Over the last few decades, technology has changed dramatically and therefore, so has the spectrum of inherent errors and technical difficulties that comes with it. Occasionally, given the right platform and circumstances, a technical malfunction can lead to some pretty spectacular impromptu visual and audio performances that leave you bemused or even terrified. Like when your radio temporarily picks up a crossed frequency or when your CD player lapses into an epileptic shock mid playback.
Just the other day, my laptop, which has shown no sign of grievance or unpleasant behaviour in the past, decided it would treat me to a display of multicoloured pixel stripes tumbling like a waterfall down the entire screen. No trace of what I was working on could be seen and all the hardware had gone numb. I'd only left the room a few moments to make a sandwich and when I returned I lost six hours staring at the flickering, hypnotic display that was probably reprogramming my mind to invest in a high-risk financial venture of some sort.
Curiously, the stripes were of uniform height and orientation and the colours were fairly complimentary. How odd. How could something that for all intents and purposes was a mistake look this gracefully composed?
My girlfriend even observed that it was reminiscent of some Paul Smith marketing - I was experiencing a designer error!
Similarly, I put on this Bench T-shirt this morning (one of the few Bench tees I own that doesn't depict a hint of architectural illustration), left the room for a few moments to make a sandwich, and when I returned, the entire design had imploded into this heavily distorted cluster-chuck. Coloured blocks and grainy partitions were jumbled across the canvas like a satellite broadcast peppered with interference. It looked like a ZX-Spectrum load sequence having a fight with the BBC Test Card.
I treated myself to this T-shirt a few months ago after a successful meeting with a client about, funnily enough, a T-shirt commission. I found it in the Bromley branch of TKMaxx suggesting it was one of the discontinued or poor performance lines - probably a lot of complaints about how faulty it was.
I've chosen to wear this tee for the Xtreme Vortex Family Fun Day that I talked about back on Day 115, where fortunately, the technology was much better behaved. In the photo above, I'm standing in front of the company's Laser Tag Arena which boasts several graphics I designed to decorate the inflatable. You can see the artwork as well as a whole bunch of other design and illustration work commissioned by Xtreme Vortex here.
