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egypturnashOne of the things that continually fascinates me, from an artistic standpoint, is shitty reproduction. I make this hyper-slick stuff by default, due to my preferred tools. And sometimes I see what I can do to fuck it up. Create fake off-register four-color printing effects. Dither something to within an inch of its life. I've played with saving an image as a crappy jpeg, loading that in, and repeating - though I haven't done a finished piece using that. Someone uses a screengrab from a bad video signal as a user icon and I wonder how I could get that effect deliberately.
Pixels, bad printing, video artifacts, over-compression... The little strangenesses created by the awkward intersection of technology and art. A certain kind of inorganically-made noise. Rough paint and ink splatters can interest me, but not always. What happens when you deliberately manipulate what's supposed to be a "problem"?
"These days, though, you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness."
Pixels, bad printing, video artifacts, over-compression... The little strangenesses created by the awkward intersection of technology and art. A certain kind of inorganically-made noise. Rough paint and ink splatters can interest me, but not always. What happens when you deliberately manipulate what's supposed to be a "problem"?
"These days, though, you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness."
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Date: 2006-09-20 08:08 pm (UTC)I've also done this with music. Intentional detuning of instruments, low-quality waveform interpolation (or none at all!), clicky gapping, filtering to make stuff sound like it's coming through bad television speakers....
Perhaps I'll try converting a piece of music to MP3 files at various rates and then 'subtracting' the original sound to hear just the encoding artifacts....
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Date: 2006-09-20 08:55 pm (UTC)I definitely like the idea of hearing, and playing with, just the encoding artifacts! Hell, my favorite Nine Inch Nails album is his first one, because you can hear the edges of how raw his tools are on that one. And then there's Daft Punk's 'Discovery', which is deliberately compressed and abused to sound like a crappy AM radio...
Sometimes, I kinda miss the shadows under cels. I was watching the horror that is 'Battle of the Planets' and I was really struck by how... handmade... it looks compared to modern cartoons. You can see errors in the xeroxing onto the cels, there's shadows under them, it's so clearly a made thing and that's pretty cool. Even though it's, overall, a pretty badly made thing.
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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.
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Date: 2006-09-21 05:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-21 03:22 pm (UTC)As a warning, I've no clue what the processor usage is on it. I can run the HQ4X filter and never see the slightest belch in performance, so it's hard to gauge....