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MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today

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Re: MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today

#91
post #73
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have no idea on how charming these games look.

Or I do, because I played them? But that was my not well received point about nostalgia ..

I didn't play them. but I owned a Game Boy in late 90's and I emulated 8-16 bit microcomputer/console games in 2001-2005, and I really appreaciated them.

Re: MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today

#92

There's a term I read about a long time ago, I think it was "aesthetic completeness" or something like that. It was used in the context of video games whose art direction was fully realized in the game, i.e. increases in graphics hardware or capabilities wouldn't add anything to the game in an artistic sense. The original Homeworld games were held up as examples. Anyway, this reminded me of that. Making these picture…

It’s interesting to think about the intersection of cultural, technology and aesthetic.

Gaming embraces most of its historical aesthetics while say movies do not. There aren’t serious attempts to replicate the aesthetic of 50’s tv (which are tied in heavily with the culture of the time) similarly, jn the eighties and I imagine prior, I’ve been watching Miami vice and you can tell lots of the rooms are cheap sets with pretty minimal props. This is on the one hand definetly not full formed, but on the other hand I’ve grown to appreciate that aesthetic, And again other art forms like painting and video games seem to appreciate all eras of aesthetics in their modern versions in a Way tv and movies don’t. (Maybe just due to expense?)

Re: MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today

#93

Then we should probably mention http://macpaint.org (From page HTML source) Does anyone even remember why Netscape 4 was bad?

> Does anyone even remember why Netscape 4 was bad?

Netscape 4 is a broad set of releases over several years. It also wasn't necessarily "bad". It was just largely not mindblowingly better than Netscape 3 (for normal users) while using more CPU and RAM.

I also imagine in this context it's incomplete CSS support is problematic. Netscape 3 will ignore properly commented out CSS (mostly) while 4 will try to interpret what it can and choke on the rest. It's box model doesn't conform to where the CSS spec landed so even if you can give it CSS it can handle, your page is broken in every other browser.

Re: MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pixel art is very much still around today, even though it's far from "pushing" the limits of current hardware. It's pursuing a rather consistent "vision" of maximizing quality while staying within the bounds of a predefined level of detail (i.e. resolution) and color depth.

I think most indie developers choose pixel art (and low-poly 3D) today because they still can’t produce high-quality high-detail art, and high-quality pixel art is prettier than low-quality high-detail art. It’s still a case where the developer can’t truly express their vision, but they can express it behind a filter, in this case pixelation, that makes our brains charitably fill in the missing details. Although I’m…

I think a slightly different way to think about it is that it’s not always contest for maximum detail. Apple’s new liquid glass look is impressive, but is it necessarily better UI than System 9? I think you could have a reasonable debate about that.

Re: MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today

#95

Earlier 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…

Similarly, Liszt made full use of what modern, powerful pianofortes are capable of - although were he a man of our times, he’d probably have been fronting a heavy metal band.

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 & sounds produced by them.

Re: MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today

#96
These seem to be made by artists trained on traditional drawing. All drawings show knowledge of cross-hatching or pointillism, correct use of values, perspective, and so on. That’s why it looks great today, these qualities are independent of how advanced the digital medium of the time was.

Re: MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today

#97
post #70

Earlier 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.

Switched-on Bach is a revelation in part because the synth bass tones are more focused, distinct, and identifiable than when the same notes are played on acoustic instruments — allowing you to hear harmonic interplay which I believe is closer to what Bach heard in his head.

But here are lots of Bach synth albums and only Wendy Carlos’ work has the taste and obsessive fidelity to the original compositions to allow those ideas to come through. Most synth Bach falls into the trap of being idiomatic synth rather than idiomatic Bach, akin to playing Bach on the piano without considering how it would have sounded on the harpsichord.

Re: MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today

#98

There's a term I read about a long time ago, I think it was "aesthetic completeness" or something like that. It was used in the context of video games whose art direction was fully realized in the game, i.e. increases in graphics hardware or capabilities wouldn't add anything to the game in an artistic sense. The original Homeworld games were held up as examples. Anyway, this reminded me of that. Making these picture…

I was also considering the effect of how silent computing used to be. It created a tension and expectation when waiting for an image to appear like waiting for a curtain to open on a play. So when the artwork appeared, the artists worked to make it beautiful. It was almost pushing the edge of what these systems could do, and so as a viewer placed you in an engaging experience right at the state of the art.
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