Absolutely. This isn't a fascination with versimilitude, either. (Ask me sometime, or maybe there, about how I loathe the notion that something must be the original to be worrth anything.) It's a fascination with the particular effects left to a work by its more primitive means of being. I love that AM sound, in limited amounts. I love the NTSC colour-bleed because it just looks neat. (Actually, the SNES emulator doesn't emulate enough of it for me; I want bright orange areas to leak over to the right like someone smeared phosphorescent pixel juice across the screen.) I love the pits and violet fades in a badly mimeographed page.
Find an old book printed with real metal type. Run your fingers gently over the glyphs that fill the page. Then you understand why old printing has a depth to it that modern digital reproduction lacks. It's a literal depth that really does bring it to life. It doesn't mean modern methods are bad... only that it's a pity we don't see the depth more often.
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Date: 2006-09-21 03:43 pm (UTC)Find an old book printed with real metal type. Run your fingers gently over the glyphs that fill the page. Then you understand why old printing has a depth to it that modern digital reproduction lacks. It's a literal depth that really does bring it to life. It doesn't mean modern methods are bad... only that it's a pity we don't see the depth more often.