i remember when ye (kanye w) iterated on a finished piece of work. maybe it was the life of pablo, can’t recall exactly but the timeline was full of mr west being lauded as the first artist to treat work as iterative, instead of absolute, like software (SaaS).
this came mostly from the VC techo-sphere, a top down propaganda arm that related everything to “software eating the world”.
of course, this was not the first case of this. it might have been the most public version, because of the sheer reach & influence of Mr Ye, but artists have iterated on finished works since cave paintings.
it’s of course a very different thing when said item is all digital. it’s much more difficult after you shipped out a million CD’s/DVDs but we are living in a different era altogether, where we leave no trace but 1/0’s behind.
my version of this iteration process occurred in 2009. i had finally finished my first feature film, WHALE, and released the work on DVD. this was a painstaking ordeal and had taken several years to finally get to the point of release. i felt somewhat relieved.
but, nearly right after we started both selling and sending out screeners, I couldn’t get rid of an itch, in fact I couldn’t sleep. i felt i had given up on the edit too soon, and knew that something was missing but i couldn’t work out the problem & i didn’t have the energy to face it (also, the tech issues at the time, with my PowerPC G5 giving up and project files being corrupted was part of this defeat).
in this fog of insomnia, on one of those nights i was taking nyquil just to fall asleep,i had a dream, and this dream was a direct solution to the problem, sound and visual. so, i went back to the edit room and came back several months later. now, it felt truly finished and i could sleep soundly again.
the other thing that’s changed over the years has been the keyart of the film, with the most recent refresh done by artist/designer Ali Sabet for the HD-re-release that went live in 2019 . this HD version of the film also has one or two tiny changes (i had to fire up a PowerPC mac running final cut pro 5 and this was a whole nightmare and another story). so, this new streaming version is in fact the finished version of the film, a v2.44 version as it stands.
below is some of the art over the years, including the rare OG DVD design.
WHALE keyart redesign done with the help of artist/designer Ali Sabet for HD re-release - 2019
WHALE DVD coverart for current in circulation DVD’s - 2010
WHALE original DVD front cover design for released, but scrapped version of the film - 2009
WHALE original DVD back cover design for released, but scrapped version of the film - 2009
