apologies to Andrej for this unsolicited collaboration
art - tm
chibi store painting
painting made with Computers Club Drawing Society software "Chibi Paint" -- this is a layer -- still mulling over a version with an additional layer
new romantics, go back to the graveyard
When you think of "new romantics" and "internet" the first thing that probably comes to mind is goth girls posing in cemeteries.
Possibly that wasn't the first thing that popped into the heads of the curators of Eyebeam's upcoming exhibit with the unapologetic title, The New Romantics. "Just as the Romantics responded to the industrial revolution," the curators postulate, "this group of artists are similarly responding to the current information revolution."
Ever since William Gibson envisioned Haitian voodoo spirits inhabiting cyberspace, writers have been trying to depict computers and the internet as something other than what they are: soulless cold environments created by nerds to be inhabited by other nerds. The internet is the domain of numbers, statistics, menus, and multiple choice tests. The only way to imagine it otherwise might be something like David Cronenberg's fleshy "game pods" that attach to your spine with an umbilical: a "dream space out of meat space" governed by murky synaptical potentials rather than precise silicon robotics. In the real cyberspace we inhabit, however, no amount of pouty romantic acting out can overcome that it's going to be converted to pixels and aiff files and reproduced on a page where it will be tabulated with like counts and stored with thousands of other similar expressions.
my new romantic drawing above was made with the Computers Club Drawing Society "Chibi Paint" software (and resized to fit here)
Disc Formation
jpeg of MSPaint rendering, 2014
The Windows 7 Paint has a colored pencil tool that's not bad for shading -- I used it quite a bit here in the "gradated" areas.
That "improved" MSPaint now has intriguing contradictions: the new brush-like, pen-like, and crayon-like tools can still be used with old legacy pixel lines.
What I've been thinking of as a creative clash of visual rhetorics may be the endgame or death-throes of a certain type of digital imaging, if Jon Williams is prescient in his call to "End Raster Art Now."
In 25 words or less, web imaging is moving towards a vector model, where angles and curves draw mathematically, as opposed to the raster model, where art is a function of pixels and grain.
Adobe Illustrator is vector, Photoshop is raster. Vector has a tendency to reduce images to smooth gradients, without bite, tooth, or grit. Also, screens are still pixel-based, so vector is ultimately converted back to pixel. That is not efficient or minimal. So I think it's permissible to keep exploring contradictions within raster, using familiar forms from painting (Cubist faceting of space) and pixel art (lines and loops).
