scan - NicheInterests/mistfunk GitHub Wiki
SCAN 1. An image scanned in by way of an image digitizer or similar means.
Unpacking this a little, scanning could have neutral or negative connotations. BBS file bases were awash in scans of eg. Cindy Crawford swimsuit photos from magazines, with varying degrees of grain, and Rusty n Edies BBS got into hot water hosting other, more aggressively defended magazine scans. But in the late '80s and early '90s, scanners were expensive and not widely available, meaning that scans were not really present in the early days of the underground computer artscene.
This would change as access to scanners became more widespread and prevalent. By and large, [hirez] (or "VGA") graphics in the artscene were initially purely from a few streams -- punctillious pixelart, each pixel placed precisely; output from 3-D modelling and raytraced scenes left to render overnight; and very mathematical landscapes and similar scenes generated through fractal formulae. VGA files had to fight for their place in artpacks, because filesize-wise they were relatively large compared to textmode art, and scans of sketches drawn by teenagers with poor sense of proportion and perspective (cut them some slack, how many teens have logged a dozen hours at the local life drawing clinic?) generally were not considered to have earned their place on board. Scans of awesome line art were suspicious, and indeed there was nothing stopping an enterprising lamer from scanning art made by someone else, slapping a logo and their signature on the bottom and submitting it to an artpack, a practice that was difficult to police prior to the era of Google Image Search. In this sense, a scan is the ultimate piece of copy art
CatBones of ACiD turned around attitudes toward scanner use by incorporating scans of real organic textures and applying them to his Photoshop airbrush compositions, enjoying similar success to the Czech game developers at Amanita Design who undertook a similar practice in the look of their Samorost adventure game series. The PhotoShop era of artscene hirez necessarily leaned on scans quite a bit more -- prior to the mainstreaming of affordable digital cameras, scanning was the only way to get the Photo into the Shop, as it were.
All in all, how to know whether scanner use is lame or elite? Look at it as a visual equivalent to the practice of audio sampling. You could digitize an entire song and distribute it as a scratchy, monophonic .WAV, but that would be enormous and you would have achieved nothing save the algorithmic conversion of a creative work into an inferior reproduction -- the machine is doing all of the heavy lifting here. Conversely, you could selectively digitize choice samples from a song and use them as the bones for an enhanced remix featuring intriguing variations from the original -- or work them into an entirely new composition with no obvious connection to their source! Similarly, scanner use can potentially enhance a composition, but when clicking "scan" is the end of the artist's input to the artwork, what is yielded would generally be considered bad computer art. The "lazy plagiarism" aspect of scans resonates today (2025) in the genAI era.
Philosophically weighing over the impact of the scan on a community of bespoke, handmade digital artisans, you can if you like consider the impact of the development of photography on painting, what happened to illuminated manuscripts after the introduction of the printing press, the polarizing serial output of Andy Warhol's Factory (still controversial today!), or Walter Benjamin's essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.