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.