Think Tank
Big, chunky pixels: New lo-fi animation
Dan Nadel
Table of Contents
There are two possible ways to use technology: as it was intended, and as it wasn’t. With every new development, we make a decision. Do you use the electric guitar to simply play acoustic styles, but louder, or do you pump it through distortion peddles and play it with your teeth? These are delicate considerations. Animation today has been marked by a headlong rush into a progress, defined as maximizing the available technology to move the medium deeper and deeper into realism. If animation can be photorealistic, if the hairs on Garfield can be made to gently undulate as he lets out a long sigh in a Bill Murray-voice, then that’s what must be done, right? Well, not necessarily. There is a growing contingent of artists using animation “wrong,” deliberately underplaying the technology or subverting its normal use in service to their own visions. Their Garfield doesn’t even have hair: he has big, chunky pixels.
Creators of animated video such as the duo Wyld File, artist Michael Bell-Smith, and artist Cory Arcangel are largely underutilizing the available technology, not in the service of minimalism, but rather because lo-fi methods are more effective in communicating their ideas. By doing more with less, these artists are helping to define digital animation as a field of artistic exploration, not solely as the product of the latest digital tools. They pick and choose the elements they want to use.
Figure 1: “Standing in the Way of Control,” a video by Wyld File for The Gossip. “We only were given one week to come up with a concept, shoot and animate.”
