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[NSFW] These Shapeshifting Dots Are Not What They Seem

An old illustration technique gets a virtual age update in denial.of.service’s new music video for Aeternam Vale & Kerri LeBon’s “Hiding Love.”
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Our first introduction to video artist and music video director denial.of.service was a cyberpunk smart drug trip gone horribly wrong. Featuring abstracted geometries and static, the work was a shapeshifting procession of 3D scans warped in a range of black-and-white generative visuals.

In his latest video for Aeternam Vale & Kerri LeBon’s “Hiding Love,” denial.of.service again explores molten shapeshifting. But this time he does so using a hallucinatory style of digital stippling, a technique typically reserved for pen and paper. In it, hundreds of dots of various sizes come to constitute a whole image.

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In what looks like found porn footage, two lovers cavort as their bodies move in and out of focus with denial.of.service’s stippling. The results make it look almost like an animation, with the stipples rippling, expanding, retracting and thus forming and unforming the lovers’ bodies.

denial.of.service found the technical and aesthetic inspiration in Robert Hodgin’s experiments in digital stippling. While Hodgin uses his stippling algorithm, which has magnetic particles that push pixels in different directions, to slowly build stipple recreations of classic artworks, denial.of.service’s approach is far more abstract and experimental. And, when paired with Aeternam Vale & Kerri LeBon’s “Hiding Love,” it's highly erotic.

Click here to see more of denial.of.service’s work.

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