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> Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital vide
by yoklov 11y ago
> Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.
- Brian Eno
This is my favorite quote to bring out when people are discussing the merits (or demerits) of pixel art. It's really spot on.
- Kenji 11y agoI knew someone would bring that up. I actually thought about whether I should treat it shortly to prevent someone from parroting it _again_. No, I feel like pixel art is different. I grew up with cassettes and CDs, even some disc records, but no. I hate the lack of quality and distortion so much. I think the quote is superficial and condescending and I do not like it.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- arfar 11y agoObviously this is just your opinion, but I think Brian Eno completely on point here, for music at least. The best real-world example I know is the resurgence of cassette tapes. Whenever I go to see a not-very-popular (indie, for want of a better term) band, the merch stand, without fail, has cassettes and vinyls and sometimes no CDs or optional Internet downloads. Is there a practical reason? No, not really, it's all marketing. Making tapes and vinyls is hard, burning CDs is easy, but people want the nostalgia of the more interactive process of flipping tapes and vinyls. I guess they could be moving to those mediums for the "grit" of the sound produced. But that sound can easily and effectively be reproduced with an equalizer, sound filters and effects.
- antod 11y agoCDs mean out of touch old fogeys. Cassettes and Vinyl means consciously and fashionably retro. Yes - I am an out of touch old fogey.
- wodenokoto 11y agoWith that being said, low fidelity (of many kinds) lets us imagine things to be prettier than they are. This is why it is dark in a night club. People look better. It's not a limitation of the medium, but a function of how we construct images from visual inputs.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoA personal example is quick pencil sketches. They always look better to me than if I ink them into proper line art.