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an external view of ZX graphics I was asked to write a short article for JOINT about my views on ZX graphics, possibly because to my knowledge I'm the only French graphician drawing ZX pictures in 2004. Spectrum graphics are something relatively new to me, as two or three years ago I had hardly came accross any. The reason being the Spectrum as a game machine hasn't had a huge success in western Europe in the eighties, except in the United Kingdom and to a lesser extent Spain, Portugal and Greece. The Commodore 64 was the most popular machine by far elsewhere. Quite logically, the popular platforms of yesterday are the popular oldschool demoscene plat- forms of today, and as Great Britain and southern Europe don't have a very active scene nowadays, the ZX Spectrum is hardly ever used for producing demos here. Actually I can't even remem- ber seeing any Spectrum demo released at a major demoparty in western Europe, except "Losing Victoria" by Hooy-Program at Assembly 2002. As a matter of fact, the whole Spectrum demoscene remains quite a terra incognita for us western Europeans. That's probably from our point of view the most exotic scene existing today, especially as newer demos tend to run on hardware that has never been available in the European Union - I'm thinking about the Pentagon and Scorpion ranges of computers for instan- ce. It's quite interesting to realise that wherever in Europe, even though the continent was divided for half a century, the same phenomenon emerged: people evolved from cracking games to forming teams to work on demonstrations of what they and their computer could achieve. If you consider that unusual hobby hardly exists elsewhere, then that's perhaps a modest proof we Europeans all live in the same cultural area and share some similar values. Let's go back to ZX graphics. The biggest advantage of graphics is that they are easily viewable in a decent way, even if one doesn't own the machine they were created on. There can be slight ratio differences and the fact that a VGA monitor is always sharper than a RGB one or a TV, but that's no big deal. No emulation needed! For me, even if I came accross a couple of ZX graphics before, the real beginning of my interest in that part of the scene was an article published on GFX Zone (www.gfxzone.org) about 2 years ago, written by Paracels and NdK/GFX Zone. It explained the basics about the video mode, listed the major paint programs available and included some very good pictures as examples of what could be achieved with a bit of talent and sweat. Being something really new to me, that was enough to arouse my curiosity and I started grabbing many ZX-made pictures on the internet, for instance on ZpiXels, which has sadely become very quiet lately. I became increasingly impressed by the images I got. Who would have thought it was possible to create elaborate pictures using only 2 colours on each 8*8 block and colours so bright they are usually discarded immediately when working on another platform (being the infamous "coders' colours")? Because of the heavy constraints that ZX graphics bear, they appear to me as an intricate mixture of art and technical limits, to the point that the video mode influences the way of designing and implementing a picture. Some artists will be shocked to see their creativity limited by a computer, but some other may realize that another side of creativity is to actually play with constraints and find ways to include them in your creative process. Andre Franquin, a famous Belgian comics artist once said "L'Art nait des contraintes" or loosely translated, "Art springs from constraints". Even if he most probably never heard of Spectrum graphics, his sentence seems to fit ZX pixelling perfectly. I do consider some of the pictures by Rion, Pheel, Diver or Paracels (to name a few), as real pieces of Art, even if most people will never get it because they can't see the point of drawing pictures with so many limitations when you could do it more easily on modern hardware. Seeing how the average level of ZX pictures released at demoparties has been increasing those last years, hopefully the ZX demoscene as a whole won't vanish soon but instead continue to rise to unprecedented levels to amaze us. Keep up the good work, we love what you do! Exocet - exocet@atari.org |