- 90s Cyberpunk Grit: Neon-drenched, post-industrial cityscapes filled with grime, cables, CRT glow, and malfunctioning tech. Think Tetsuo: The Iron Man meets early hacker zines.
- Digital Decay: Images should show digital systems breaking down—glitches, corrupted renders, dead pixels, low-resolution fragments. Files that look like they’ve been opened too many times.
- Analog Chaos: Embrace the texture of the physical world decaying alongside the digital—scratched VHS, warped cassette tape, sticker residue on old gear, Polaroids left in the sun.
- Vibrant Rebellion: Keep it chaotic and alive—zine energy, DIY spirit, illegal warehouse shows, rebel networks, aesthetic resistance.
- Post-Human Intimacy: Focus not on epic battles but on subtle residues of life in a decayed future—personal spaces, strange artifacts, glitch ghosts.
- Primary Colors: Neon pink, electric blue, lime green
- Support Colors: Gritty black, faded greys, burnt white, and metallic silver
- Usage: These should be raw, dirty, inconsistent. Let colors bleed, glitch, and bloom. Use chromatic aberration, CRT scanlines, and ghosting for digital color interference.
- Pixelated overlays – mimicking early digital graphics, compression artifacts, blocky low-res bitmaps
- Glitch effects – datamoshing, corrupted JPEGs, shader warps, misaligned 3D renders
- Slime-like substances – textures that look wet, organic, synthetic, or viscous—like pink mucus in a heat sink
- Noise & grain – both digital (compression static) and analog (film grain, dust, scratches)
- Decay – weathered plastic, oxidized metal, dead batteries, sticker residue, broken buttons
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Cameras:
- Sony Mavica MVC-FD88 – early digital, low-res, floppy disk storage
- Canon AE-1 + expired Kodak Gold 200 film – analog nostalgia, muted tones, grain
- Fujifilm FinePix 1300 – classic 1.3MP early 2000s look, soft focus
- Polaroid Spectra – distorted instant photos with blown highlights and milky colors
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Lenses:
- Vintage 50mm f/1.4 lenses for soft vignettes and shallow depth
- Wide-angle 28mm for compressed, intimate compositions
- Cheap CCTV lenses adapted to mirrorless for strange aberrations
- VHS emulators (e.g. Scanlines, VCR OSD Mono)
- Datamoshing with AviDemux or FFmpeg
- JPEG artifact layering
- Color shifting using gradient maps and color channel misalignment
- CRT simulation: rolling scanlines, bloom glow, phosphor ghosting
- Early Photoshop FX (lens flare, emboss, noise, threshold)
- Rendered in primitive 3D, often with simple geometric forms, checkerboard floors, and chrome spheres
- Textures are stretched, aliased, and unrealistic—often featuring garish color palettes
- Motion is slow and smooth, almost eerie; scenes feel empty but loaded with potential
- Inspiration: Virtuality arcade machines, CyberTown, The Lawnmower Man
- Hyper-technical visuals with a focus on real-time animation, sync to music
- Often showcases spinning wireframes, starfields, particle effects, and scrolling text
- Limited palettes, creative use of compression, ultra-optimized style
- Emphasizes skill, control, and aesthetic within constraint—feels underground, outsider, digital punk
- Think intros to cracked software, scene groups with names like Razor1911 and Future Crew
The tone of SPLASTEEN visuals should evoke resonance through residue—not spectacle. It’s not about showing the future but sifting through what’s left of it. Every image should feel like a trace, an afterimage burned into a dying screen. The mood is not horror, but something softer, more human, and broken. It’s grief dressed in pixel noise. It’s beauty found in corrosion.
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Melancholy There’s a sadness threaded through everything. Not explicit—no crying figures or tragic poses—but ambient. Empty chairs. Forgotten devices. Disconnected patch cables. The sense that someone was just there and isn’t anymore.
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Disorientation Visuals should induce low-level confusion. Slight camera tilt, misplaced horizon lines, layering that feels like memory error. We’re not lost in a labyrinth—we’re in a room that used to mean something, but we can’t remember why.
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Intimacy Images should feel personal. Spaces are cramped, corners are cluttered. Objects are close to the lens. You feel like you're inside someone’s secret world—an artist’s desk, a hacker’s bed, a broken synth patched into life support.
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Noise as Emotion Static isn’t just a texture—it’s a mood. It conveys distance, interference, decay. Let noise interrupt clarity. Let it become the subject itself. What the noise covers is less important than the fact that it’s there.
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Sincerity, not irony Though we’re immersed in retro tech and low-res artifacts, this isn’t parody. It’s earnest. It remembers a time when these images mattered—when they were someone’s idea of freedom, escape, or control. That sincerity gives the work weight.
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Low-Key Surrealism A single element out of place—pink teeth growing from a speaker grill, a CRT monitor filled with fog—can twist the familiar into the uncanny. Not grotesque, not sci-fi, just wrong enough to stick in your brain. Subtle glitches in the real.
- A bootleg VHS of a dream you barely remember
- The warmth of dying tech in a cold basement
- A lost zine found in a water-damaged locker
- A signal that still plays even though the tower fell
- The soft hum of a patch cable that goes nowhere
- A JPEG that’s been emailed too many times