previous one, the illustration shown above in this post is more attached with emotional suggestions. The key phrases for this illustration were, Compassion, Sympathy and Humanity. Where as for the previous one, the key words I had in my mind while designing, are Plan, Development, Result and Hope. Below is a thumbnail image for the previous illustration, I mentioned.

Previous illustration:

Death of A Mustache
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When I saw the news of Veerappan’s death in a police encounter on the news paper, along with a photo of the deceased brigand, the first thing I noticed was the absence of his great mustache. I was not sure how Veerappan lost his legendary mustache, but I thought, ‘It’s not a death of a man or a sandalwood smuggler or a notorious bandit or the infamous brigand; it is actually a death of a great mustache!’ I might sound funny or weird but I was very much impressed by his mustache, since I have seen his picture on a newspaper when I was in high school!

Within next few days, I came up with this work!

Illustration: Under Construction
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An illustration I have done for a UNIFEM project. The project was to document the progress of various NGOs working in the area of human trafficking with fund provided by UNIFEM. I have visited those organizations and tried to capture visual references of the development and work happening there. Later, I created various collages with the photographs taken at the spot and tried to bring out my understanding about the development happened there. The illustration shown above, was for an NGO who has started to construct a huge building for the benefits of the victims of human trafficking. The building is yet to be completed, but one can easily see their hopes and happiness, around this building, still under construction. When I was there, I captured multiple low angle shots of various parts of that incomplete building and later, combined those photographs to create a collage that emphasizes on the hope of the members of the NGO, around this building, still under construction.

Rampage
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Being an avid gamer I used to spend lots of time on various versions of famous game series GTA – scheming a ‘rampage’, planning ‘bomb blasts’, executing a ‘mall shootout’ or simply ‘riding’ through the city ‘killing gang members’. This image is a kind of extension of my visual memories of those virtual images of deaths and blood and blasts, juxtaposed against our real context – a blasting population, often threatened, disturbed by deaths and murders, mass killings and genocides. It’s all about our time - restless and anxious, like the central character of GTA, standing in the middle of the blood and bodies of ‘wasted gang members’.

The Bengali text on the image says, ‘Our time’, repeatedly.

This work has been featured on the cover of Autumn 2007 issue of International Journal, published by Canadian Institute of International Affair (CIIA, Toronto), currently known as Canadian International Council (CIC). Thanks to CIC and IJ.