My posts about the show, which ran in Nov-Dec 2011.

See also:
Telephone journal
Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts

Raster Portrait 1

Not to be cruel - this is a celebrity we're talking about - but this kid (Skrillex, the dj) has a big bulbous nose. Am sure he got ribbed about it in school and had to grow up to be famous so it became a trademark rather than a liability. In any case, a previous attempt at drawing him was fairly realistic and the nose got reduced out of empathy but it lost the essence of the guy's goofy charm. This raster portrait is more of a caricature and is rendered more vaguely so the honker is back up to full scale. (Ex-portraitist aside/self-shop talk.)

The one above isn't even recognizable but I liked how the Photoshop Navigator Buren-ized the image.

...plus some percussion, and it's in 9/8 time! Woo.

individual frame from GIF animation by Kiptok

slimmed-down version of a GIF posted to dump.fm by Pecco
larger, .5 MB version

GIFs, bit depth and sampling rate —- spatial resolution is also sampling rate. Which is why smoothing is bad and zooming is powerful. @tommoody

Smoothing is a kind of destructive upsampling technique; it, uh, disrupts the integrity of the picture plane. @tommoody @clementgreenberg

Zooming pulls an image out of the sampling rate-/resolution-space of the desktop or browser window, smoothing re-absorbs it. @tommoody

Zooming here is used more broadly here than just "the movement of a zoom lens" and includes simple one-step GIF-enlargement, say, from tiny pixel size to huge, as Nullsleep was demonstrating. Some people have been using that for artistic effect - a "change in scale" a la Claes Oldenburg making a giant toilet or pencil eraser. You could redraw the image but most people use a sampling algorithm. The two main kinds are "bicubic" and "nearest neighbor" and it's with bicubic, the Photoshop default, that you get the "destructive upsampling" Sievers mentions, particularly noticeable when enlarging a GIF with hard edges (due to low bit depth). The algorithm literally adds information, light-to-dark gradients to smooth seams, which are not in the sampled GIF. (Destruction by addition of "polluting" data.)

This topic started with a GIF that was likely not resized (and therefore not sampled) but rather generated from scratch, using various parameters. It imitated shallow bit depth without having a reason, such as a pre-existing full color GIF that had been converted to black and white in order to save bandwidth. If that unique GIF (which we were arguing was mainly an exercise in style) were enlarged you would use "nearest neighbor" if you wanted to keep it looking all "1-bit."

I was using "number of frames" to refer to sampling not of space but of movement: a sample of a musical waveform takes a series of snapshots of the wave and in image motion capture you literally take stills of the action. You can reduce the sample rate by removing sample points and you can reduce a GIF by taking out frames: in both cases you end up with a smaller and more "instantaneous" file.

*Per Wikipedia, in computer graphics, bit depth is the "number of bits used to represent the color of a single pixel in a bitmapped image or video frame buffer." In digital audio, bit depth describes the "number of bits of information recorded for each sample" (basically everything except pitch, which is determined by the sampling rate). GIF-wise, by "frame rate" in the prior post on this topic I meant the playback rate, which has no effect on the size of the file. If the GIF was taken from a video of movement, the initial capture rate would of course impact the number of frames. GIFs themselves, however, do not record, they only compile or transcode other visual data.

Update: On the subject of GIF playback rate, please see Nullsleep's Animated GIF Minimum Frame Delay Browser Compatibility Study

So we were having a discussion of the Chicago school of artists, dating back to the '60s, who incorporate underground comix-style drawing into their art. I tried to make a "Chicago" style drawing from memory, not looking at any one particular work by, say, HC Westermann or The Hairy Who. Above is the second revision, which yells '80s, not '60s. The more I try to make it like Karl Wirsum or Jim Nutt, the more it looks like Gary Panter.

1. Pixel art is a web genre separate from gaming. You can find discussion boards dedicated solely to the publication and critique of pixel art.

2. Artists working in the gallery/art school tradition are attracted to pixel art because of the low level control it gives you over art-making. Some don't feel they are completely in control until they get down into the code telling this part of the screen to flash green and this part blue.

3. Every image on a modern browser is now "smoothed" as if it were a photo enhanced to hide grain. Pixel art flouts this trend and celebrates the artificial.

An area not specifically covered is the political or ecological argument. Products such as Siri suck enormous bandwidth and motivate needless "buildout" (more batteries, more cell towers...). The choice to work small is the web's equivalent of locavore dining.

bit-depth can't be understood without sampling rate. Just saying a work is "1-bit" is saying close to nothing.

Hadn't thought of it that way but that's interesting. What would sampling rate be in GIF terms? Not the frame rate, because slowing it down or speeding it up doesn't change the size of the GIF. Rather, it's the number of frames. You can reduce the GIF size by (i) decreasing the bit depth from millions of colors to sixteen colors, or to black and white, and (ii) removing frames so that the basic motion is still there without a lot of unnecessary transitions. The GIF we were talking about has the look of a severely-reduced palette but has 360 frames. There is no "original" GIF with full colors that was reduced down to a still rather huge 2.7 megabyte GIF. So (let's pile on here), it's just about simulating Kool 8-B1t Stylezz with no other valid artistic purpose.