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Synthwave Outrun Visual Art and Design. August 29th, 2017. Synthwave – the future of the past is here. I’m a huge fan of retrowave, synthwave, Outrun, vaporwave, and the whole retro 80’s nostalgia in design and music. These prints are my contribution.
Computer animation of the First Man, or Boeing Man, 1964This use of the grid as the basis for town planning continued to be employed across the U.S. Until the end of the 1960s, by which time the computer was beginning to play an increasingly important role in the economy and the popular imagination—through film, advertising, and graphic design. The computers of the 1960s and 1970s used what were called vector graphics to economize on the processing load the video displays required.
These were images whose lines were drawn directly onto the screen—like those of an air traffic control panel or oscilloscope—as opposed to being simulated by coloring in pixels as in the images that would predominate in the ’80s. The distinctive imagery that resulted—glowing geometric lines against a dark background—persisted in popular culture even after being supplanted by the raster model.The 3D models created using vector graphics became known as “wireframe” images, and the first wireframe model of a human being was realized in 1964 by American graphic designer William Fetter, the man credited with coining the term “computer graphics,” in Fetter’s short animated film First Man, produced while he was working for Boeing. In 1972, Edwin Catmull and Fred Parke produced a short film called A Computer Animated Hand, excerpts from which were used in the 1976 sci-fi film. Barrier, 1979Dean Edward Mitzner, Looker’s production designer, also handled production design on Tron, for which Triple-I and RA&A provided computer graphics. In Tron, the “game grid” makes up the world itself—a digital universe within computer company ENCOM’s mainframe into which protagonist Flynn (Jeff Bridges) is exiled (after being digitized by a laser) by the autocratic Master Control Program (MCP). Perhaps the film’s most memorable set piece involves the protagonists racing “light cycles”—vehicles leaving a solid wall of light behind them, designed by futurist visionary Syd Mead—across a glowing grid arena. Along with Mead and comic artist Jean Moebius Giraud, Tron‘s conceptual design team included Peter Lloyd, a British artist whose previous work included the glowing, Art Deco-ish lines of the gatefold cover of Rod Stewart’s 1975 LP.Over the same period, the entertainment sector was beginning to realize just how lucrative vector graphics could be in the development of video games.
![How to make retrowave art How to make retrowave art](/uploads/1/2/4/2/124223620/853613598.jpg)
A company called Cinematronic and its offshoot, Vectorbeam (founded by Larry Rosenthal, the MIT student who had designed the arcade version of), produced several influential games. Taking inspiration from Star Wars, players of 1979’s flew along a trench that rolled towards the viewer in endless wireframe perspective, attempting to fight off TIE-fighter- and A-wing-like enemies as they went, while players of the same year’s maneuvered a small triangle around a 3D perspective grid that disappeared into the cowl of the ominous hooded figure adorning the game’s cabinet.One of the games principally responsible for imprinting the neon grid on the mind’s eye doesn’t actually feature one. Atari’s Battlezone (1980) was a first-person arcade game that used green vector graphics on a black background to create the impression of a vast 3D environment with a mountainous horizon. This space—inhabited only by the tanks of the player and the enemy, along with various transparent polygons and a waxing crescent moon—was both alienating and compelling, and the “periscope” through which players viewed the battlefield added to the game’s immersive power, placing them in an alternative world that was at once new and familiar. The same year Battlezone was released, the U.S. Army Atari to produce a version that could be used to train gunners for the then-new Bradley Fighting Vehicle.
Many Atari staff, like, were restive at the idea of their work being used for the military, and only two prototypes were produced, one of which turned up years later in a dumpster. Other popular vector graphics games followed, including Atari’s Tempest (1981) and the official arcade adaptation of Star Wars (1983), which featured a sequence set on the surface of the Death Star and another set inside the space station’s trench, again rendered in glowing vector wireframe. (The controller used for the Star Wars arcade game was adapted from the one originally developed for the Bradley Fighting Vehicle trainer).
Future Life, September, 1980Omni, August, 1983Time, June, 1986Despite what retrospectively looks like ubiquity—particularly in those milieus linked to the then-burgeoning demographic of home computer users, science fiction readers, popular science buffs, and technophiles—a cursory review of the magazine and book covers of the ‘80s reveals that the grid was less pervasive than imagined. The renaissance it has experienced in recent years as an ironic avatar exploits a revisionist vision of the decade made explicit in initiatives like, which, at best, takes up the ontological investigation of perception and memory present in the and movements. At worst, these movements cherry-pick the ‘80s collision of futurism and camp to create a world of faded primary colors, John Carpenter-esque synth, and alluring vector landscapes without engaging with the messy political, social, and aesthetic realities of the time they attempt to evoke.
As we have seen, though, the grid was in many ways already a “retro” proposition by the time it began to impose itself, raster graphics having already won the war as far as popular computing went. So why, to paraphrase Tron’s Master Control Program,?The soothing reassurances of nostalgia and recognition are obviously part of the attraction, but there is something more. With its sense of an imaginary place that is at once empty plain and cityscape—both quiet and humming with possibility—the grid evokes the vast, uncontaminated spaces of the mind experienced in video games like Battlezone and suggested by nocturnal aerial views of that most photographed of cities, Los Angeles, a place internalized in our collective fantasies by decades of films, photographs, and music videos. The grid is also the feeling of power and control that comes with seeing the world through the heads-up display of a targeting computer, liberated of the confusing detritus with which it is normally strewn. The grid is the Classical piazza pared down to its essentials, freed of context and at once ancient and futuristic, a fillable mass of space and direction across which we can omnipotently swoop. The grid is a dream dimension that exists outside of time and yet which, for a small moment in the latter half of the 20th century, seemed eminently realizable.Richard McKenna grew up in the visionary utopia of 1970s South Yorkshire and now ekes out a living among the crumbling ruins of Rome, from whence he dreams of being rescued by the Terran Trade Authority.
Excellent article! This has to be THE definitive piece on the topic. Several years ago I started discussing grids as a design element with my design history class, and I did my best to piece together the artistic lineage. Oh, how I wish this article existed then! It would have saved me a ton of time, plus this fleshes it out way beyond what I came up with. Looker and Barrier are great examples I’d never seen.I include the vector grid on a list of things that showed up in the ’70s, but are now forever associated with the ’80s.
(along with PCs, video games, home video, the Walkman, New Wave, etc.) The 70s is all too often written off as a tacky void when it comes to design, but really it was like an incubation period. The economy just wasn’t ready for all the cool stuff yet.
Upon reading this article, my mind leapt immediately to the Holodeck, appearing in Star Trek: The Next Generation and subsequent Trek series. By your chronology it may be late to the party– 1987– but surely the Holodeck is a member of the family you have portrayed.For the Starfleet crew member in search of recreation, the Holodeck promises limitlessly malleable landscapes of illusion. But when its “off” switch is flipped, one is standing in a black room whose only feature is a bright yellow grid covering the floor, walls, and ceiling. It was a simple way for the production designers to indicate that the room is a tabula rasa, awaiting the whim of a programmer to become anything, anything at all.
![80s grid illustrator 80s grid illustrator](http://hdqwalls.com/wallpapers/retrowave-tron-grid-9k.jpg)
Thank you for this very informative article! I’m for reasons I simply cannot explain, simply obsessed with 80’s retrowave for the last few months, making my own 80’s DJ mixes and learned how to use Gimp to create my own 80’s retro/vapourwave grid artwork as album covers for each mix.It really is memories of a future that could have been, In the 80’s the future was simply just over the horizon, around the corner, an inevitability we were going to encounter really soon. A future in which technology would save us and make the world a utopian dream. Of course, I think why this is coming back that we are now living in the very future we dreamed and fantasized about, and it’s the dystopian world we got.
Corruption, hunger, disease, greed, ego, insecurity, poverty(spiritually/morally & materialistically) followed us and compounded in growth.I suppose the lesson to be learnt is not to depend on technology for humanity’s ascension to higher realms of spirituality, awareness, happiness and love and prosperity.
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That will work, but width of the vertical lines will not have perspective acting on them like in OP's picture. In order to do that, the brush width should be narrower at the top.Alternatively, you can make a simple square grid, group it together, and then Effect Distort & Transform Free Transform and pull the top corners into a trapezoidal shape.Another alternative would be to select the object and then Effect 3D Extrude & Bevel, making sure to decrease the thickness of the Beveled object to 0 so it doesn't have a thick base.