dtj wrote:
"Too blocky," they said. "Look - you can see the pixels. They're huge!"
And now we're getting the opposite: "Too soft. Where are the pixels?"
The pixel - the quantum unit of any image. Back in 1996, the computer graphics field was going nuts for photo-realism. Look at Myst, for instance. There were millions of people who actually preferred it to Doom because of the way it looked. Insane in hindsight, right?
So the emphasis in the computer graphic aesthetic was to obscure the pixel; to hide the "jaggi." To eliminate any semblance of computer-based creation.
This is a really interesting phenomenon, and not just in visual art (eg the growing popularity of "pixel art", such as
http://www.armyoftrolls.co.uk/ - an aesthetic which is only attainable using computers). An area of this which fascinates me, though I'm not so into the music, is in music.
I think it's pretty much unarguable that popular music's course has been absolutely, and probably irrevocably, altered by the rise of cheap sampling and digital-recording technology: guitar bands use digital effects (I have a three hundred pound box which gives me a reasonable facsimile of 99% of all guitar tones I've ever heard, most of the remainder being the creation of Kevin Shields
), vocals are AutoTuned to within an inch of their lives, and so forth and so on - and a hell of a lot of effort has been, until recently, put into hiding this.
However, this is rapidly changing: first with the 'glitch' idea, of minimalist dance music where the weird effects caused by the breakdown of the algorithms in these devices were not suppressed, but rather exploited as the centre of the music - see Pan Sonic, Autechre, the Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, and so forth and so on - which then crossed right into the mainstream with Radiohead's "Kid A" (the title track being almost pure glitch). You can also find traces of the same aesthetic, shamelessly, in R'n'B and mainstream American pop - rhythms and textures totally unattainable without modern digital effects.
Another example of this is when the the whole bootleg scene, a fundamentally online phenomenon, took off, and you wound up with Richard X - a bedroom bootlegger - producing Sugababes' "Freak Like Me" in such a way as to
deliberately mimic the "crunchy" sound quality of a low-bit-rate mp3 (listen to it sometime, closely, and you'll hear what I mean) - the song itself being a remake of his bootleg of Adina Howard's original vocal onto Gary Numan's "Are 'Friends' Electric".
This seems to me to be approaching something as important to future music as Kraftwerk (or Stockhausen) are to today's: it's certainly very comparable the latter's use of "found sound" - the use of "found" digital effects, digital distortion, and other such pieces of serendipity in the assembling of music. To lapse into hyperbole, it might be the most important thing in popular music since the discovery of valve clipping's unique effects on guitar tone.
It's just exciting seeing this new audiovisual aesthetic take shape; one with a much greater degree of interactivity and malleability than any that have come before....
... which links us neatly back to VLMs.
