Two Stop Bits | Idk, given that Warhol's mastery was in reproducing – and elevating

masswerk 175 days ago | parent

Idk, given that Warhol's mastery was in reproducing – and elevating – that kind of blunt impression, serial corporate imagery was dumping ubiquitously onto the public, the fact that now everyone could produce a false-color image in solarized aesthetic (something that had been previously a complex process, involving various crafts and a certain amount of sloppiness) by 3 clicks anywhere on the screen and send it off to serial reproduction by another click, was not great news.

To me, the demo has something morbid about it. It's a bit like demoing a generative AI interface with Hayao Miyazaki, showing how everybody can now impersonate his style – and everything that had been sacred to him, like the combination of craftsmanship and imagination to capture a personal expression of a fragile world – by typing a few careless words into a chat prompt. ("Totoro in a vintage seaplane, Miyazaki, award winning, high resolution.")

bmonkey325 175 days ago
I see it in a way but you still had to have eye for composition and style. There are still videos of people wielding MS paint to produce art that awes me and produces something I could never do.
In the era of dall-e or midjourney feels like a cheat code in comparison.
- masswerk 174 days ago
  I guess, it's still somewhat similar. For example, producing a posterized image previously involved separating and clamping brightness ranges using orthographic film and expertly judging exposure time, and masking these masks by other masks, or tracing images on masking film, before you could even think of preparing the actual printing process. Notably, both methods involved an interpretation of the image, aesthetic judgement, and expertise, guided by experience how this would behave robustly in a printing process. Now, there is a "posterize image" dialog, which does the same by a single click. – The modern approach is hard to control, though, which may be one of the reasons, we don't see that aesthetic not that much, anymore. It practically vanished from common experience. The impact of "easy to use" technology on our culture and shared imagination is not to be underrated, and may not work out the way, we may have expected.