BLEEDTHROUGH
/VISUALS + PACKAGING [IN PROGRESS]

00/IMITATION IS THE SINCEREST FORM OF PLAGIARISM

For With Teeth, NIN creative director Rob Sheridan began experimenting with glitch art, embracing errors in both digital and analog spaces. Glitch art is definitionally the product of error, and the processes involved are typically chaotic and random. While Sheridan’s work has been deeply influential, it would be a mistake to replicate rather than innovate. As much as Bleedthrough had to feel appropriate to the artists’ canon, it needed to find its own process.

 

01/HALO 19_BLEEDTHROUGH

The word “negotiation” comes up a lot when I think about this. Every choice was in dialogue with the original album’s art, figuring out where to adhere and where to deviate. The first and most obvious choice: red.
The background was beaten up and reprocessed a hundred times over across a half dozen tools, all its detail reduced to a choreographed gradient. The backwards N sitting atop it was a conscious choice: most NIN campaigns have been branded with different distortions or croppings of the Gary Taplas-designed NIN logo. This felt like the place for a statement.

The interior portrait of Reznor gestures at one from With Teeth, seen above in Sheridan’s work. Replicating his meticulous pixel-stretching was at odds with my own inherent laziness, so I leaned heavily on Sean Ellis’s spectacular photos for SPIN. That blue-tinged portrait was treated red and flattened into another background achieved by threshing data across apps. Obscuring Reznor’s eyes with a beam of CRT noise picks up on his mention of “layers of reality”, offering a character whose perspective is strained and obstructed.

 

02/HALO 18_SUNSPOTS

XX

03/HALO 20_LOVE IS NOT ENOUGH

XX

// return to bleedthrough menu