[shit_game]

"I had learned to appreciate the color limitations during the old-school graphics competition at Evoke, where we could only use a predefined color palette. The first time I submitted an entry in 2022, I hated it. The second time, in 2023, I came to accept the limited color palette as a problem to solve. And by 2024, I actually started to enjoy the challenge."

I've found that limitation in artistic mediums can serve as motivation and even inspiration in art. I primarily work with glitch art; the definition is finicky, and creating it without bleeding into the more generic genre of New Aesthetic can be difficult because of how volatile and uncooperative glitches are. A hard limitation on a number of colors in a palette seems simultaneously incredibly frustrating and liberatingly-simple. While it doesn't inherently affect the medium of the work (pixel art), it poses limitations that challenge it (fidelity in detail being most notable). These limitations also pose some ceiling on the work that can be done - a limited color depth makes an artists focus much more on effective detail than perfect detail, which I think adds character to an art piece.

Very interesting article.

[kbouck]

> I've found that limitation in artistic mediums can serve as motivation and even inspiration in art.

There's a great 1969 interview with Charles Eames in which he discusses design, and constraints as being a necessary component of design.

Some Excerpts:

Interviewer: Does the creation of Design admit constraint?

Eames: Design depends largely on constraints.

Interviewer: What constraints?

Eames: The sum of all constraints. Here is one of the few effective keys to the design problem: the ability of the designer to recognize as many of the constraints as possible, his willingness and enthusiasm for working within these constraints. The constraints of price, size, strength, balance, time and so forth. Each problem has its own peculiar list.

Interviewer: Does Design obey laws?

Eames: Aren’t constraints enough?

[ebcode]

For more (great stuff) in this vein, check out Lars von Trier's The Five Obstructions.

[veunes]

A perfect illustration of how limitations can push an artist to think in new ways

[myself248]

If that's glitch art the way I understand glitch art, then it's only volatile and uncooperative because its practitioners want it to be. The majority of people I've seen glitching circuits have no understanding of what they're doing, actively resist gaining any, and then act frustrated when the humidity changes and the glitch doesn't work anymore, or the chip dies after a few more tries.

If you want a glitch to ground out a sync pulse that travels between chips in a Speak N Spell, but do so _without_ overstressing the chips and eventually destroying them, there are absolutely ways to do that. Buffers and diodes are not rocket science, and once the signals have been found, manipulating them can be made repeatable, safe, and durable.

If you want a glitch to happen somewhere between the 4th and 40th scanline of a video frame and always during the horizontal blanking interval, it's absolutely possible to construct a trigger circuit that will do precisely that, every time, perhaps still with a configurable degree of randomness but never in a way that will smoke the chips.

Which is to say, suffer for your art only if the suffering is the point. Which I suspect may actually be the case.

[Dalewyn]

>limitation in artistic mediums can serve as motivation and even inspiration

Also known as: The quality of software is inversely proportional to the power of hardware.

[veunes]

It’s like discovering beauty in imperfection