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 06:41 pm (UTC)
ineffabelle: (hmm...)
From: [personal profile] ineffabelle
I remember one of my favorite photoshop filters was on eyecandy - it was called "television" I think and it let you make something look like a bad video screencap. Good for cyber-punky stuff.

Date: 2006-09-20 08:08 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] tracerj.livejournal.com
The Super Nintendo emulator, ZSNES, has a built-in optional video filter which makes the display look as close as possible to a crappy NTSC television with an RF hookup, complete with ghosting, colour bleed, and hue shift. I switch back and forth. I have one emulator config which smooths things out with a different filter to make it all look like crisp line art, and then the other which uses this 'worst television ever' effect. Sometimes, foor reproduction is exactly what you want to get a past-honest feel.

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....

Date: 2006-09-20 08:41 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] kaputotter.livejournal.com
This job that I just finished up is going to be printed at KINKO's of all places......


I asked for them to give me a copy of the poster (yes, poster, oh god). I expect to be suitably horrified. :)

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: 2006-09-20 08:56 pm (UTC)
ext_646: (Default)
From: [identity profile] shatterstripes.livejournal.com
Oh god, I love television filters. I used to have one of those hanging around Photoshop. I can play with the settings and undo for ages.

Date: 2006-09-20 08:58 pm (UTC)
ext_646: (Default)
From: [identity profile] shatterstripes.livejournal.com
Being intentional about bad repro is different from unintentional bad repro. *grin* Good luck with it not coming out pitch-black!

Date: 2006-09-20 08:58 pm (UTC)
ext_646: (Default)
From: [identity profile] shatterstripes.livejournal.com
(As long as your end was done with color profiles turned on, you have SOME hope of it looking like it does on-screen.)

Date: 2006-09-20 09:09 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] dv-girl.livejournal.com
I remember a sci-fi story I enjoyed a lot as a child. The premise was a person returns to Earth thousands of years after a nuclear war where most people have been wiped out and the people that are around start asking him about all the artifacts they've found.

Of particular interest is this shrine in the main room of many homes which has a glass front and a strange exotic material casing that the've been unable to quite replicate with their finest woods.

Date: 2006-09-21 02:17 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] dasnarrenschiff.livejournal.com
Like the way the Akai S2000 just sounds a bit wonky and not-quite-the-ticket, a wonderful thing in the age of doing everything on computers. Doing everything on computers kind of makes for interesting badness. Music and art can be exceptionally bad yet apparently well produced, which makes for a kind of weird eye/ear-popping thing.

Date: 2006-09-21 03:52 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] jenkatb4u.livejournal.com
Grain Compress Grain Compress Grain Compress. Take it in the default Windows Picture Viewer if available. Select 90 degree turn, accept the warning that it may permanently lower image quality and then flip it back after Windows screwed with it some more..

I'm just guessing.

Date: 2006-09-21 05:11 am (UTC)
xyzzysqrl: A moogle sqrlhead! (Default)
From: [personal profile] xyzzysqrl
Oh god, ZSNES has that? I need to try that NOW. Uhmm. That sounds AWESOME.

Date: 2006-09-21 08:55 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] stinkygoat.livejournal.com
Artifacts. Glitchiness. Playing around with and using that which others seek to eliminate... yeah, I love that stuff, Neon and Giraffe are completely riddled with it }:-).

Hehe, I remember an early cut of Neon where I had a grid of 10x10 effects "screens" that you could navigate through and taking the time to make the non-selected ones all display either a good representation of video "snow" or colourbars with fucked vertical hold and therefore rolling pictures.

Mmm, glitchy. <3

Date: 2006-09-21 03:22 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] tracerj.livejournal.com
Well, I'm not sure at the moment which build started having it, but these are the open-source builds. The last official one, 1.42, lacks it.

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....

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.

Slightly off topic, but...

Date: 2006-09-21 08:39 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] genkitty.livejournal.com
Here's a review I think you should read: http://elfs.livejournal.com/516775.html

As I read it, I immediately thought of you - in that you'd find it potentially useful. :)

Re: Slightly off topic, but...

Date: 2006-09-23 05:49 pm (UTC)
ext_646: (Default)
From: [identity profile] shatterstripes.livejournal.com
Yeah, that's been on my to-get-when-I-have-money list since I heard about it! I need to get a new copy of Understanding Comics</i, too. Thanks for reminding me about it, now that I have some cash.

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Margaret Trauth

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