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cover art II / generative technologies
Spent a few days over the weekend hacking out some mockups of cover art for the Number None CD.
It was hard to think of an image that would convey our aesthetic very well. My tendency in design these days is to lean towards the ultra-minimal: super-clean expanses of white space broken up only with stark, perfect geometric forms. You know, the kind of thing that is easy to do well with Adobe Illustrator.
And that would be a decent fit if Chris and I were making minimal, clean laptop music. But we're not.
Which is not to say that we don't use technology. Chris can play some instruments well, but without machines I would have nothing of value to bring to this band. I love using the machines as generative technology: I'll set up a system on the computer, plug a sample into it, and see what emerges. Or I'll "play" the guitar using only the knobs on the effect pedals. But the end result is not clean. The music is dirty—irregular, fecund, low-fidelity. Recorded live to a single microphone which also records the room hiss and traffic noise. The Illustrator look just didn't fit for this project.
But then it occurred to me. The right technology to use for the cover art was the photocopier.
For a long time I've loved photocopiers. (See number 17.) I love the things that are made with them. And it seemed to be fitting to use them for this project: as with the recording technology Chris and I have at our disposal, photocopiers are cheap and lo-fi (the punks knew this first), and, as with the sound manipulation software I use, with photocopiers you can appropriate just about any sort of input, push a few buttons, and be rewarded with often magnificently unpredictable output.
How about links?
Here's a history of Photocopy Art.
Here's some information on Choreography For Copy Machine (Photocopy Cha Cha), a 1991 animated film made entirely from photocopies (I saw it in 1999, and it was wonderful; I wish a Quicktime version existed).
And here's some images from the (somewhat) recent book Fucked Up and Photocopied : Instant Art of the Punk Rock Movement.
Labels: number_none, technology, xerography |
