EYES ON CULTURE #008
04 January 2023
An Exquisite Canvas
EYES ON: Exquisite Canvas
Created by our very own Founding Engineer, Jacob Robbins’ Exquisite Canvas is a wondrous tool for creating pixel art. It builds on the work of Exquisite Graphics, a file format designed to fit pixel art compositions into as few bytes as possible so that they can be stored fully on-chain. By bringing on-chain pixel art to anyone and everyone, this canvas-building tool provides an endless fun reminiscent of Microsoft Paint.
WHY WE’RE WATCHING:
Constraints breed creativity. Nothing illustrates this as plainly as this tool.
Not only is the aesthetic focused on 'minimum viable fidelity' (ie. how low the resolution can be whilst still prompting an emotional resonance), but this thriftiness also pervades the canvas creation tool itself.
Instead of varying the size of the pixel brush, the tool asks you to expand and relocate the entire canvas to achieve different sized pixels. The canvas, in all its variations, acts as a window onto the piece itself, one that offers a very interesting perspectives on digital art’s scale.
A Virtual Underground
EYES ON: The Virtual Underground: An Introduction to VRChat's Rave Scene
Instead of taking place in illicit warehouses, during the pandemic, some raves went online. The documentary The Virtual Underground works to redefine our understanding of ‘underground’ by tracing the surprising night life scene in the popular VR platform VRChat.
At first you might think there can’t be anything less ‘underground’ than a VR platform, but just as real life raves encourage a personal freedom through anonymity, so too do VR avatars give online ravers the chance to escape themselves.
WHY WE’RE WATCHING:
An upside to the fact that so few people actually use ‘The Metaverse’ is that things still have a sense of intimacy.
In the case of the VR nightclub scene, members claim that the personal nature of the community feels much like the rise of the nightlife scene in pockets of the globe in the early 80s and 90s when only few, very committed members made up the dance floor. That description — of a virtual intimacy so real that it encourages behaviours of the ‘underground’ — is sociologically intriguing, even if it's a product of a lack of users.
The Original Screen Light
EYES ON: EL Wire Costumes
Next, we have the EL (electroluminescent) wire-laced costumes dressing the inhabitants of the aforementioned ‘underground’ — so unnaturally bright it’s hard to look away. From the plains of Burning Man to your local basement party, outfits are outlined with coated copper wires pumping with electricity to emit 360 degree unbroken lines of dark-defying light.
WHY WE’RE WATCHING:
Apart from deserving our attention for its place in the history of lit-up fashion, EL wire can also be viewed as the real world precursors to computer generated image techniques. In the same way that an EL wire glows from within, many material computer graphics support a property called ‘emissiveness’ — enabling the digital material to light up, free from any external light source.
As digital fashion creators, we keep a close eye on digital-physical correlations. Not only can these connections inspire new approaches to creating the digital clothes of the future, but they also ground those clothes in the material traditions of their past.
WHOSE EYES: Jacob Robbins, DRAUP Founding Engineer