Foundation 14 - all your data is art (how to break nearly everything)

In 2013 I was part of the first Foundation series of art exhibitions in Tullamore Co.Offaly http://www.offalyindependent.ie/whatson/roundup/articles/2013/09/27/4017709-foundation-13-officially-launched/  curated by Brendan Fox http://www.brendanfoxart.com/ . During foundation 13 I gave a talk and workshop about circuitbending and glitch art which was well received, and showed one of my first databent videos here which sat in the basement of an old shop and growled and grumbled threateningly . Next year they asked me back to do a further talk which I called ' All your data is art ' , except that year nobody turned up ! This blog post is more about what I would have talked about then and gives the background to how I started to work more in digital than paint .

Databending and circuitbending – web links

Databending - BEFORE DOING ANYTHING TO A FILE ALWAYS MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A BACK UP COPY DATABENDING IS SOMETIMES NON RECOVERABLE ( THOUGH THE FILE MAY PLAY OR BE READABLE IT WILL NOT BE THE SAME , EVER) YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED BACK UP BACK UP BACK UP..

Start here – probably the clearest and simplest explanation as to method. Databending primer -http://blog.animalswithinanimals.com/2008/08/databending-and-glitch-art-primer-part.html

Philip stearns – puts the glitch to work , very important in popularising the ideas of glitch aesthetic

http://phillipstearns.wordpress.com/

Rosa menkman – her vernacular of file formats is essential reading , but her website sunshine in my throat is more fun http://rosa-menkman.blogspot.ie/

http://paulhertz.net/factory/showcase-2/databending/

essential reading for messing with jpegs http://www.ffd8.org/header_remix/ gives good overview of file format construction.

For all your header file needs and understandings http://afruj.wordpress.com/2008/08/01/image-file-header-formats/

find out what colours are in your files ! http://www.javascripter.net/faq/rgbtohex.htm

Definitions definitions definitions http://www.jameshconnolly.com/glitchtalk.html

Information is currency http://www.information-is-currency.com/

the inestimable Antonio Roberts aka hellocatfood http://www.hellocatfood.com/

Datamoshing ( its all about the i frames )

http://www.datamoshing.com/

see some glitch art !

http://gli.tc/h/gallery.html ( because it hurts my eyes)

https://www.fastcompany.com/3034296/inside-the-bizarre-phenomenon-known-as-glitch-art

more Rosa Menkman ( her online work) http://vimeo.com/r00s

on facebook many many groups but this one is open and accesible

https://www.facebook.com/groups/Glitchcollective/

Circuit-bending (remaking stuff to make it work in more interesting ways)

Circuit bending is more , shall we say ........ risky than databending . I advise caution and never to work on anything connected to mains power . Start with battery powered devices , like childrens toys , if working on cameras be aware that the flash capacitor if there is one ( large black round long thing near flash itself) holds a very high charge and can give you a nasty shock .so start at the first link and read carefully .

http://www.anti-theory.com/

that's the site of Rheed Ghazala read more about him on wikipedia – he is a seminal figure in circuit bending ( especially for musical instruments and how to make things do things they really really shouldnt) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed_Ghazala

karl klomp for dirty video mixers and making things look wrong

from anti render https://adharidonora.wordpress.com/2016/04/14/dirty-video-mixer/

mess with your monitor – I advise extreme caution here , if your playing with crt displays and you dont know what your doing you may end up dead , the voltages are that high , maybe chance the vga flatscreen hack ( its a cable splice project ) – but proceed carefully. So having said that heres the link , read everything carefully , download the pdf etc before doing it if your going to do it)

http://crackedraytube.com/

open source software.

I use linux , Debian to be precise , it works and keeps working  .You don't have too , but some databending stuff just works better . This one command line script

xxd -p somefile.mpeg | sed 's/a0/b0/g' | xxd -r -p > somefileglitched.mpeg ( where a0 and b0 are hex values which can be changed from 00 to ff or from 0000 to ffff or 000000 ffffff and all hex values in between) depending on target and file format

is the basis of most of my work , that and transcoding using ffmpeg, ( you can do it in windows but its so much easier from the linux command line) , though glitch is os agnostic flexibility is better.

Having said that here is a list of software to find which is all open source ( to see what i mean by that go here http://www.fsf.org/ it explains why you cant do certain things on your windows or mac laptop and what the alternatives and issues are) some Ive included on this disc , some you will find yourself.

Avidemux ( good for iframe removal for that squishy datamosh feeling – also for converting your mpegs to mp4s and general format tomfoolery)

The gimp – photoshop replacement – open-source and free

vlc – the only media player to use ( good snapshot function for capturing that lovely glitch – plays corrupted files quite well also)

virtualdub – primitive non-linear editor

Audacity – sound ( and video editing he he he he)

yawcam – webcam monitor

picasa ( fault in file reading in wndows makes corrupted mpegs even more corrupt nice) though as of 2017 discontinued boo.

ffmpeg – commandline but can convert anything to anything really quickly.

Frhed – hex editor

notepad++ editor of choice for many .

The fun is finding new ways to do things , and that should be your guide , its all 0s and 1s a computer is agnostic , be prepared to break stuff , but remember always backup!

Year Zero post 2016 part two .

So having discovered there was a name for this supposed fault, I started taking cameras apart and rebuilding them in earnest , looking for the novel and whatever I could squeeze out of these mistreated web-cams and cameras that I found in car boot sales and charity stores , the older the better , rewiring , making breakout boxes and strange contraptions of wire and solder .

 So to start with I just started taking shots with the cameras and poking around the innards with a few wires shorting across the ccds from contact to contact , the results were interesting to say the least and very very immediate  , but still based in an aesthetic that I was used too , still life or self portrait , the old aesthetic - what would happen if I really started to corrupt the electronics and push them to the point of failure rather than being happy just to get a few more interesting effects , what would happen if I threw everything I knew away ?

 

To push things to the point of destruction I would need a different tool , something I could control and play with in real time - to that end I made a break out box , so I could connect one or even two cameras together to bleed into each other . And a program called yawcam a free to use web cam monitoring and recording program.

Breakout box

Year Zero post 2016 part one (with digressions )

 Lets forget all that painting stuff for a while and talk about what really occupies my time at the moment ( artists live in the present also ) . I play with computers a lot , have used them in my work to varying degrees since 1987 and pretty much full time since 2012 . I happened upon a cheap plasticcy digital camera that was being given away for cheap as a promotion by a dairy company here in Ireland ( Avonmore if ya really want to know ) it was a devil to find a driver for it but I did . before that I'd become increasingly fascinated by near infrared on digital cameras - I'd made a series of portraits using a few modified cameras which I turned into paintings .

I was quite pleased with the results , even tempted to look at landscape afresh ( landscape the last refuge of the scoundrel ) so looking for unique effects I kept on collecting cameras and taking them apart and rebuilding them using instructions I'd found online .

At some point one of the cameras I was playing with ( the cheap throw away - now there's a concept , a disposable digital camera ) did something unexpected .

At first the unexpected result stayed along with all my digital files on my hard drive . But I kept coming back to it .

At this point in 2012 I was rapidly becoming disillusioned with painting as a process , I'd had one solo exhibition in 2012 in the Signal arts centre in Bray and I'd been in a group show in Ranelagh arts center Dublin, the venues were great , I had the paintings to show , but I think I'd reached the end of what I could do then , easily bored I wanted something new to play with. (I have a love hate relationship with painting , I value the craft and the sheer effort of making paintings , but I was beginning to begrudge the amount of time it took me to complete even the simplest of paintings , from less than a day or so it began to take upwards of a month to complete one single painting , I began to dread going into my makeshift mobile home studio more and more.)

Looking through some pages about manipulating digital cameras in various ways I came across and article about Philip Stearns , a new media artist working with electronics , old digital cameras and something called circuit bending , (find his blog here https://phillipstearns.wordpress.com/ ) so I followed the leads up , found his blog and starting learning something new , there was a word for the fault that I'd found - Glitch.