Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have had a rather successful 2020, with a fresh Emmy win for their work on the soundtrack for HBO’s Watchmen as well as the honor of finally joining the ranks of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as members of Nine Inch Nails in the same year. But that’s just one year. They’ve gained acclaim for lots of their work over the years, including for their acclaimed The Social Network soundtrack in 2011. Well, that soundtrack is notable for more than just its music.
Artist Rob Sheridan, who has worked extensively with Nine Inch Nails since 1999, took to Twitter on the 10th anniversary of The Social Network‘s original soundtrack release to elaborate on how he came up with the album’s unique artwork. “For the TSN soundtrack art,” he said, “my goal was to walk the line between representing the film and creating something that stood as a piece of art on its own.”
Sheridan explained that his process began, unsurprisingly, with the iconic poster for the film itself, which featured a close up of Jesse Eisenberg as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg overlaid with the text “you don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies.” Sheridan, whose art style revolves around “glitching” and corrupting existing pictures and photographs to create hauntingly striking new pieces, experimented with glitching out that original image (sans text). Unfortunately, he had to settle for a more subdued version of his finished product due to Sony rejecting his preferred take on the artwork.
Aside from the cover itself, Sheridan was given some promotional stills from the film to help fill out the album’s inside artwork and liner notes, and he made up for holding back on the cover by going full throttle with his glitchy process on the rest. He found that several different unexpected factors played into how the finished image would turn out, from method of glitching to file format of the picture itself. Interestingly, his preferred method of glitching any given image was to open it in a simple text editor (such as Notepad) and randomly mess around with the text data. Using trial by error, he would keep trying until he created something he liked, which resulted in surreal pieces of artwork that unnerve and fascinate all at once.
Perhaps as an apology, the 10th anniversary vinyl release of The Social Network‘s soundtrack featured Sheridan’s original pitched cover art, complete with the more glitched effect, which seemed to make him happy even if it was a decade later. While the artwork used on the official cover in 2010 has its own charms, it’s rather “safe” overall. There’s something raw and slightly visceral about the re-release’s cover, and it’s nice that the passion behind it finally got to show through eventually.
Sheridan’s style proves that there will always be new ways to create works of art. Whether through computers or with one’s bare hands or something else entirely, the creative minds of the world will always have a medium to express themselves. So here’s to an eternity of creations, each more wonderfully bizarre than the last.
Source: Rob Sheridan/Twitter
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