Student Work
My 2020 Process Book
Michael Russell
Madison, CT
Concentration: Game Design
Advisor: Dan Pejril & Dennis Recchia
Multimedia Book
Link to My 2020 Process Book
Making books is a passion I discovered in high school when I created an issue of our school's literary arts magazine. Since then, the breadth of my creative outlets grew to involve 3D modeling, digital art, printmaking, and more. For this project I wanted to synthesize my many different interests into one large scale project involving many different mediums, eventually culminating in a book. I got off to a rough start with this though; my transition to online learning was claustrophobic when I counted on the adrenaline of running across campus to get to classes, the xerox machine, the dining hall, anything. Sitting down puts me in a do-nothing headspace which exacerbated the slowness with which I completed coursework, and I couldn't shake all these doubts forming in my mind. In going through this struggle, I decided to use these events as fuel for the content of my book. The images connect my internal monologue to the tangible events unfolding in front of me, as well as the state of the places I spent significant time in. The book is divided into 12 months which serve as chapters to present the viewer with a snapshot of myself at different points in time within the last year. My goal is to overwhelm the book with symbols, messages, and dates (ACE chapter titles stand for After Common Era
) to have the reader interpret the content according to their own experiences. Hopefully, this will mean readers have a much different perspective of the content than anyone else, as apposed to traditional books which make efforts to communicate specific concepts. As I often get misunderstood, I chose to dig deeper into my feelings rather than adjust them in order for it to make sense for everyone, and have it just reflect my own way of communicating what I see.
Artist Bio
Michael Russell was born in New London, Connecticut and raised along the shoreline of Long Island Sound. An energetic kid with a wild imagination, Michael showed signs of creativity in playing as much as he did in projects. Expressing himself as a multipotentialite, Michael had many different hobbies, interests, and sides of his personality. This wasn't ideal for his parents when he was described as an Angel
by teachers and other adults, meanwhile at home he was a bit of a devil. In high school, Michael increasingly began to focus on artistic pursuits, deciding to apply for the School of Fine Arts at the University of Connecticut. Now as an undergraduate student, Michael is pursuing a BFA in Digital Media and Design and a minor in Studio Art.
https://github.uconn.edu/pages/mfr15102/Process_Book_Display/
https://www.instagram.com/mike.f.russell/?hl=en
https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-f-russell/
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