Albums Filtered Through The Prism
How do your favourite albums come out when filtered through the prism?
Do you, like me, love art but are shackled to the confines of mere appreciation due to an excessive case of gumby handedness? Every time you’ve ever tried to express your “artistic side”, the results resemble what would happen if a particularly flabby sumo wrestler sat on a freshly prepared palette and proceeded to violently drag his arse over the canvas like a stray dog suffering an aggressive worm infestation.
Maybe you can draw, but suffer a severe lack of inspiration? You have the skills, but when you try and push something out you end up feeling like a decrepit 73 year old. One who has been force-fed a steady diet of gouda in some kind of twisted Dutch retirement home, thus clogging the only outlet for daily enjoyment, which consisted of dropping a satisfying and unflushed grunt in the communal bingo hall toilet after yet another humiliating defeat at the hands of Ruth and Cecil. Everyone knows those fucks are cheating. Soon they’ll pay.
Either way, I’m sure most of you are also burdened with the curse of the bourgeois. Well, today we get to pretend. Today we can taste a sliver of the sweet satisfaction that comes with artistic expression. Kinda. Ever wonder what it would be like had Fuseli lived long enough to have dabbled in Cubism during the post-Picasso era? What if Paul Romano carved an Escher-esque series of linocuts? Wonder no more. Bruegel through a mosaic? Repka doing anything other than cartoons? This app can take you there.
The electronic world in 2016 is rife with a plethora of apps for all sorts of things, most of which are either inane, user-hostile, merely a vehicle for marketing or just completely fucking useless. Prisma decided to turn the industry on its head by being both easy to use and actually worthwhile, something other companies had not previously considered. Sometime last year I caught wind of the Deep Dream feature which our silicon overlords Google were offering. After seeing a couple of cool examples that reminded me of some of the psychedelic artwork I enjoy critiquing from my fetid throne of ignorance, I decided to make a few for fun. Ever the workhorse, Dubya thought it would be a cool idea to turn our enjoyment into work by throwing some of our favourite album art through the machine and creating an article about it. Turns out Deep Dream took approximately 6 days per image to essentially cover everything with dog’s eyes. Why? Because even a machine can tell doggos and puppers are objectively better than cats. Well, Prisma is quick, and can do much more. Prisma is essentially a bunch of filters that let you replicate some of your favourite styles of art. And I fucking love it.
So when I awoke this morning and showed Joe and Dubs the results of my early experimentation chucking images through the prism, Dubya immediately suggested we try the album covers again, and guess what? It rules. I subsequently spent a few hours trialling different covers with different filters. As you will see, some covers were only conducive to certain filters, and some looked amazing regardless of the filter used. There were of course, some album covers for which nothing could be done to salvage them in any way. However, I won’t post any of those. Well, maybe just one…
We even dropped some albums created by Toilet ov Hell community members through the Prism –
Some album covers were nearly impossible to ruin (click to enlarge) –
While others, were just terrible no matter which filter they were fed through (NSFW)-
