Whither Pixelation?

Working in older operating systems, you can see where the “glitch” sound and look came from. Take Mac OS 9: everything is pixelated, all the attempts at metallic surfaces, depth, and dimension are caricatures of the real-world objects they mimic. Most versions of Windows up until XP suffered similarly, and even Linux’s attempts at antialiasing are blocky, chunky, rough. Spend your day making music or designing media in this environment, and pretty soon your world looks like Diesel Sweeties.

But this is no longer the case. Mac OS X has no tolerance for anything less than smooth, scalable perfection. Icons are photorealistic and interface elements are smooth, polished, “lickable.” Text may as well be printed type, and not just in some applications, but across the entire operating system. And, as we know, lots of musicians, designers, and content creators use Macs. Personally, when spending my digital day surrounded by such slickness, pixelation seems nostalgic, quaint, maybe even irrelevant. I use a purposefully pixelized typeface in the title image at the top of my site, but I actually had to force Adobe ImageReady not not make it smooth and clean.

So too the craft of experimental electronic musicians may change as it becomes harder and harder to produce the bugs that give rise to the glitch sound. And will our little world of sound really suffer for it? There’s an art-school pretentiousness in working hard to make things sound broken; the listener knows that the blurping beats of Pole’s broken 4-pole filter are as “organic” as broken technology can be; using VST plugins to simulate this effect is disingenuous, even if the intent is to convey some high-minded commentary on the frailty of digital technology. Glitch, pixelation, has already become old hat: it’s a reference to an era of electronics that’s already gone. This is not to say it cannot be pleasurable, but it no longer carries any critical meaning. Musicians and designers would do well to look to an antialiased future, and embrace the nostalgia of glitch like a guitarist to his antique fuzzbox, brought out only to remind us of those years when clean technology with dirty output reigned supreme, and of the simple pleasure this oxymoron carries.