CiA #59 - score: 7 out of 10

God Among Lice:
CIA seems to be chock-full-o' photomanip and manippy-design types, which I think is nice. When these kinds of styles are released by themselves with mostly airbrush or other traditional scene styles making up the rest of a pack, I can see how some people might go and start to believe that it's all the same kind of stuff, just slapping photos together or something. But when a whole bunch are presented together like this you get to see all the many varieties of styles that are possible, many of them going in quite different directions.

In this pack, you've got the sort of "pure" photo manipulation of agent 42's Castle Cloud, almost like a Photoshop tutorial in its mostly straightforward montaging (and winding up almost as dull as one too). Ghostface's image of men in winter clothes helping their hobbling friend out of the desert is less straightforward in both theme and color. The main difference here is this idea of theme; it's not just manipulating to create some other image, but creating a work with an idea/mood/theme by comparing these different subjects next to each other. Another Ghostface piece matches a freehand girl with a photographic backdrop and foreground. In addition, there's a curious silhouetted jumping man formed entirely by the absence of the scanline texture of the background... a new effect to me.

Then you have the more abstract style of montaging such as Fire From Heaven's Construction series, which itself can have varying degrees of representation of actual scenes. Agent 42's lie_un presents an image with just the perfect amount of noise to make us wonder where the black or the white is really part of the detail, and where it is simply noise, and made a little more difficult by inverting one side. Then there's the dramatic made more dramatic in FFH's sculpture flattened to black, white, red, and yellow. You find yourself moving between seeing the splotches of color or tone as depth in the sculpture, and then seeing them purely as flat color arranged just as themselves on the plane.

Moving into the design-influenced pictures, you've got a bluedevil/lk joint with a maniped photo along with design-aesthetic type and effects spread all around. Agent 42's Florida Postcard takes this style a step further by adding a message or concept to the photo-with-design (though that's not to say the end result is any more effective aesthetically). Milie's cours de langage plastique is a great piece of design work and one of my favorites in the pack. Here the photo has almost disappeared into the world of large color shapes; it's not very recognizable at first because of its sideways presentation and false colors. It's purpose has instead been made completely and solely as a part of the design. And then finally Agent 42 returns again with the pure design - no photos - of the Nothing magazine cover.

I left Ikarus out of the discussion so far because he seems to fall right smack dab in the middle of all of these currents. For instance, his Canned Culture is abstract photo-montage, noise-added, thematic, and design influenced all at the same time. While he's montaging images, he's creating a theme as well. While adding to this theme with words and text, he's creating the design, and eventually it all comes together as one.

Of course there was more than just photomanip in this pack. :) Just thought I'd take the opportunity to try and spell out the many varieties of styles you can find with photo/manip/design images, and remarkably even within a single pack such as this. Quickly, some other images that caught my eye... Sunday's Gimme had a nicely portrayed lighting effect, and lots of pretty, subtle yellows, purples, greens, and browns. F7's bear was a menacing counterpart to BD's mountain. I like the smeary brushmarks. Incognit0's brushy and color-maniped portraits are once again brilliant. Uhm.. plenty of other images that just seemed so-so to me. Given the size of this release, it seems like there were a good number of images that could have been left out to make this a better pack overall.

score: 7

Root88:
BDF7BE~1.JPG stands out as the best of this pack to me. It almost looks like a painting traced over a photo, but I know that Blue Devil and F7 would never do that.

You would think that Incognito paid me to keep hyping up his work the way I do, but his images in this pack are fantastic again. He’s moved on from torsos to portraits and they are excellent. Portraits don’t hold my attention for too long though, hopefully we will see the entire package come together in the upcoming months.

A few tips that might help out PK_TRPIC.JPG. 1. The girl either has a really small nose, or it just fell of, it looks a little strange. 2. There are "jaggies" around the knot of the girls bathing suit. There are several ways to use anti-aliasing to correct this. 3. Some parts of the pic seemed blurry. This can be fine is you are trying to achieve a dreamy type of look, like they used to get sometimes in the original Star Trek episodes by smearing Vaseline on the camera lenses. It’s just a bit inconsistent, not a very big deal.

RA_RC.JPG is a good job of 3d modeling. Only two small problems with this pic. I think it would look a lot more interesting with something in the background, instead of just a flat horizon. A giant construction cone comes to mind. Something to point out how small the car is supposed to be. The other minute problem is that the back left tire gets lost in the shadow of the car. A small adjustment to the lighting of the scene would quickly correct this.

I just don’t know SP_FETAL.JPG is supposed to be. Is it an abstract picture? The title didn’t help me identify it either. It looks sort of like a raised arm with a hand pointing down. Possibly this is an unfinished pic that snuck into the pack somehow? Maybe I am just clueless as to what this is, feel free to email me at root88@ice.org to tell me what a moron I am.

The photomanip artists in this pack did a little better this month than last month, but they might be able to learn a thing or two from the HRG guys.*

*this does not mean artists should rip others style or ideas.

score: 6.5 if you don’t count the fact that it’s the worst packaged release I’ve ever seen. (See discussions for numerous reasons why.)