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.
Bullet points from my Ustream talk in connection with Art Micro-Patronage's "10,000 Pixels" exhibit.
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.
In response to the post Invasion of the Giant One Bit GIFs, Beau Sievers adds that
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.
1. Brian Droutcour explained what poetry was going to be in a "new media" context. The web has many outlets for literati -- the equivalent of small press publishing -- as well as online versions of established academic journals that continue a tradition of writing and evaluating poetry. So what was an "art and technology" website going to bring to the table in terms of redefining or recontextualizing the poetic narrative impulse? In a cogent essay, Droitcour traced the origins of "new media poetry" back to the early 20th Century avant gardes, in particular experiments in cross-mediation by Cocteau, Gertrude Stein, and others, and then forward through the '50s and '60s with the visually-oriented concrete poets and verbally-oriented conceptual art movement, to more recent blurrings of media in '90s net art. Building on these foundations, Droitcour championed a group of verbovocovisual poets working in electronic media today, such as Erik Stinson.
2. Droitcour's efforts were met with skepticism, and almost no one covered his "wordworks" project for several years. The persistence of his vision eventually convinced critic Kyle Chayka, who covered Droitcour in the magazine Artinfo with a begrudgingly sympathetic analysis. "I wasn't going to just rubber stamp this," said Chayka. "It took many, many posts before I was convinced that Droitcour was onto something."
