The neighborhood sleeps soundly tonight. A New King has risen.
Hard to believe Nine Inch Nails' classic The Downward Spiral is 30 years old today! Here is some detail photography I took of the original album cover painting by Russell Mills for the 10th anniversary deluxe edition release, which I had the unique honor of designing, and somehow that is now 20 year old.
Everyone has that one album that hit at just the right moment of adolescence to change their perspective on music and get them through their teenage angst. The Downward Spiral was that album for me, released as it was in 1994, when I was a freshman in high school (and an absolute banner year for music/films/games all around). I must have stared at the artwork for hours over those years, without even much detail to draw from on its tiny 5” CD slip case. So five years later, when I found myself inexplicably working for Nine Inch Nails, it was surreal to see the actual original painting in the flesh, hanging as it was at the time in Trent Reznor’s office at Nothing Studios, New Orleans.
I was struck by how much dimension and texture there was in the artwork that never translated on that tiny slipcase printing, how much detail was happening in the physical materials of the art: Flies, moths, wires, blood… I had been staring at this “painting” for so long, yet suddenly it was like I had never seen it before. I also noticed that it had aged - the wires had wilted over the years, drooping down from their original position as captured in the original album cover (interestingly, judging by the photo posted today by NIN, the piece has since been restored); a tooth was missing from the other main piece.
That experience stuck with me and it was the first thing I thought about when the task of re-imagining the album package fell upon me in 2004. I wanted to re-photograph the artwork, subtly updating the cover to show that ten years had changed it physically, much like our perceptions of art and music and memories change over time with perspective. I also wanted to dig into the previously unseen details of the work and explore it with my macro lens, so that fans like me, old and new, could have new layers of texture to pore over for hours while listening to a legendary album.
Happy birthday, old friend.
Early works with mpeg compression corruption, 20 years ago, during my 2003/2004 journey of experimentation with new forms of visual decay in the digital age that would lead me to the Nine Inch Nails With Teeth aesthetic. Some of this stuff made its way into parts of the large body of With Teeth artwork, but some of it is liminal inspirations in accidents, spawning ideas and techniques that I still carry with me today in my works across all mediums.
You can read more about my digital glitch art processes for With Teeth, and download a full tutorial, on my Patreon.
recombinance (2004). Early works with DV data corruption, 20 years ago. As I mentioned in a recent post about NIN’s 2002 And All That Could Have Been DVD, I became during the creation of that film fascinated with the aesthetics of Y2K-era consumer digital video. I was drawn to the uniquely chunky corruption blocks that occurred on lightly-damaged DV tapes, how they were sparse and sometimes gentle in nature.
I filmed some soft gradients, some out-of-focus landscapes and other smooth organic surfaces, and then damaged the tapes (wrinkling the tape, applying magnets/heat, just enough to disrupt the data but still let the tape pass through), seeking the right balance where the harsh digital corruption disrupted and contradicted the soft backdrop while also at times trying to become part of it.
It’s how things felt in the post-millennium migration to all-things-digital, like our old organic analog world was fading out of focus as more of it became rapidly mass-digitized, encoded, and compressed down into tiny efficient grids that more or less replicated what we were at the expense of all the complicated gradients of humanity in between.
Harsh DV data glitches and video interlacing against soft organic textures would form much of the inspiration and methodology of my NIN With Teeth album art in the latter part of 2004 and early 2005.
You can read more about my digital glitch art processes for With Teeth, and download a full tutorial, on my Patreon.
robsheridan reblogged
Getting psyched for the Big Game with my favorite sports movie, 1981’s CANNIBAL QUARTERBACK. A schlocky low-budget grindhouse splatterfest, the film is impossible to track down but cherished by aficionados of tasteless cinema. Although it contains no sex scenes, it received an X rating for “senseless, prolonged nudity and graphic violence” thanks largely to its notorious “cheerleader blood orgy” scene, which at 27 grueling minutes accounts for nearly a third of the entire film.
In CANNIBAL QUARTERBACK, radioactive waste from a secretive government facility leaks into the farm of cattle destined for leather, and a football made from the mutated cows finds its way to the local college football team. At first the mysterious football seems to give the players power and stamina on the field. But what follows is anger, violent rage, and an intense hunger for raw bloody meat. When gobbling beef before each game is no longer enough, the gruesome killings begin; students begin disappearing, and mangled bodies turn up around the stadium, the flesh chewed off them.
Consuming human flesh begins to change the players, mutating them one by one into savage creatures who yearn only for blood. Their coach, greedy for the wins his newly supercharged players are bringing, tries to conceal the dark secret of the team and even helps lure unsuspecting students into the locker room to become pre-game snacks. The big game against their rival team proceeds as planned despite the growing body count, and all hell breaks loose on the field. The rage and bloodlust of the now monstrous players can no longer be contained, nor can the sickness afflicting them, which spreads rapidly to the other team — and the cheerleaders.
A fight between the rival cheer squads quickly descends into a cannibalistic orgy of gore. In a trance-like state, drunk on an abundance of nubile flesh, the possessed women tear each other apart and writhe in their blood and guts, consuming their bodies layer by layer until the locker room is a formless heap of meat and bone.
Meanwhile, the violence on the field has continued, the teams of deranged mutants engaged in a twisted "game," savagely competing to devour each other all through the night until only the strongest cannibal remains.
The film’s final scene sees the sun rising on a field of grotesque death, with only a few mindless cannibal monsters still alive, wandering around seeking new blood. But a bizarre post-credits scene returns to the radioactive farmlands of the opening shot, where humanoid mutant cows are seen emerging ominously from the glowing green ooze that created them. A planned sequel of mutant cow creatures seeking revenge on the humans for slaughtering their kind was supposedly filmed but never completed.
Auteur underground horror director Ron Sharletan, fresh off the success of 1977’s DRIVE-THRU OF DEATH, described CANNIBAL QUARTERBACK as “a commentary on the corruption of school sports and the toxic American obsession with zero-sum victory at all costs.” Upon receiving an X rating from the MPAA for the film’s “excessive graphic violence and nudity,” Sharletan refused to edit the film despite the rating meaning near-certain commercial failure for the film. “Art is not defined by censors,” Sharletan said in a statement, “and my vision will not be sacrificed on the altar of mass market puritanism.” Thus, the film had an almost non-existent theatrical release, and only found its niche audience years later on VHS.
Critical reviews were unkind, with many reviewers walking out of press screenings during the film’s notoriously graphic 27-minute “cheerleader blood orgy.” Gene Siskel wrote: “I’m envious of my colleagues who made the wise decision to abandon this cinematic atrocity, because having enduring the full length of the film, I can assure you dear reader that there is no merit to be found on the other side.”
Peter Travers called the film “regressive, exploitative trash” and Sports Illustrated’s review said “such excessive violence and sexism make a mockery of the beautiful game of football.”
Little is known about why the planned sequel fell apart before completion, but one crew member described it as “a drug-addled trainwreck” and “the worst filming experience of my life.” The never-seen footage from the sequel has become a “holy grail” for underground cinema aficionados.
Official CANNIBAL QUARTERBACK t-shirts now available at Glitch Goods!
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NOTE: This film does not actually exist outside of my imagination. This alternate history horror story is part of my NightmAIres series exploring media and events that never existed, conceived by me and visualized with synthography. Some other entries in this series include Cyborg Slaves of Satan, The Macy's Thanksgiving Day "Blood Parade", World Without Christmas, Rankin/Bass' 1967 Krampus TV Special, Children of Irradiated Skies, Jodorowsky's Frasier, David Lynch's Perfect Strangers.
Goodnight, and remember: N̴O̴ ̶S̴C̷R̷E̴E̵N̵ T̶I̴M̵E̵ ̷B̶E̶F̸O̴R̴E̶ ̸B̸E̴D̷. . . . . . . . . . .
Here’s a look at the new reach print up close. Really glad I revisited this one, it’s great to bring out all the analog/organic/digital texture at larger size. First batch is heading out now, thanks to everyone who’s picked one up!
Signed/numbered limited edition of 25 prints, made in my home studio and shipped worldwide direct from me - available now.
See the original art post here.
robsheridan reblogged
Some concept art and web imagery I created for Nine Inch Nails in 2003/2004 based around the NIN album concept for “Bleedthrough.” The album eventually changed conceptually and became “With Teeth,” and so the artwork changed as well. But I still have a fondness for this material, much of which was created by dragging paper through a broken but resilient old printer.
Just realized it's been 20 years since the Bleedthrough era. These concepts and approaches informed the scanner glitch art I would begin experimenting with in 2004 that would become the NIN With Teeth artwork.
These old screenshots, this visual aesthetic, and this early-2000s way of thinking about websites as vibes-over-function interactive contemporary art projects, all still live rent-free in my head. Some day I’ll find the right reason to revisit this style.
Nine Inch Nails' And All That Could Have Been DVD, released on this day in 2002. I found a folder of raw screengrabs from 2001, during the editing process, where some of the footage was still interlaced from the consumer DV cameras I filmed on in 2000. Here are some enlarged details, which have a phenomenal early-digital texture to them now, and it’s remarkable to see the resolution we were working with to put that film together (these were direct TIFF frame outputs from FCP - all the compression you see in here is from the camera!)
I always loved the way interlaced frames digitally ripped an image apart, and it inspired me in the creation of the “With Teeth” visual aesthetic a couple years later. In 2004, as the prosumer digital video world was continuing the clunky transition away from interlacing, I discovered the first version of Apple’s Motion software did not know what to do with interlaced footage, and would in fact render the interlacing as part of the video when you zoomed into it. That happy glitch accident formed the aesthetic foundation of the video for “The Hand That Feeds.”
We Never Shed the Bones of the Beasts We Slay Within.
Collages created from new methods of generative glitching.
Reach (photography, digital glitching). That exact midpoint in between failure and perseverance where you’re either going to sink or you’re going to push through. Sort of how January has felt for me.
New vertical edition print available now; signed/numbered, 25 copies total.
This piece is not a Photoshop composition or AI, it was shot entirely in-camera (aside from the glitching, of course) on an early overcast morning on the California coast some time ago during our wandering years, when Steph braved the frigid ocean once again in the name of art (that's her arm).
The Great Collapse (photography/synthography, 2007-2023).
A transformation of old memories, experimental synthographic destruction and recomposition of old film photographs from the desert and old abstract photographs, reinterpreting them to capture a feeling rather than a setting:
Seeing other versions of reality flicker in the light; a fleeting quantum mirage; a double-exposure photograph of a memory happening before your eyes, just as the sun is setting and the car is moving fast enough that you look back and it's gone, and you wonder if it was a trick of light or if you maybe glimpsed through to something else, somewhere else, briefly, before it collapsed.
What We Saw Beyond The Sea.
Some recent journeys across dreams.
Previously: Silent Screams on the Shores of Time
More to come.
Screams of Silence on the Shores of Time.
Some new explorations with MidJourney V6 into an aesthetic space I've been building on for a while... I like it here. More to come.
BATTLE SANTAS trading cards were all the rage of Christmas 1988, hyping kids up for a toy line and film franchise that never came to be after Christian protesters halted production.
The cards, produced before the first film was finished, tell the story of a multiverse of cosmic Santas who arrive from across time on an array of Battle Sleighs to help Earth’s Santa save Christmas future from the forces of Hell. On Santa’s lunar battlestation workshop (where he relocated after the North Pole was ravaged in The Santa Wars), his elves built armed vehicles from old toy parts and the re-animated corpses of reindemons, the hellbeasts of the demon army unleashed on Earth after a portal to hell was opened in the North Pole when oil companies drilled near Santa's Earth Workshop (thanks to Reagan’s deregulation of protected lands).
The early release of the trading cards was meant to generate buzz for the film’s funding and toy licensing, but the plan backfired, as the cards revealed a controversial plot point: Mecha-Jesus, the Cybersavior, a towering robotic kaiju Jesus built by the Battle Santas as their last stand against Satan. Mecha-Jesus is piloted by the real Jesus, who the Battle Santas summon back to mortal form. When Christian groups heard about children trading cards that depicted Jesus eviscerating enemies with Nazareth Napalm missiles and shooting Light of the Lord laser beams from his robo-eyes while shouting “The Power of Christ compels you to DIE!” over heavy metal music, a firestorm of protests made the entire BATTLE SANTAS property toxic to investors, leaving the trading cards the only glimpse of a Christmas epic that never came to be.
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NOTE: This alternate reality story is part of my NightmAIres narrative art series (visit that link for a lot more). NightmAIres are windows into other worlds and interconnected alternate histories, conceived/written by me and visualized with synthography and Photoshop.
If you enjoy my work, consider subscribing to my free newsletter to stay up to date on my projects, or supporting me on Patreon for frequent exclusive hi-res wallpaper packs, behind-the-scenes features, downloads, events, contests, and an awesome fan community. Direct fan support is what keeps me going as an independent creator, and it means the world to me.
Who wants a t-shirt?? You can have all of our very good t-shirts for just $15 until Tuesday! I created this short film which should explain everything. It’s a hauntingly intimate cinematic meditation on t-shirts, who wants them, who can have them, and who cannot.
Here are some close-up looks at the new edition of analog(oblivion) 000 as I get these ready to start shipping this week from my home print shop! Despite how it sometimes appears, these are all photos of the actual paper; every pixel of the CRT from the original captures is preserved in crisp detail:
This second edition print is actually an entirely different piece from the sold-out first edition: Whereas the first one was the art used on How to Destroy Angels' Welcome Oblivion CD cover, this is the variant seen on the vinyl cover. Variations were important to the overall presentation of this art: The figure shifting in and out of phase, altering your perception of its presence depending on where you saw it, gave an unsettling feeling that its presence was liminal, bringing to printed stills the constant turbulent motion of its analog VHS/CRT glitch origins.
If you had the original download version of the album, you’ll remember how the embedded artwork changed from track to track until the figure eventually dissolved into, well, oblivion. So I wanted to take a unique approach to these prints that reflected the intention of all these variations.
If you’re wanting prints or video prints or holiday cards from me before Christmas, please get those in TODAY! Attach a note to your order if you want a custom holiday greeting on the included sticker.
All of my limited edition prints are personally signed/numbered fine art giclée prints on archival matte paper, printed by me to personally ensure the finest museum quality on 308gsm German fine art paper at ultra high 1440dpi print resolution, and packed/shipped worldwide with care by my wife Steph from our home studio in Tacoma, WA. Every print comes with a signed certificate of authenticity and an exclusive sticker.