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In trying to define my current practice, I managed to narrow it down to one core element that has bled into all of my Unit 6 work, the repurposing and recontextualising of old technology to create new meaning. I welcome you to join me on this adventure of discovery and reflection into my design inspirations, motivations and journey.

hyper-digital

My current practice constantly finds me gleaning what I can from “outdated” digital mediums and styles. I have found myself frequently looking at old digital technologies for inspiration and repurposing elements to communicate to a modern audience. For example, in my Unit 6, E&E project, I recreated and repurposed recognisable UI elements from digital platforms like the Wii and the MSN Messenger to make a zine. I did this for a few reasons. Firstly, the brief required me to map how somewhere or something feels. I chose to map how two songs feel. I chose the songs 2008 Toyota Corolla and the 2014 Nintendo eShop Theme. These two songs have a very Frutiger Aero, clean and nostalgic sound to them. Moreover, in the comment sections for these two songs YouTube pages, there were hundreds of nostalgic Nintendo fans expressing how meaningful these songs are to them. This community had people exclaiming how nostalgic these songs were and how they longed to go back to an older version of the digital landscape. With that in mind, it felt only natural that in mapping out how these songs feel, I should pay homage to this community and the old design styles that are indicative of what they deem a better time for the digital world.

Another way which I gleaned from ‘outdated’ mediums was through the illustration style of my N&V project. I was on ‘The Short Read’ brief and had to create 3 illustrations for two different short stories with the goal of encouraging more young adults to read. I decided to take inspiration from games made with a software Adobe has now made redundant called Adobe Flash. My illustrations were heavily inspired by art from game studio The Behemoth, and game designer Edmund McMillen. They were amongst many other designers and games from the early 2000s, the “golden age” of the Flash browser-game era. The Flash browser-game style I went for is characterised by a fun use of bright colours and cartoony illustrations. I wanted to work in this Flash-game style in part because, assuming a young adult is anyone from 18-25, my audience is likely to have played browser-games at some point during their childhood. Whether that would have been through Facebook Games, Newgrounds, Friv, Kizi, or game websites like Club Penguin, Moshi Monsters, Bin Weevils, Poptropica, or educational web games like Mathletics, Mangahigh or BBC Bitesize games, it is likely that a young adult is familiar with this art style, even if they weren’t an avid gamer.

In these two projects, I found myself going back and gleaning from design styles and UIs from a similar timeframe, 1997 to 2014. A large inspiration for me wanting to do so is contemporary music video director Lauzza. In the last 2 years he has created a distinct lane in the underground British music scene by directing music videos which are set largely in digital worlds, making use of visual effects to break the barrier between the digital realm and reality. In behind the scenes footage, you will largely see artists he shoots in empty sets with large green screens surrounding them in order for them to be placed into otherwise impossible settings. One of his music videos was set in a fabricated DSi world while another was largely set in a Frutiger Aero paradise inspired heavily by old Windows backgrounds.

Similarly to Lauzza’s work, my outcomes have relied on my audience having a certain level of knowledge about the digital world between 1997 and 2014. My work excessively plays into old digital design styles. Therefore, I would regard my current practice throughout Unit 6 as hyper-digital.

my journey w/ old technology

So, the main way I would describe my practice is hyper-digital, frequently recontextualising old styles to create new meanings. With that said, to contextualise my current practice properly I think it is important to reflect and analyse my unique design history in relation to using old styles specifically. I used to have my own YouTube channel where I created gaming montage videos to music I liked. Without being conscious of it, I began playing into vaporwave and lo-fi visual trends in my videos. The first time I repurposed old visual aesthetics was in a 2019 Fortnite montage where I used a “VHS” overlay and colour grade over a 4:3 video clip. This came completely out of coincidence. My clip had come out very horizontally stretched, so I made the clip 4:3 and repurposed the old CRT TV look to make it appear intentional. Not thinking much of it, I uploaded that video and moved onto the next, though my interest into these old aesthetics would only grow.

The vaporwave and lo-fi aesthetics had remnants of its visual language come to me through an unconventional form - analogue horror. The popular games Slender: The Eight Pages and Five Nights at Freddy’s came out in the early 2010s. I was fascinated by the concept that a video game could be horror. As a child, I was deathly afraid of anything in the horror genre. This fear made me hugely interested in the genre growing up, frequently revisiting these games and the analogue horror genre. Analogue horror’s style is one rooted in old technologies like the CRT TV, relying on glitches and visual artefacts to build frightening suspense. Though the games both might not be considered vaporwave, the use of 90s visual styles has definitely played a part in my interest for repurposing vintage technology today.

The intrigue I had into these games’ visual styles and concepts has definitely contributed to my current practice today. In my Unit 2 and Unit 3 Lens projects, I produced photography indicative of the analogue horror film, Skinamarink. To do so, I captured photos in dark settings purposefully to maximise the amount of digital noise visible. In these instances, I was using new technology in an unconventional and “inferior” way to evoke fear and have an older look to it. Those were my first university projects recontextualising old technological styles, but it would not be my last.

Music and Music Videos

After the aforementioned Fortnite montage, I started taking Media Studies classes in Year 8 where I started to grasp a larger understanding of contemporary and historical media trends, specifically in the world of music videos. Looking back on it, 2020 is the first year I started actively thinking about the potential of old technologies in the modern day. ‘Gimme Love,’ a song by Joji, and ‘Supalonely,’ a song by BENEE, both made use of old digital cameras in their music videos. In Joji’s video, he makes use of this old technology to create an intimate, old aesthetic that compliments the fictional behind the scenes footage shown throughout his video. BENEE’s video makes use of “outdated” recording devices in order to play into the childish and fun imagery throughout, created using bright colours indicative of the vaporwave aesthetic. In both instances, this “outdated” technology created new meaning, and that has intrigued me ever since.

Many could describe these two music videos as Y2K mainly because of the use of old digital cameras and, specific to BENEE’s video, the use of bright colours and liminal settings. The Y2K term is rather broad though and encompasses many aesthetics. In my Unit 6 E&E project, I would have created some pages in the Y2K Futurism style if I had more time. For that reason, to properly contextualise it I think the Frutiger Aero aesthetic would be more aligned and specific to my work. For example, when I repurposed graphics from the Wii’s UI, my work instantly is indicative of Frutiger Aero because the Wii is a staple for the aesthetic, being mentioned 17 times on the Aesthetics Wiki’s Frutiger Aero page. Moreover, another page used photography representative of one of Frutiger Aero’s sub-genres’, Technozen. On a different page, I made use of Frutiger Metro design conventions that nod towards the design of Xbox’s Live Arcade console packaging, and Apple’s silhouette iPod advertisements. For those reasons, I would consider my Unit 6 zine an archive for two things. Firstly, it is an archive of various Frutiger Aero designs that have been recontextualised for a different purpose. Secondly, my zine had to convey the feelings which two songs create. To do that, I wanted to look outside of myself and build around comments left on the songs’ YouTube pages. In doing so I have also created an archive of this communities’ comments too. Andrea Lioy mentioned in Week 7’s lecture how we should design not for people, but with people - I feel like I have done that with my outcome.

Reigning it back into my own practice, seeing music videos like Joji’s ‘Gimme Love’ and BENEE’s ‘Supalonely’ in 2020, sparked a further interest into the Y2K aesthetic and how old technologies can be used to bring new meanings. This would eventually lead me to working with other old technological aesthetics such as Frutiger Aero today.

Designing in the Frutiger Aero style is one example of how I have incorporated gleaning into my practice. Gleaning is a concept I became familiar with during Unit 6 that has changed how I view my work. I watched Agnès Varda’s 2000 documentary ‘The Gleaners And I’ when I was worried that repurposing old designs and styles was in fact lazy and gimmicky, that I was a worse designer for doing so. Watching the documentary made me realise that reframing and repurposing designs and styles was not lazy but actually quite unique and beneficial. When we look at visuals which are seen as outdated, unimportant or bad, we are inhibiting ourselves to certain ways of working and thinking. It makes sense to glean from the old and repurpose things for the modern day - it is a way for us to learn and grow. Through gleaning I noticed that I could make work which connects to people in a unique way. This documentary has made me keen to keep working in this hyper-digital way, influencing me to want to keep on doing so.

Another documentary which influenced my Unit 6 was Good Copy, Bad Copy. It is a 2007 documentary about copyright in the world of online file sharing, the internet and music. The film highlights many artists. The producer Danger Mouse gained popularity because of his project, The Grey Album. For this, he mixed vocals from Jay-Z’s The Black Album with The Beatles album commonly known as The White Album. In doing this, he created a piece of art which was completely new by recontextualising two others. Combining these two vastly different pieces of work required a lot of creativity and skill. This made me realise that authenticity is truly more important than originality, making me feel more confident about what I was creating in Unit 6.

In Good Copy, Bad Copy, the featured musicians remix a lot of other music to make new art through sampling. Many artists take parts of other songs and repurpose them to create entirely new music. Sampling is a practice I would never shun a musician for doing; therefore, it did not make sense that I had doubts about myself as a designer for doing something similar.

Thanks to both of the documentaries, I have taken a different attitude towards my work. Instead of viewing my hyper-digital and context-reliant work as lazy or bad, I now see it as me remixing and recontextualising visuals or design styles to create new meanings.

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