crudeness

Sep. 20th, 2006 02:33 pm
egypturnash: (Default)
[personal profile] egypturnash
One 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."

Date: 2006-09-20 08:55 pm (UTC)
ext_646: (Default)
From: [identity profile] shatterstripes.livejournal.com
Oooh. There's some 'bad video' effects in the emulators I use, but nothing that extensive. Mac emulators are usually at the 'be glad it works' level, rather than the 'lovingly polished'.

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.

Date: 2006-09-21 03:43 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] tracerj.livejournal.com
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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Margaret Trauth

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