Tag: digital

Feature

Sanjay’s Super Team brings Indian mythology into the digital age

This article is part of a collaboration with iQ by Intel. Pixar’s Oscar-nominated animated short Sanjay’s Super Team (2015) premiered last year, delivering a personal story about Indian culture and spirituality to a global audience. A largely autobiographical tale directed by Sanjay Patel, it centers around the duality of his Indian-American identity, a largely underrepresented demographic in the Western-dominated field of animation and digital storytelling. In an interview with The Verge, Patel said “It felt really important to me to have America see this, and have Pixar and Disney say it’s normal.” In the short, little Sanjay is enamored by a Transformers-like…
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Photo series shows how GTA V’s bleakness mirrors everyday life

As technology advances and our lives grow more and more digital, the barrier between our physical world and the virtual one grows increasingly blurred. As videogame graphics venture further into the dark lands of the uncanny valley, it seems only consequential that a photographer would eventually utilize in-game screenshots to juxtapose them against our physical world. Pairing our world with one of the most illustrious and life-like of open world games That’s what photographer Ollie Ma’ of Buckinghamshire, England has done, having captured the thematic emotions of disconnect in his photography. In his latest project, “Open World,” Ma’ couples in-game…
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New painting collection stands up for the value of digital art

We live in a time of artistic plenty. At any moment, anyone with an internet connection can simply type a few words into their browser and have immediate and free access to history’s most famous paintings, music, and theater. Even lesser-known works are often available to view as photographs on the personal websites of the artists who made them. This is easy to take for granted, but it is important to remember that seeing a work of art used to require either purchasing it for oneself, visiting it in person, or at the very least buying an art book. With…
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Digital typeface 83M80 is an attempt to claw back earlier internet eras

These are great times for the weird internet, which is a little strange because it’s all so respectable. Sure, there are still genuinely weird sites like oj.com, but they are weird precisely because they are retro. It’s probably for the best that we don’t live in the era of make-your-own-Geocities and frames, but what have we lost along the way and does it have any aesthetic value independent of our nostalgia?  83M80 — Letterpress in the Digital Era, a documentary by Gonzalo Hergueta and MRKA, attempts to address what has been lost in the move towards a more professionalized internet.…
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It’s about time digital art had a place to call home

Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was the first time I saw something resembling a digital frame. The technological magic of his “Picture Picture” device looked like an ordinary painting in a garishly gilt frame until Mister Rogers wanted to show viewers a video. “Hello,” it would sometimes greet him, before then launching into a story about the industrialized creation of crayons or some other every day object. When the video was over Mister Rogers would bid the frame goodbye and the screen would morph back into a generic landscape painting. Decades later and digital picture frames belong to the lackluster luxury end…
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Plug & Play exposes the hopelessness of digital communication

Swiss animator Michael Frei has a strange fascination with fingers. “What I especially like about hands is their expressiveness,” he told Director’s Notes back in 2013. It makes sense: he’s an animator, he uses his hands a lot, to create, to mold, to make actual the visions inside his head. And so do we all, as the hands and their appendages are attributed with our ascendance over all of Earth’s creatures. obsessed with fitting in with each other.  With Finger Simulator, Frei had us confront our understanding of what a finger is and how it works; extending their lengths to…