Abstraction vs. Realism

(photos coming soon)

<img src=“_photos/abstractrealism.jpg” alt=“Abstract vs Realism” style=“width: 60%;“>

I’ve been thinking a lot about the abstraction versus realism scale. After reading about it in Scott McCLoud’s book Understanding Comics, I see the concept everywhere now, not only in art.

Realism mediums

• Photographs
• Commercial Film
• Naturalistic Sculpture
• Memoirs
• Music with acoustic instruments as they sound in real life
• Maps
• Anatomical Drawings

Abstract mediums

• Comics
• Cartoons
• Poetry
• Free Jazz
• Emojis
• Infographics
• Logos

Realism aims to represent and mimic the real world. Abstract things try to distill, reframe, or symbolize the world.

Realism gives you all the information and detail up front. Abstract things rely on the viewer to fill in the details with their own mind.



Realism vs. Abstract

Realism is loaded with pre-set meaning. When something is realistic, the information is presented directly, leaving little room for imagination. You are saying: This is what it is. This is how you should interpret it. This is what it means.

Abstraction opens space for interpretation. When something is abstracted, the viewer is invited to project their own imagination, ideas, and worldview onto the piece. You are saying: Here is the space to enter. What do you see inside it?

Abstraction: Use Cases

• Focus On The Message: When you just want to deliver a specific message or the “essence” of something and you don’t want the messenger to get in the way / it is not important who the messenger is, it can be helpful to make the messenger abstract. You can remove other details to distract from your core concept.
• Invite Participation: When you want the viewer to actively project their own imagination, emotions, and worldview onto the work, abstraction creates an open space for interpretation.
• Amplify Emotions Beyond: Our inner world and emotions are often much richer and more complex than natural language can describe or realistic images can represent. Abstraction opens the world up to heightened expression — exaggeration, distortion, and symbolism can convey feelings beyond what realism can show.

Realism: Use Cases

• Focus On Accuracy: When you want to show something exactly as it is, with all its details intact, realism is the most effective. Realism is grounded in clarity and leaves little room for ambiguity. The audience sees and understands the concept in the way you intend.
• Build Trust: When credibility matters like in journalism or documentary, realism conveys authority and truthfulness through real representation.
• Anchor in the Familiar: When your work explores new, challenging, or [outside-the-Overton-Window ideas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window), using realism can give the viewer something recognizable and more comfortable to hold onto, making the concept more accessible.

Weird Places For Abstract vs. Realism

Quiet & Mysterious Men: There was a guy I used to know who was reserved and did not say much in social settings. From what I heard (we did not go to the same college) he was immensely popular in college among women, despite his “nerdy-ish” appearance! His friends called it “Aaron Factor.” My theory is that since he did not say much, it opened his character up to interpretation. His silence gave people space to project their own ideas of who and what he was like. Is that crazy? Homie was just abstracted.

Kendrick Lamar vs. Young Thug: Kendrick Lamar says listen to what I’m saying, listen carefully to my lyrics and clever wordplay. Young Thug says it’s not important you understand what I’m saying—just feel.

Takeaways

It has been interesting to test and experiment with more abstract elements in video and film.

The Throne: In one unreleased project featuring a man on a toilet. We opted out of having narration to leave it more open to interpretation. I’m treating the concept of this piece as a kind of rorschach test or inkblot test… It is strange, what do you see in it? How do you feel walking away from it?

New Rap: [I recently posted a minute long rap video](https://www.instagram.com/p/DNbcGOZMUuT/). It is abstracted in many ways. The vocals are distorted and mumbled in a way that they are indecipherable. The subtitles are not accurate, in Japanese, and blurred out. It is more about the vibe and feeling than: What is this idiot trying to say?

Previous Dislike of Abstract Things

Some abstract works of fine art require knowledge of art history and general history (an awareness of what was happening when the work was made) in order to appreciate and understand the work.

I used to dislike abstract works because I did not approach it with an open mind, and I did not understand it. It’s easy to like realism art because it can be taken at face value, it’s all presented to you. You can turn your brain off and still enjoy it. Even worlds like Star Wars and the MCU, despite being fantastical, are still rooted in a kind of realism. They still occur in a world that we understand and live in.

I’ve been coming around to being able to appreciate more abstract art. I can still totally understand why abstract art can piss people off. But (1) if you approach it with an open mind, the world of possibility expands tremendously, (2) you will be able to appreciate and feel more stuff in the world, not only art. Also, a lot of art you already enjoy is abstract! Like cartoons and even words. Words are an abstraction, they are squiggles that are supposed to represent the real thing (I think).

Hiding Behind “Oh It’s Abstract”

One of art school’s biggest critiques is probably that student artists have not given the concept of a piece of work any thought, and when pressed about it, lean back on “oh it’s abstract.”

I’m thinking deciding whether to make something more abstract versus realist should depend on the concept and intention behind your piece, duh!

Getting Into Theater

I’ve been opening up to works of theater and plays. I had always thought I did not like theater because it was “too dramatic” or that its style did not resemble realism like in film. But it seems I’ve been looking at it the wrong way!

Dramatic monologues, lighting changes that don’t make “realism” sense, breaking the fourth wall, actors addressing the crowd directly, long pauses, abstract set design… these are all tools that theater has at its disposal… this is how theater gets its power.

Harold Pinter and “Menace In The Mundane”

I’ve been reading excerpts of the American playwright Harold Pinter. One of the narrative themes in his work is the idea of “menace in the mundane”. That is the intrusion of revelation of darkness, danger, or dread in the ordinary world.

I’m drawn to this theme because of that contrast and tension between the seemingly ordinary and unsettling.

This theme manifests in his plays in subtle ways. They are set in ordinary places like boring living rooms and domestic spaces. And characters jockey for power and dominance over each other through their dialogue.

Menace In The Mundane and Power Struggles in The Homecoming

Here is an excerpt from The Homecoming. Max and Ruth are meeting for the first time.

MAX: Do you like cigars?

RUTH: They’re all right.

MAX:  That’s what I like. A woman… with spirit.

(pause)

MAX: What have you got for an armful, eh?

RUTH: What?

MAX: Have you got a good pair of lungs?

RUTH: I’ve got lungs.

MAX: I bet you have.

(pause)

MAX: You married my son, did you? You know what I’m saying? My son. You understand what that means?

RUTH: We’ve been married six years.

Max shifts back and forth between polite small talk and invasive talk, charm and threat. It sounds weird and keeps both Ruth and the audience off balance.

Ruth’s minimal answers also assert a kind of quiet power and strength. She does not give in to his weird power games.

Menace In The Mundane in Obsessed (2009)

Strangely, I was watching the 2009 movie Obsessed with Idris Elba and Beyonce, where I also saw this kind of power struggle in dialogue. Lisa, a temp worker, is meeting her manager’s wife and child for the first time.

https://youtube.com/shorts/5pYLIvQ17c4?si=oHYSXOlY_lj-RoUf

Both Lisa and Sharon shift back and forth between compliment and backhanded comment, charm and threat.

My Takeaway

A big piece of advice in filmmaking and visual storytelling is “show, don’t tell”. We are encouraged to minimize dialogue and show more through body language or visual plot cues.

But it has been good to learn the power of very strong dialogue. There is so much story, emotion, and messaging that can be loaded into dialogue that doesn’t explicitly express it.

I will continue to dive into theater. There is so much to learn! If theater and film are seen as separate disciplines, there is an opportunity to bring the best elements of both into the other.

I love the idea of bringing heightened theater-like drama and elements into the medium of film. Dramatic lighting changes, monologues, and breaking the fourth wall break open the common language of film. It adds more tools to tell story or create vibes in unexpected and novel ways.

Redesigning My Portfolio

There’s this Virgil Abloh quote that pretty simply encapsulates the idea of how the environment a piece of work is in shapes that piece of work.

It reminds me of that time someone put a pair of glasses on the floor of a white box gallery and people began to think it was a piece of art work.

So I redesigned my portfolio on Cargo Site. Here it is. The intention was to have something simple and easy to maintain. I opted out of trying to build a site from scratch as I felt the friction of building and maintaining it would take away from the main goal of showing my work.

-–

Rediscovering Old Incomplete Work

In the process of recollecting my work all in one place, I rediscovered a ton of incomplete work I had done over the years. There are many reasons projects don’t get finished. Some are too ambitious, some hit big blocks, some just lose momentum. It was delightful, yes delightful, to see some of the stuff I had worked on in the past. It’s been so long since I’ve seen some of it that I find myself surprised and laughing alone at my desk at my own work.

Friction Protected The Camcorder Aesthetic

I’ve been looking into the “camcorder look”…

For a while now, there’s been a big resurgence of the vintage camcorder aesthetic: a particular type of crunchy and soft video resolution, slow but long zoom, landscape video orientation… etc.

There are a few ways to get this look:

• Asking your parents if they still have an old camcorder lying around
• Take regular modern day or iPhone footage and crunch it down artificially in post

MiniDV

There’s a format called MiniDV which is digital video recorded to physical cassettes. I believe it was the last physical tape format before everything moved to memory cards.

MiniDV is unique and separates itself from memory card camcorders, because:

• You get artifacts from dealing with physical tape
• Camera sensors were older + color science was not as good
• There’s some kind of video compression happening

Recording to MiniDV is a hassle. You are dealing with a physical tape, you cannot go back to select and delete clips you’ve already taken, and in order to digitize the tape onto a computer you need to play it back at its normal speed to transfer it. So if you took one hour of MiniDV video, you have to playback the tape for one hour to transfer it onto a computer.

Today, it’s even harder to use MiniDV as manufacturers don’t make those cables anymore. To transfer MiniDV onto my 2024 Macbook Pro, I’d have to chain together three generations of cables: Firewire 4-pin -> Firewire 9-pin, Firewire 9-pin -> Thunderbolt 2, Thunderbolt 2 -> Thunderbolt 4…

And these cables are rare now? Some of them run for $80 on eBay!

For now, and for me, it’s difficult to tell how much of a difference there is between true MiniDV 480p and just straight-to-SD card 480p. Video nerds and purists have an obvious opinion on this.

My theory

• The friction of MiniDV has created and protected its aesthetic. Because of how difficult it is to use the MiniDV format + how easy it is to use modern formats, almost all of the footage we see in MiniDV or “that camcorder look” actually comes from the early 2000s.
• The reason the “camcorder look” evokes such a strong nostalgia to that time is because we rarely see footage of any other time period in that format.
• Recording to memory sticks blasted MiniDV to obsolescence: the resolution was higher, you could playback and delete and overwrite seamlessly, you could transfer files super fast, it was way cheaper…etc.

My takeaway

• It remains to be seen how much of a visual difference there is between true MiniDV vs. super early SD-card camcorder vs. crunched down modern footage.
• If there is a noticeable or meaningful (visible to normal people not video nerds) difference, then people with the resources or the will to work through the friction of recording on true MiniDV will achieve a look that is rare and unique.
• The tech is cool to learn about
• At the end of the day, it’s only another visual aesthetic and look… and an uber trendy one that I think will pass… we should still think critically about what it communicates and how we can use that in our work… if it makes sense to use it and for what stories/pieces
• It’s also not that serious, it’s good fun anyway

Yesterday I saw seven Sundance shorts at the IFC Center. Before that I went to the MoMa twenty minutes before it closed. Some takeaways:

• First, I’m still very far but I feel closer than ever to being able to pull something off like what I saw!
• A few of the Sundance shorts could have been YouTube videos, except what seems to separate them is that they are shot very beautifully and have involved crews and equipment
• This is my only exposure to Shorts work at Sundance but it still seems pretty commercial-ish. Like standard narrative structure and digestible themes. I’m curious to learn what festivals host the weirder stuff.
• Not sure why I need to remind myself over and over again, but it’s so good to get out there and see work. If I’m not feeling particularly inspired or motivated to do work, then I should just go out and see other people’s work. Anything at all, even if it’s totally unrelated to what I’m working on now. That also includes just browsing and flipping through random books at the library. Being open to inspiration is an attitude and mindset. The material is all out there waiting for you to absorb and interpret it in a productive way (if that’s what you’re out to do).

Sundance Shorts:

https://www.ifccenter.com/films/2025-sundance-film-festival-shorts-tour/

I also picked up the book One Minute Plays. It’s been fun to read super, super short stories. They sometimes read like comics.

Yesterday, I held a rehearsal for Hayden’s Bars, a short film that is a 2010s on-the-street style interview turned modern rendition of Hamlet’s Soliloquy.

Markdown flop:
[Here is the latest script.](https://drive.google.com/file/d/10nsPILRR73FTo28bGWFbuadjnuSRHqtM/view?usp=sharing)

Looking back at some of the patterns in my work, this short contains many of the themes I’m interested in. Like:

• Sincerity and Irony: There is a blend of irony and sincerity. Hayden (Hamlet) and his boys alternate between being silly and serious.
• High vs. “Low” Culture: Blending very casual and slang-ridden(?) language with a historically significant piece of theater/literature.
• An Unexpected “Turn”: The film’s opening content + cinematography (camcorder look, front-facing light, run-and-gun style) gives the initial impression that it will be trashy but it turns into something sincere and vulnerable
• The Monologue: Hayden’s got shit to say!

Learning:

• Nobody sees the vision in your head: Everyone sees something different when they read your script (if they love you enough to read it). As a writer or director, you have to fill and close a huge gap. You need to be able to express what you see in your head. Whether that’s with language, acting out an example, or showing references, your job as a director is to help people see what you see. And then to support them in helping you create it.
• The Idea vs. Final Product: It’s difficult to see the potential of a project from a script.
• Professional actors are amazin’: I experienced one of those yuuuge ear-to-ear smiles during our first table read. The actors immediately came to life in their characters, standing up from their seats and fully immersing themselves into the scene. Chasing our dreams: For a fleeting moment, when I look around the room, all I see is a buncha kids chasing their dreams!!! Nobody forces you to go to art school. Nobody begs you to pursue the arts. We’re all here because we want to be. In fact, most have faced considerable opposition and skepticism when deciding to do sum’n creative. We’re here because we want to be. To me, that’s a powerful thing to declare!!!
• Directing is fun: In a traditional film/theater setting, everyone looks to the director for what they see. I think in many ways, they place a kind of trust in you. That you are the outside view, that you have a plan, that you see the bigger picture. They trust you are on the same team, there to help them play the character to the best of their ability.

I-frames & P-frames

Fleshing out my initial understanding of the basics of datamoshing…

Digital video files are compressed in order to save file space. Digital video is ultimately pixel-level color information (i.e. pixel #3 is RGB color 255,0,0 at frame #45). In a video, there are times when a pixel’s color remains static over a period of time (i.e. in a video of a bird flying across a solid blue sky, the blue sky does not change). To save space, we can skip saving data about pixels whose color does not change.

This (I think) is how it’s done: The initial frame of a new video is stored as an I-Frame. An I-Frame contains color information for every single pixel on the screen. Then, every subsequent frame of the same video is composed of P-frames. P-frames contain information only about what has changed since the previous frame. P-frames contain motion information.

I-Frames

• Exist independently
• Contains color information for every single pixel on the screen
• i.e.: [255,0,244,233,2,123,23,64]

P-Frames

• Rely on a previous/existing I-Frame
• Contains motion information for only the pixels that change
• i.e.: [Move block from (x1,y1) to (x2,y2); change color slightly in region X]

In a video, the frames would look like: [I-frame, p-frame, p-frame, p-frame, I-frame, p-frame, p-frame, p-frame]

In a video with two distinct scenes, with one cut in the middle, there would be two I-Frames. The first I-Frame occurs at the very first frame of the video. The second I-Frame occurs at the first frame after the cut. Since the second scene is different, we need a new I-Frame for the subsequent P-Frames to follow.

One form of datamoshing is performed when you remove that second I-Frame. What happens is the second set of P-frames alter the “incorrect” I-Frame. The effect you get is motion information being applied to the “wrong” pixels. The example below is unfortunately suggestive and may be offensive to some viewers.

Other forms of datamoshing involve manipulating the motion data directly. This is exciting for a newbie like me because it feels like manipulating down at the pixel-level opposed to pre-made transitions and effects (which I guess in a way also happen at the pixel-level(?) + I am using a pre-made After Effects plugin).

It will be a fun challenge to explore the narrative storytelling possibilities of datamoshing. For now, I feel much of its appeal is how interesting it is on a “technical” level. To an outside audience it just looks like video vomit. Initially, I feel it has applications for absurd comedy, satire, and parody… the effect or idea that the video medium itself is breaking down…

A list of work I want to check out. Parenthesis are my own notes and comments for reference.

• Two Viewing Rooms (1974) by Dan Graham
• Fire Writing (1975) by Mary Lucier
• Fluxus Sonata II (1962) by Nam June Paik
• Beatles Electroniques by Nam June Paik
• Zen for Film by Nam June Paik
• Magnet TV by Nam June Paik
• TV Cello Wearing TV Glasses by Nam June Paik
• TV Buddha by NJP
• Vertical Roll Joan Jonas
• Duchampiana: Nude Descending a Staircase by Shigeko Kubota
• Live-Taped Video Corridor (1970) by Nauman
• Shigeko Kubota
• Andy Warhol: Screen Test Jane Hozler
• Caricature by Tony Oursler
• Light Time Takes by Joan Jonas
• Sip My Ocean by Pippilotti Rist
• A Trip To The Moon by Georges Melies
• Kid Auto Races at Venice by Henry Lehrman
• Thaïs by Anton Giuzio Bragaglia
• Diagonal Symphony by Viking Eggeling
• Anemic Cinema by Marcel Duchamp
• Ballet Mecanique by Fernand Leger
• Un Chien Andalou by Luis Bunel and Salvador Dali
• 8 ½ by Federico Fellini
• Semiotics of the Kitchen by Martha Rosler
• Snows Carolee Schneemann
• Household by Allan Kaprow
• Representational Painting by Eleanor Antin
• Centers by Vito Acconci
• Bouncing in the Corner, No. 1 by Bruce Nauman
• Walking In An Exaggerated Manner Around THe Perimeter of a Square by Bruce Nauman
• Cube and Room Drawings by David Haxton
• Line Describing A Cone by Anthony McCall
• Light Music by Lis Rhodes
• The Hiroshima Project by Krzysztop Wodiczko
• The Tijuana Projection Krzysztop Wodiczko
• Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman by Dara Birnbaum
• Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer by Jack Goldstein
• Coscmococa 5 Hendrix-War by Helio Oiticica
• Video Ping-Pong Ernst Caramelle (White studio style)
• The Green LIne Jerusalem by Francis Alys
• To Raise The Water Level in a Fishpond by Zhang Huan (Interesting composition)
• Free, White and 21 by Howardena Pindell (Documentary)
• Art Herstory by Hermine Freed (Cool framing / masking effect)
• Tristan’s Ascension (The sound of a mountain under a waterfall) by Bill Viola
• Time Left by Michal Rovner (Project map in a dark room)
• DRK PARA by Petra Cortright
• Real Violence by Jordan Wolfson (VR beating the shit out of someone)
• Comma Boat by Ryan Trecartin
• Desiderata 1972 by Paul Pfeiffer
• Stealing Beauty by Guy Ben Ner
• Baltimore by Isaac Julien
• Installation at Zabludowicz Collection by Jon Rafman
• MiG 29 Soviet Fighter Plane by Cory Arcangel (Desktop computer art)
• Blind Eye by Jennifer Steinkamp (Full room projection)
• Grosse Fatigue by Camille Henrot (Desktop window art)
• Mercy Mercy by Pipilotti Rist (Full room projection)
• Legend (A Portrait of Bob Marley) by Candice Breitz

I am so excited about the future. There are so many things I want to try creating and making. I want to get into more performance, more experimental video work, I want to try my hand at making music…

Looking back even a year ago, nothing super huge has changed materially. Most of this excitement comes from a shifting mindset… to more openness to experiment, less self-set arbitrary rules about how or what work should or has to look like, more exposure to interesting work…

I watched a YT video recapping a short history of Video Art as a medium and as an art form. There’s so much exciting work I want to experience and learn from. Understanding the history of video art, the evolutions, the technical and cultural influences, the concepts, will all help me create more exciting and interesting work.

June 26, 2025

Going to start documenting what I learn or did throughout the day, very roughly.

Today I:

• Set up a Sony ZVE-10 camera to shoot Slog-3: Tested out adding a LUT in Premiere. I might be doing something wrong as it doesn’t look super sharp. It actually has a grainy, filmic look which I didn’t expect but looks kind of good!

• Intro to Datamoshing: Playing around with datamoshing, which is like corrupting/manipulating video compression to create really weird transitions. This is exciting to me as we are getting into manipulating video on the data and pixel level instead of slapping on pre-made transitions. This may be some foundational video art stuff?

• zaqstoner: Found zaqstoner on YouTube who’s got some really cool video art, filmmaking tips, sincere content which I am really enjoying

• Datamosh 2: Got the trial of the AE plugin Datamosh 2 which I am excited to play around with

• Inspiration & References: I find that when I see work that I find very cool and awesome (EXC3_CM3), I automatically start thinking about how I will differentiate my own work from that. But I think I should just appreciate it, absorb the best parts of it, and let it influence my own work—which it always ends up doing anyway.

• Narrative Storytelling & Performance: A big part of me is always drawn to narrative storytelling and performance. I see a lot of people at ITP and on Instagram create very original, creative, and cool visual effects… I think I’m not as interested in being creative in a technical, nitty-gritty sense… like understanding video compression deeply and then coming up with a whole new way to bend pixels… I am, however, very interested in using these new techniques and adding narrative storytelling and performance to it.

An on-going archive of the themes, concepts, and techniques I am interested in pursuing.

As of June 2025

Sincerity vs. Irony

Personal issues.

Absurdity

I want to learn more about absurdity as a device and its history. I want to understand better why I keep returning to it and what draws me to it.

Satire and Parody

It’s fun. I like that one needs to understand and be able to deconstruct something in order to parody it.

Vulnerability

I like the inner conflict and tension… The inability to express how one feels for fear of looking weak. I like this quote I saw on a meme one time: “We mistook vulnerability for weakness when really it’s the bravest thing we can do.”

The Monologue

I like how dramatic a monologue is… especially outside of a theatrical setting. The idea of someone not only feeling strongly about something, but that they had held it in until a breaking point… how unusual and dramatic it is for someone to speak alone for an extended “socially weird” amount of time…

High Brow vs. Low Brow Culture

Ties into absurdity… And maybe a way to signal to people: Hey, I used to read!

Internet Culture

Meme and meme history.

Video Art

After experiencing Halcyon.exe at Rhizome World, talking to my friend Noah, and watching some Joel Haver, my mind has been opened to the world of video art which has been in front of me this whole time. I never really considered before as a medium or format, but looking back, I have made work in the past which can be considered video art: The Poo Vlog (2023) and How To Turn On An iPhone (2024). This has prompted me to just make, make, make video and post it on my YouTube channel.

Interruptions and Interludes

Ties into absurdity and unexpectedness. If a part of creativity is to put two things that aren’t supposed to be together, together…

An on-going list of things I’ve learned that make art-making easier:

• START WITH REFERENCES: Start by looking at existing references. Take the best parts of one thing, avoid the worst parts of another. Use other people’s work to guide and inform your own. Your work can be complimentary or exist in opposition.

• RIDE MOMENTUM: Excitement and motivation for a project will decay over time. Invest the most amount of time and energy when you and your collaborators are excited about something. Race to the end.

• RACE TO THE FIRST DRAFT: Dirty the page. Make the skeleton of the skeleton. Shoot crappy pilots, sketch bad diagrams—bring the abstract idea into the real world as fast as possible.

• DON’T WORK ALONE: Involve other people in your work. Almost all things are harder to do alone.

• BALANCE CONSUMING AND CREATING: Make a lot of work but also experience a lot of work. The work you consume and experience greatly influences the work you will make. Add weird, unconventional, and obscure items to your art and media diet.