Hot Springs Junior Academy held its inaugural Digital Art Show Tuesday with over 120 student artists' pieces on display.
The student-lead event was a collaboration between the school's Education Accelerated by Service and Technology, or EAST, and its art program. Free snacks and coffee were provided by Family, Career and Community Leaders of America and Red Light Roastery. In total, over 150 students were involved in the production.
Art show guests were instructed to download the mobile phone applications Sketchfab and HP Reveal from the Apple App Store prior to entering the exhibits in order to fully view and experience the art pieces. After opening the apps, guests were told to center the artworks on their phone screens within the program's crosshairs. Once the app sensed the artwork, other features of the pieces were revealed.
Previously invisible features of the art included colors that had been removed from black and white mandala drawings, superimposed video clips of creative processes and short clay animation videos shown on blank pieces of paper beside dioramas with the figures from the videos.
"We've been talking about it for a while, and I just sort of pitched the idea to the kids and they were looking for a really cool EAST project, and they just kind of took it and made it their own. It's really their vision, honestly. I was just like 'Hey, it would be cool to do something like this.' And they ran with it," EAST facilitator Aspen Ham said.
"My kids would do their half and then come down to the EAST room, or her kids would come down to me and they would get the pictures on their end, then we'd finish on our end, and they'd get more pictures, so it was a lot of back and forth," art teacher Natalie Miller said.
Ham said the greatest accomplishment of the show was "Just the kids coordinating the entire event. Plus there's a lot of technology components that go into it, making sure it goes right and a lot of checking and rechecking then rechecking again and then stuff not working and rechecking a lot."
"They learned how to manage through stress and come up with solutions last minute. Even this day of the show, some things didn't function so they had to quickly get on it and figure out what to do," Miller said.
The art was judged by adjudicators from Mid-America Science Museum. All winners' and honorable mentions' pieces will be available for viewing and interaction in the Alliance Rubber Co. Tinkering Studio at the museum until February.
Local on 11/11/2019