Nomad Error Logs #3
First published on Beehiiv February 12 2024
And just like that we're onto Issue 3 of the Error Logs. In this issue, I'll be sharing some of my exploits from this month, announcing where you can download some of my art as cellphone wallpapers, featuring a wonderful pixel artist that I discovered recently, and finally as usual, I'll be introducing some tools so you too can glitch your little face off.
News
It's been a busy few weeks with getting my Teepublic store up and running. If you haven't checked it out yet, what are you waiting for?
On the art front, it hasn't been the most prolific month, but I have been trying out new things. I've been moving a little away from portraits and trying new subjects like full body-figures. My methods of glitching are generally quite destructive, and it works well on subjects that have distinct shapes. It's one of the reasons I do a lot of portrait work, because a face generally has distinct components. With a full body it starts to lose those recognizable traits once you glitch it a lot. So it's been a fun challenge to figure out how to work with these subjects, whether that's using a body with distinctive clothing (say astronaut) or using contrast between a silhouette and light.
These are some of the works I’ve made this month. I’m particular happy with the first image above of the astronaut. I'm usually not a huge fan of compression artifacts in glitch work, but I've seen a few artists use it really well to express a narrative within their work.
Rosa Menkman tells some great stories using compression, such as Dear mr. Compression. Aristeidis Koutoulogenis’ Digital Recollection is another great work that uses compression artifacts and other glitch effects to distort repressed childhood memories.
So I decided to challenge myself with a style that I usually shy away from.
In my own work, I tried to tell this story of an astronaut far from earth. The further they get from us, the more and more compressed they get until their voice and image becomes unintelligible. I think there are many circumstances in which we can relate to the astronaut or their loved ones. For me, it’s kind of a metaphor living so far from home. I’ve been away from my home country for around 15 years now. The longer I’m away, the greater the distance gets and the more distorted I become. If you haven’t seen a larger version of the work yet, be sure to check out my Instagram.
Cellphone Wallpapers
So my big news this month is that you can now buy cellphone wallpapers of my art.
Each pack has 4 unique wallpapers in various different styles; you've got straight up raw glitch, CRT TV aesthetic, pixels style art, and some sexy looking curves.
So, if you're looking to have the coolest phone this side of the Citadel, then head over to my ko-fi.
Each pack costs $5, the same price as a coffee or a box of fun paper clips, and they come in a couple of different sizes depending on what kind of phone you have (sorry, no 84×48 pixel version for those of you still using a Nokia 3210)
Hit that pink button right below to check them out.
Artist Spotlight: Arts.of.Win
“The past is a candle at a great distance: to close to let you quit, too far to comfort you” - Amy Bloom, Away
Quit Living in the Past, Arts.of.Win
Keen-eyed followers of mine will know that I often deal with themes of nostalgia.
What’s fascinating about nostalgia to me is the double-edged nature of it. On the one hand it can celebrate all that was good about the past. Nostalgia protects us. Helps us feel warm. Kisses us on the head and tells us it's all going to be ok.
But it also glosses over the bad, obscuring it in a haze of rosy retrospection; distorting our perception of the true reality of events. It was Proust who said “Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.
One of the interesting facets of Nostalgia is that you would think you can only ever truly experience nostalgia for times or cultures that you experienced first-hand.
But is that true? Can you be nostalgic for a time or place you never experienced?
Anemoia (/ænəˈmɔɪə/)- nostalgia from a time or place you have never known. Through stories, photographs, music and art, we are still able to visit these places trapped in time, even though we may never have experienced them firsthand. We experience the nostalgia vicariously. It is a form of escapism; the wish to run away to an idealized place in our minds built upon the nostalgia of others. After all, “We are homesick most for the places we have never known” (Carson McCullers). Perhaps anemoia is even more potent than nostalgia.
So I recently stumbled upon the work of arts.of.win. She's a pixel artist from the Philippines with a very unique, distinctive style that draws you in as soon as you see her works. She’s in high demand, not only making illustrations and animations for us to enjoy, but also working on indie games, creating album artwork for several musicians, and collaborating with fashion brands to have her pixel artwork feature on t-shirts and hoodies.
Her work evokes a peculiar feeling of nostalgia. Or more fittingly I should say anemoia, considering that I never grew up in her pixelated worlds that merge Showa-Era Japan with contemporary times.
Her artwork masterfully combines the sentimentality and whimsy of Ghibli, the austere tones and subtlety of traditional Japanese colour palettes, as well as the dreamy wistfulness of lofi aesthetics to create this feeling of anemoia.
The image below I think is the perfect example. The girl riding the train, hinting at the adventure that awaits her as she travels to meet the mystery texter; a childhood friend? A mysterious stranger? Travel always plays a major role in Ghibli movies, whether that’s the friendly Cat Bus of My Neighbor Totoro, or the Sea Railway of Spirited Away. In keeping with the spirit of Ghibli, this artwork invites you to daydream the end of the story, allowing the artwork to linger in the memory.
[Someone’s Waiting for You], Arts.of.Win
Inspired by vintage Japanese advertising, she uses Japanese artistic principles such as Shibusa (渋い - the aesthetic of simple, subtle, and unobtrusive beauty) and the concept of Ma (間 - the use of negative space in art that allows the work to breathe and the viewer to feel and connect with the work).
I think the work below, Under a Nearby Moon, is a perfect example that encapsulates the principles of Shibusa and Ma. The colours and linework are very simple, but they convey a lot of movement and meaning. The creases in the clothes suggesting that she’s turning back to look at something, with a tinge of melancholy in her expression. The leaves in the corners blowing in the wind, hinting at a struggle that she needs to face. The empty space around her makes me feel that it’s a struggle she must face alone, but the framing of the moon around her gives me confidence that she’s strong enough to face up to triumph.
Under the Nearby Moon, Arts.of.Win
The most striking thing that hits you when you see her work is the minimalist, 2-bit colour palette of brown, beige and orange which is reminiscent of Japanese advertising from the showa era (1926 -1989). One of the major movements in that era was Showa Modern, a trend in Japanese advertising prior to the war where traditional Japanese art styles were combined with western influences such as art deco, as can be seen in the Shiseido advert below.
Shiseido Cosmetics, around 1928,
Ad Museum Tokyo
You can see that it shares the same kind of muted, limited colour palette of arts.of.win’s work. But rather than mixing traditional Japanese art with Modern (with a big M) Western influences, her work is a fusion of Showa-era advertising with contemporary themes and technology that is relatable to a modern (with a small m) audience.
I’m far from an expert on the history of Japanese art, but what’s interesting to me is the colour palette of Showa era art is something of a throwback and nostalgic nod itself to more traditional Japanese art. With its sumi ink blacks, ochres, bean browns and unbleached silks. The art of the Edo era (1603 - 1868) has a very distinct style unique to this place and time, as can be seen below in Matsumoto Hoji’s ukiyo-e (woodblock) frog art from the early 1800s. As you can see, the colors are not very vivid, but are instead quite muted and subtle.
Matsumoto Hoji, Meika Gafu, 1814, The British Museum
Another Japanese art style from around the same time is Benizuri-e, which was an early form of ukiyo-e from the 18th century which, like art.of.win’s 2-bit color palette, also used 2 colours; pink and green, set against the blacks of the lines and the whites of the background.
Torii Kiyomitsu,
Hosoban Benizuri-e ca. 1758
One of the reasons for these distinctive colors is that a lot of the paints used in the edo-era were made from plants, such as safflower and turmeric, which faded over time. This is something that has only become known to us recently as the science has better allowed us to understand how these paints and dyes are affected over time.
A modern-day artist, Tachihara Inuki, reproduced the works of Edo-era ukiyo-e artists to show what the works would have looked like when first made. You can see in the comparison image below. On the left is Utamaro’s Yamamba and Kintaro: Smoke of Tobacco (ca. 1801-03), and on the right side is Tachihara’s reproduction. As you can see, the colours of the reproductions are much more vivid.
To me this is all super interesting because it could mean that the works produced in the Showa era influenced by the palettes of the Edo era were based on something that was never intended. It’s almost like the children’s game Telephone, where the different iterations based on the initial influence have been distorted over time.
And that is not to say it’s a bad thing. It’s similar to how ancient Greek and Roman statues, in their classical pure white marble splendor, were actually often painted, and seem quite garish to how we perceive them now. Many art movements, from neoclassicism to vaporwave have been influenced by our incorrect perception of what those statues looked like.
So in the same way that vaporwave is a hallucinatory evolution of ancient Greek sculptures, arts.of.wins works are an anemoiac interpretation of traditional Japanese art. The initial influences distorted as they passed through the lens of different eras. The Meiji era’s open borders bringing greater influence from the west, not to mention trade with other countries expanding the range of paint colors available to Japanese artists. The austerity of the war years in early Showa, to the boom period of late Showa. Finally, we’re brought to the technological advancements of current days.
Down Side Up, Arts.of.Win
These distortions of the original influences creating something unique and exciting, yet still familiar. More anemoia than nostalgia. Her works beckon us home. Even though we’ve never been there before, we know we’ll be safe.
Come Home, Arts.of.Win
Tool Time: Dominik's moving dots animation-generator
What are moving dots? What do they look like animated? And more importantly, who is Dominik?
Well, let me answer two out of three of those questions.
One of the most requested types of effects people send me DMs asking how to recreate is those line glitches that artists like glass_void, Polygon1993, Arhitektorov and Zombtendo do so well. You know, the ones that look like Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures or something from a Daft Punk video.
Synthesized Remnants, tokyo_nomad_
First of all, it’s good to put a name to the face. There are a couple of different names for this effect. I generally hear it being referred to as Frequency Modulation, Modulation or FM. I’ve also heard it called Oscilloscope occasionally too. And I guess if you don’t have much of an imagination, you can call it “Moving Dots”.
Now there are quite a few different ways to achieve this effect. I’m assuming all the artsists I mentioned above all have their own way of recreating this effect from using analog equipment to disrupt TV signals (circuit bending through video synthesis) to using Adobe After Effects. It’s an effect I’ve used before in some of my work to great success. I generally use GenerateMe in Processing for my works (like in the image above), but I’ve also used Glitch Lab before (like in the image below).
Forever Young, tokyo_nomad_
Processing is my preferred way of doing things, but can be a little tricky, and the Glitch Lab method is only available in the paid-for version of the app. I’ll probably write a longer article or tutorial on the Processing method in the future, but this month I want to focus on an easy method that anyone can do.
So everything is done through your browser and the interface is dead simple. You basically upload your image and it does the hard work for you. There are some parameters that you can fiddle around with to change the color, resolution, blur, density. To save as an image, you can just right click on it, and it’ll let you save.
User Interface
Here’s a couple of quick examples with different parameters set.
What happens when you listen to Merzbow
There’s also the option to export it as an animation, and you can play around with the direction the waves move as well as the speed.
Probably listening to Massive Attack
Ultimately, it’s a pretty bare bones way of creating FM style glitches, but if you have access to programs like Photoshop/Gimp, or even mobile apps like Chroma Lab, you can do quite a lot of further editing like adding bloom, gradients, blur etc. to make the work more interesting.
So that’s it for this month’s Error Logs.
I'm not going to lie, trying to write consistently and meet deadlines has been kind of tough. I guess at first, I thought it would just be writing out my (largely) unedited thoughts, but the research and formatting takes longer than expected. It’s been a great learning experience for me, and I still think this is a worthwhile endeavor, but it has been reducing my artistic output a little.
With that in mind, I've decided to make some changes to my posting schedule. Currently I've been trying to do one blog post and one newsletter a month, but I’ve decided to make the blog posts irregular and keep the Error Logs as my consistent monthly post. I think that's going to be the best way of keeping the content at a high level.
So I’ll be posting again in March. If you enjoyed this, please feel free to subscribe or share it with friends or on your social media!