Woodcut is an old analogue printmaking technology, in Europe it dates back to the 1400s. A picture or design is carved into a flat block of wood which is then inked and pressed onto a sheet of paper to produce the finished image. At the turn of the 20th Century, woodcut was appropriated by the Expressionists as an authentically direct and traditional medium in which to experiment.
Bitmaps are way of representing images digitally as a grids of discrete values, dating back to the 1960s. Over time, the range of colours and the amount of detail that it is possible to display in a bitmap has grown from chunky black and white mosaics to hyperreal multi-million colour multi-million pixel images. In popular culture the upcoming generation will in part define itself culturally by valorizing the dross of its parents' era. This is a process similar to pastoral or to cultural appropriation in high art. The 80s were big in the 2000s, the 60s were big in the 80s, and the 40s were big in the 60s. Part of that process currently is the use of lo-bit aesthetics, 8-bit and 16-bit image and sound aesthetics used to create contemporary art. To those of us who spent a lot of time, money and effort climbing the bit density well for digital art, this can appear a naive exercise in nostalgia for the moment before one was born. Disney's use of lo-bit aesthetics in its film Wreck-It-Ralph might appear to confirm this. But stripped of its status signifying function and its need to suffice for practical requirements, lo-bit aesthetics join analogue photography and mechanical writing instruments as historical tools that are now appreciated for their contingent and historically entangled aesthetic properties rather than their efficiency or novelty. The blur or jaggedness, the wonkiness or blotching that once frustrated the signification of meaning now enables it. Like using woodcut in the age of offset lithography. _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
