I remember when this style was current, though some of these images are slightly older than I am.
Also, "a door somewhere" reminds me of old album covers. For whatever reason I'm thinking of Lou Reed's "take no prisoners".
MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today
131–140 of 210 posts
Re: MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Western classical music had a strong tradition of taking advantage of cutting edge technological advances, especially in metallurgy but also advanced woodworking techniques like lamination making large soundboards possible and pushing the bounds of acoustic amplification. It wasn't until I think around the advent of recorded music and electric amplification that it settled into a fairly stable set of instruments & so…
Settled, or ossified? Sure, there’s modern classical with more adventurous instrumentation, but that’s not what the moneyed retirees down at the opera house want to hear. The music of the classical canon is unbelievably fantastic, and it deserves respectful treatment, but the genre has lost the audience for cool new sounds. It’s very unfortunate.
Neither, I’d argue. The greats that we look back at were the outliers, the madmen at the fringe. For every Beethoven or Mozart there were a thousand thousand nobodies cranking out the same stuff that their grandfathers wrote. Rachmaninov was seen as nouveau trash in his time, Holst derided, Gershwin hackneyed. Eno perhaps falls into the same category.
Hell, in a century you’ll see string quartets banging out Aphex Twin at elegant soirées. The real connoisseurs, of course, nod knowingly and mutter that drukqs is “early period”.
Similarly, plainsong was seen as “classical” music for many centuries, and was also a largely rigid form, but there exist some absolute bangers in the canon, mostly unattributed because monks.
It’s hard to see the sweep of history from within it.
Re: MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Western classical music had a strong tradition of taking advantage of cutting edge technological advances, especially in metallurgy but also advanced woodworking techniques like lamination making large soundboards possible and pushing the bounds of acoustic amplification. It wasn't until I think around the advent of recorded music and electric amplification that it settled into a fairly stable set of instruments & so…
Settled, or ossified? Sure, there’s modern classical with more adventurous instrumentation, but that’s not what the moneyed retirees down at the opera house want to hear. The music of the classical canon is unbelievably fantastic, and it deserves respectful treatment, but the genre has lost the audience for cool new sounds. It’s very unfortunate.
Yeah I actually used that word as I wrote it, and then switched it so I wouldn't come across as judgmental or anticlassical or whatever. I think it's a valid view of it. But my perspective here is that this kind of music is basically german-french elite traditional ethnic music. And as I don't negatively judge for example gamelan or carnatic or gagaku music for being settled/ossified I shouldn't judge traditional european music for that either.
It's simply not the role of any one musical practice to be at the forefront of experimentation forever. What we now call classical passed its torch on generations ago, and rock & jazz have now settled in too. We have hip hop and electronic music taking this role now, and eventually they will bind up into their own conventions and some descendant of theirs will push on.
Re: MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
The same holds true for everything from cave paintings to Roman frescos. It's part of human expression. The tools of that expression shape it. For example, Bach's music was shaped by the fact that the harpsichord had no sustain. The piano changed that, but "upscaling" Bach's work to take advantage of this new technology would destroy them. You use the new technology to play them as they were written for the old. The…
Switched on Bach is one of my favorite albums of all time.
Awesome, thanks. Had an inkling whatever Spotify came up with wasn’t right—thank you TIA for Wendy Carlos’s 1968 original!:
https://archive.org/details/wendy-carlos-witched-on-bach
(have to donate to Internet Archive again now…) anyway Wiki says this album essentially brought the Moog/synths from experimental to popular music. In a lovely fashion, my ears do say.
Re: MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Western classical music had a strong tradition of taking advantage of cutting edge technological advances, especially in metallurgy but also advanced woodworking techniques like lamination making large soundboards possible and pushing the bounds of acoustic amplification. It wasn't until I think around the advent of recorded music and electric amplification that it settled into a fairly stable set of instruments & so…
Classical and jazz just stopped trying and standardized the instruments. Other types of music are more open to incorporating new instruments. At least that's how I feel.
FWIW the jazz tradition is still alive and well, it just isn't normally called that in the interest of not being confused with the still-extant "traditional" jazz and because many of the musicians consider themselves to be primarily part of some other community.
But there is an absolutely thriving collaboration- and improvisation-based music form grounded in jazz but open to novel & experimental instrumentation and ripe with influence from other contemporary forms like pop, hip hop, funk, reggaeton, metal. I'm thinking of people like thundercat, kamasi washington, nuclear power trio, tigran hamasyan, robert glasper, sungazer, domi & jd beck, louis cole etc.
If you like the sound of old school jazz, the standup bass the piano the brush drum shuffle, this stuff will be alien and hostile and won't feel like jazz to you. But if you like the musicianship of jazz, watching masters collaboratively invent new music in real time, this is where that ended up.
Re: MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today
#136The lack of photorealistic fidelity gives your brain a bit of room to use imagination to fill in the blanks in your internal model. This fosters a certain type of engagement with the content that you don't get with photorealistic images.
I think that's part of the reason that a lot of indie games have converged around pixel art. Obviously a large part of it is likely due to the fact that a lot of the creators grew up with the NES or SNES and just like that aesthetic, but I think you get a lot of "implied detail" when using pixel art, which is great when you're working on a limited budget. This isn't to knock it, to be clear. I love good pixel art.
YOu both are missing something. TV fuzzy rendering blended pixels together and FFVI under the SNES (and Chrono Trigger) could look astoundingly great with amazing colours and sprite art.
Re: MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today
#137It looks great today , but if you asked someone in the 90s or even 00s they’d probably say it looks like ass. Or, like, totally wack, dude. We like it today because of the nostalgia/retro factor.
I dunno - artwork in this style did pretty good on ffffound back in the day. That's at least as early as 2007. I'm sure you could go back further in other forums and find appreciation for the same reason people like it here.
To contrast, a lot of content from clip-art collections at the time looked awful then and didn't age well at all.
Re: MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today
#138Bert Monroy (the 2nd image, of an alleyway) is still quite active as a digital artist: https://www.bertmonroy.com
Re: MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today
#139Then we should probably mention http://macpaint.org (From page HTML source) Does anyone even remember why Netscape 4 was bad?
Well, like the comment said, it crashed a lot when you tried to run JS on it. It was pretty annoying to binary-search for a bug in your JS when the symptom was a browser crash. Also, it used a lot more RAM than Netscape 3 and was slower, but I don't recall it being better in significant ways.
DHTML in Netscape 4 was also completely incompatible with DHTML in IE 4. In IE you had the DOM, which is an inconvenient and inherently very inefficient interface that you could coerce into doing anything you wanted. In Netscape 4 you had layers. Our team (KnowNow) was working on an AJAX and Comet toolkit at the time (02000). In order to not write separate versions of our Comet applications for the two browsers, we stuck to the least common denominator, which was basically framesets and document.write.
Re: MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today
#140I suppose it's just nostalgia, but I get such a warm fuzzy feeling just seeing this art from the 80s. I can remember using tools like MacPaint. It was just such a fun time to be around computers.