Monday, May 1, 2017

RC2017/4 Final! (Replica Results and Post-Mortem)

"The Treachery Of Pop Pixel Art" - Scott Lawrence, 4/30/17
Inspired by Andy Warhol and René Magritte's works
As you might know, I spent time this past month working on what I nicknamed "The Andy Project". The idea was to re-create some of Andy Warhol's art pieces on an Amiga, well, an emulated Amiga, using appropriate tools, as pixel-accurately as possible.

This blog post will be a summary of results, mentions of pitfalls, and that kind of thing.  The previous three blog posts cover most of the other information for the project.  Links for these are on the bottom of this post.

Philosophical musings...

Andy's work is interesting because you don't see any other of the "classic" artists doing their work in such a media, where you can get pixel-for-pixel copies of the originals.  Nowadays, sure, you get photographs of the original, but with these digital art works, you can get essentially the EXACT same content that was originally produced. This is likely why the "originals" have never been made public directly... Understandably so.... That floppy gets out, and we see posters of pop-pixel-art available in every mall. That said, I want to make poster blow-ups of some of these. ;)

This actually got me thinking a lot about the resulting media files that I will be produced.  These will be virtually indistinguishable from the originals.  Are they the same as the originals?  In some of these, I am the person who drew all of the individual pixels in Deluxe Paint.  It is distinctly not the original files, which are still under lock-and-key.  But those may surface, and you may find that mine are nearly identical with respect to which color pixels are where on the digital canvas.

In the music industry, if you were to make a copy of a waveform, by looking at numerical representations of the wave, and typing them in to a computer, making a replica of the original waveform.  When played back, it's still Debbie Harry's "Rush Rush"... but you actually created it from scratch by copying the numbers from the original.  It's a replica... that is functionally and actually identical to the original.  In fact, if you were to write a computer program that did this for you; go through the audio file, and look at the numbers, then write those numbers into another file... then the computer has generated a replica of the original... That's exactly the same as I'm doing here, right?

That software already exists.. it's "cp", "copy" or "drag-and-drop the icon to another folder."

Does that mean that I cannot take credit for my reproductions?  This is kind of why I had wanted to add specific mistakes/changes to mine, so even if you were to compare them at the pixel level, mine would be at the least, a derivative work. ... but is that enough?  Couldn't Andy's estate come after me and say "that imagery is exactly the same as the original, and you're putting it up online for free! Stop that now!"

I know that mine are replicas...  perhaps that's enough.

But then, if you think about the pop-art movement of the '50s and onward, it delves DIRECTLY into this, head on.  Andy, for example, took iconic things (soup cans, Marilyn Monroe) and used them as the basis for his iconic works.  If the Campbell's Soup can looked different, so would have his artwork.

So in that vein... My reproductions are essentially my brand new art pieces, just using his pieces as the inspiration...

Wait.. are mine replicas of his works?  Are mine new works, like the originals under the pop-art umbrella?

I don't know how to resolve this.

The Andy Project

I started out with a list of 11 images to pick from.  I thought I might get a few done, but I never set specific goals for myself... so I only got three of them done.  I still feel like this is a major success. Mainly because I can now do many of the other ones at my leisure using all of the tools and frameworks I've already set in place, with full knowledge of the pitfalls for the various steps.

I also created two pieces that I was inspired to make from the project, so I included those in the ZIP and slideshow ADF as well.  Links to the slideshow ADF downloads are at the bottom of this blog post, along with an in-browser emulator that can play it in-browser.

Everything provided here is to be considered to be Creative-Commons BY-NC-SA. (Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-Alike).

What went wrong

I think the big thing that went wrong was wrangling with tools. There are two instances that come to mind.
Nothing really went wrong here, I just thought it would almost
be appropriate for this to be my end-state of this image. :)
I feel like Andy might have accepted this.

ObeseBits

First of all, my tool "ObeseBits" was giving me trouble.  It's the first Javascript-Processing app I've ever really made.  Most of the time for Processing, I just use Java mode.  That seemed a bit excessive, and I wanted to make something I could easily share, so I went Javascript instead. 

If you watch the time lapse, you may see bits like this roll through.
The frustration was real.
This is a fine choice, but I had a problem where... I'm not exactly sure what was going wrong, but I was re-drawing the entire screen every frame.  It seemed to be chewing on more RAM that it should, especially after it sits for 5 minutes... especially running in Chrome on a 8 year old mac with 2 gig of RAM.  Yes, I see the irony here that I'm creating these images on a machine that could do this with 1/2 megabyte of memory... hehe  Anyway, it would get so unresponsive that it would essentially lock up the machine, but it always seemed like it was JUST ABOUT TO wake up.  But no... spinny rainbow pizza instead...  Force reboots were my friends.

FS-UAE emulator

The other main issue was that I couldn't get the ADF file exported from the emulator I was working in!  Seems like a pretty straightforward thing to do:

  1. Mount an ADF disk image
  2. Diskcopy Amiga Workbench 1.3 to it
  3. Make space by removing printer drivers, fonts, utilities, etc that aren't needed
  4. Copy my "Files" folder from the virtual hard disk to the virtual floppy
  5. Set the startup-sequence to just add disk buffers and then run the slideshow (DPShow)
  6. Quit out of the emulator
  7. The ADF disk image file you have there has all of the above done to it, right?
            RIGHT?

WRONG.  I was using FS-UAE that, because of reasons that kinda make sense, treats all mounted ADF disk images as read-only, and creates an "overlay" in a separate directory with all of your changes.  So... here's the list of things I tried to get the modified ADF out of the thing:

  1. "apply" the changes to the ADF.
    • Can't do this.  The change overlay is in a custom format.
    • No tools exist to do this. (!!s)
  2. Turn on the UAE emulator flag "writable_floppy_iamges=1", which tells the emulator that it's okay to write directly to disk images for new disks.
    • Then you must mount a new disk, once this is set, diskcopy the content over, and you'll end up with an ADF with all of these changes. Right?
    • WRONG. FS-UAE ignores this flag.  There is literally NO WAY to write to an ADF that I have found directly from FS-UAE.  (let it be noted: otherwise, FS-UAE is freaking awesome.  this just really frustrated me.)
  3. At some point in here, I needed to edit the startup-sequence on the ADF, and I couldn't do it via the emulator's mounted-folder-as-disk-image, so i grabbed "Vim" from Fred Fish disk 591.
    • This required ARP for some reason, so I grabbed ARP and ran the installer.  
    • It replaced a bunch of AmigaDOS commands, added a library, etc.
    • Vi now worked.  Yay!
  4. Make a disk image to a file within the emulated Amiga.
    • Sounds ridiculous, but in fact, yes... it is ridiculous.
    • The only one I found that "should" work in AmigaDOS 1.3 was "TransADF"
      • Grabbed TransADF off Aminet, put it on my "Work13" disk (which is a mounted folder from my Mac). 
      • Ran TransADF, and... GURU MEDITATION
    • Fumbled for a while and realized I could boot an emulated AmigaDOS 3.1 system.
    • Booted up AmigaDOS 3.1, ran TransDisk, created the ADF, looked good.
    • Booted back into 1.3, and suddenly, on "loadwb", the system just locked up with a blank blue screen.
    • Eventually traced it back to ARP being an issue.
    • Luckily, my Work13: disk was being maintained by Git, so i just reverted the changes that the ARP installer did... and now it all worked again.  blerg.
So yeah.  Cumbersome as all get out, but I managed to get the ADF made, and I now know I can just boot into 3.1 and run TransDisk to do this again.

What went right...

I got three image replicas done! YAY!

I feel super proud of the fact that I was able to do it to the best of my abilities, to the best effort I could provide and do.  I tried my best to be pixel-perfect, to be color-accurate, and I think the results paid off really well!

You can see me work on these in a time-lapse on YouTube too!

What you see here are EXACTLY what I was doing this project to avoid.  Incorrect aspect ratio, wrong file format, etc. ;)  But they show the effort. I  left the Deluxe Paint panels up just for fun, and to show that these are in fact the ones that I made, and not the source Warhol material.  If you want the proper files, they're downloadable at the bottom of this file.

"campbells.pic" (As seen in Deluxe Paint III)
Original by Andy Warhol, Replica by Scott Lawrence

"Campbells" took full advantage of the foray into GraphiCraft, as I used the palette generated from the saved out Graphicraft 1.2 image, but then tweaked by hand to accurately match the pre-release palette that Andy would have had available to him.  I feel like this is a great representative pice of his work on the Amiga, as well as for this project itself.
"venus" (As seen in Deluxe Paint III)
Original by Andy Warhol, Replica by Scott Lawrence

I had originally thought that "venus" was going to be pretty simple. It was mostly the "venus.iff" file that is included with every copy of Deluxe Paint.  (Here's a link to the original as seen in Deluxe Paint IV.) Well, there's those two orange dots on the left, the scribble on one eye, and the third eye... so it should be easy.  Right?  Nope.  

  1. The source material that I had was a JPEG, with its entire color palette completely wonky.  Browns looked violet... whites looked yellow... that kind of thing
  2. This means that I had to spend time not just picking the right color, but also cross-referencing the pixel in the jpeg with another of the same wrong color, but unchanged by andy... then find THAT color in my DPaint version, and use that color.  
  3. The forehead.  I don't know how... I don't know why, but Andy replaced MOST of the forehead with the version that's there... He probably just grabbed a brush and pasted it down a lot. There's some evidence of this being the case along the left side. Perhaps I'll analyze it more for another blog post in the future.  I ended up having to wipe out the entire forehead and re-do it entirely.
I do feel it necessary to note that many of the pixels in this are "close".. not specifically the exact correct shade of the colors.  There are a lot of orange/browns that are VERY similar and with the process of cross-referencing mentioned above, I know that I made a few mistakes here and there on this one.

I had felt a bit uneasy looking at this one for a while, but couldn't place exactly why... but it turned out that the forehead's replacement was a huge subconscious "something's not right here" flag in my head that I couldn't quite place. 
"flower" (As seen in Deluxe Paint III)
Original by Andy Warhol, Replica by Scott Lawrence

This one looked like it was going to be fairly straightforward to make... and it in fact was!  There were a lot of stepped lines, and the source material was scaled up and fuzzy, but I was able to work around this.  I remembered that DPaint has a tool "Coords" (press | to enable) which shows where your cursor is in X and Y, and also length of lines you're drawing.  This took was invaluable for doing this replica.

Notes...

Yes, I did notice that "Flower" and "Campbells" are missing the red rectangles in the upper right of the imagery on the provided ZIP and ADF files below..  Those are the screen raise/lower tools from AmigaDOS shining through.  Much like the "GraphiCraft" drag bar being visible, those should also have been visible. That's my mistake. The next version I cut of the slideshow will have that fixed.

Oops!

Links!

Here's a list of links of products and stuff that may be interesting:
Everything provided here is to be considered to be Creative-Commons BY-NC-SA. (Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-Alike). 

And previous blog posts about the topic:
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