Bash script for hex editing, convolution and gmic all at the same time in a batch !

 

 

I've talked before about cutting videos into stills ( using ffmpeg -i yourfile.avi -vf fps=25 image-%05d.ppm)   to then hex edit them then putting that all back together afterwards ( ffmpeg -i image-%05d.ppm -vcodec libx264 -crf 23  -pix_fmt yuv420p newfile.mp4) . Lately I've been experimenting with bash scripting, heavily influenced by talks with Vedran Gligo and Dina Karadžić of format c over the last few weeks online in their informal hacklab01 sessions. Out of those sessions I returned to an older way I'd worked and thought about automating the process a bit more, bash scripting is the perfect way to do this. ( The source film for this is one I've used before from archive.org 'I love trouble' an old black and white film noir).

I wanted to incorporate things I'd learnt about using sed, command line convolution of images and gmic ( essentially a gmic script which mimics displacement ) and I finally came up with this which produces the images which lead to the above video. ( if you do try the script I advise using the editor geany because you'll want to change the formats you are working with for different effects and geany really does work well you can search and replace very easily and again you want to use near raw formats this will most likely break png and jpgs so stick with ppm, bmp, xwd etc. Also this works directly on the files in your working directory so back the originals up elsewhere)

#!/bin/bash

echo -n "How many times do you want flip your burgers ? : "
read n
i=0

while [ $i -lt $n ]
do
    ((i++))

find . -type f -name '*.tga'|while read filename; do echo ${filename} ;sed 's/fd/000/g' ${filename} > "${filename%tga}"_mod.tga;
#mv "${filename%tga}"_mod.tga ${filename};

#convolution section
mogrify -morphology Convolve '8x8:

-1, -0.7, 0, 0, -1, -0.1, 0, 1  ,
 1, 1, 1, -1, 1, 1, 1, 1 ,
 1, 1, -1, -1, 1, 1, 1, 0  ,
 1, -1, -1, -8.9, 1, 1, 1, 1 ,
 1, 1, -4, 0, -1, 1, 0, -1 ,
 1, -0.5, -6, -0.1, 0, 3, -2, 0 ,
 2, -1, -2, -0.2, 0, 0, 0, 0 ,
 2, 0.8, 0.9, 0.5, 0.6, 0.3, 0.8, 1 ' ${filename};


gmic ${filename} "${filename%tga}"_mod.tga -blend xor -o ${filename}
rm "${filename%tga}"_mod.tga

#you dont have to rotate after each iteration if you comment out the line below #remember to uncomment the following done or the script throws an error

mogrify -rotate 90 ${filename};done

#done





done

As you can see the script asks you to input the number of times you want to run over the files , usually I start with one but the video above is 2 iterations. You can choose to rotate the files during the process which can lead to more interesting variations.

Stills would look like this :

 

 

Burning down the house (reputation mining)

 

Slip inside this house - 2020

One of the problems with social media ( and its primary strength) is its ability to reach everywhere, Follow me on Instagram/Facebook/Youtube etc etc etc, if you become well enough known your work can be shared and re-shared multiple times across groups and even across platforms ( for example Reddit to Tumblr or Instagram to Facebook ) there is a kind of critical mass you reach which draws in more and more likes and re-posts , so far so obvious, one post can spawn a thousand re-shares ( apologies for the Helen of Troy analogy).

What happens when you deliberately burn down your account on Facebook or Instagram ( given the one month grace period for you to reconsider the error of your ways?). 

 

Essentially (and especially if you decide to take on another persona to distance yourself from what you were before) you become a stranger to new platforms with no reputation or exposure points ( exposure points being the amount your work is liked and shared and re-shared and commented on given that that is the currency of online interactions) and even more you see that the community you were part of was actually really really good with great interaction ( apart from that one time when I got stomped on by a pack of crypto bros) but as everyone stays in their silos that reach only extends as long as you remain in that silo.

You are never more alone when you leave a place and you have to mine for reputation points again, on some sites you can literally see and hear the hollow as you move around.

 

 If we consider social media in terms of gamification and in games to level up you sometimes have to do repetitive things before you get the shiny things that make it worthwhile then that is exactly what leaving one platform for another entails. 

Then of course there is ideology to consider do I go open source/ fediverse and accept the hit on possible connections and shares, in exchange for better quality of connections and less feeding into the military industrial surveillance state or swap one walled garden for another given that the platform you show your work on says a lot about you creatively and ideologically, the choices we make social media wise have consequences irl. Choose surveillance state because its easy or build something better outside of that state given that its harder and more difficult for reputation mining.

Or alternatively just shut down the computer and walk away.

Wolfenstein variations.

 

In 2018, influenced heavily by NetArt pioneers JODI after discovering and researching  about them for a talk I was going to be giving on glitch art for a conference on Digital Transformation in which I envisaged walking onto the stage and declaring 'I'm here to burn your houses down' I started to work on a series of modifications to one of the first 3d games 'Wolfenstein 3d' by id Software. One version of which was playable and shown at an exhibition in Paris titled Blue /x80 , curated by amongst others Kaspar Ravel and Zoe Stawska ( more information on that here Blue /x80 ) 

This was the playable version titled ' How do I get out of this room' as I'd modified the game so much that it was almost impossible to move from the starting point cell out into the game proper to play it - I liked the idea of subverting the game into something frustrating or challenging.

I went further into modifying the game so that I could move out of the starting point cell but objects started to move through walls depending on how I moved in the game.

And of course I could completely remove the walls as well if needed.

And finally completely mess with the text and banner images that the program displayed whilst still leaving the game playable.

It was reasonably easy to find a lot of the guides for modding the game online, though it did seem a little like archeology as nothing stays new or available on the internet for long so it did take a little digging . I was running the game and I think the modding software in dfend reloaded on Windows XP as far as I remember but a lot of my mods were guesswork running through iterations of reading the gamefiles as hex code and altering that then seeing what the mod did to the game if anything. 

Dfend reloaded has a brilliant feature which allows you to save videos of gameplay in a codec called ZMBV which in itself is also one of the nicest codecs to hex edit for example 

Finally there was this video which on reflection is more of a kind of dreamy glitchy vaporwave rampage - you can find that video here on my PeerTube Channel https://tube.tchncs.de/videos/watch/b5669a59-88db-4d39-af36-24c18f72ee78

Desktop as performative space.

Emperor Variation no 1.

 

 A funny thing happened recently, I started to think about making Vaporwave art and to do that I wanted to base it within the real space of Windows 95, as opposed to just ripping photos from the web and editing them I wanted real hardware and real faults to play with and record ( I like collecting the installation messages and faults to use later and collecting my own material). I don't know why this sudden lurch towards that as opposed to glitch art , though there are a lot of similarities between the two and a hella lot of differences . 

Windows 95 is all but impossible to use on real hardware for me ( I'm not saying it can't be done , I did it but it was unusable for my purposes ) but Win 98 has enough usability, like stability and easy usb access for pendrives, for it to be practical. So I started using it instead and then I noticed how much I like the 4:3 format ( up until recently I'd always used a 4:3 monitor then swapped to 16:9 when one came up in one of my regular visits to the tip , handy for doing widescreen videos and obs-studio capturing . But then I thought well what if I put two 4:3 monitors together as whole desktop , what would that be like especially as I'd started editing photos made with screenshots from the win 98 machine, I wanted that format . 

So I did that and then I noticed well could this be used as a space to work or perform within to compose and edit like a canvas using the elements I was working with like gimp , live capture from the win 98 box and suchlike and yes - it could . For instance these showing various desktop moments :

 

I could push these even further and make video and in fact that was the next stage, first capturing a video of sim city 2000 in action then hex editing that then placing that over a capture of the win 98 desktop ( just to add I use a VGA to HDMI adapter to take the signal from the win 98 box and capture that using a USB 3 HDMI capture card to grab that in obs-studio) .

this is a link to the video on PeerTube ( as I'm trying to gradually move away from large corporate spaces and into the Fediverse  ) https://tube.tchncs.de/videos/watch/0a19e466-e018-4ece-bac7-ed19a2fc5ac2

and the video itself 

 

So is the desktop my new performance space - I wonder, it does offer a host of possibilities to explore.

Back to the future - The Mythopoetics of nostalgia.

 

If glitch art is an interrogation of the machine and an aesthetic of failure then Vaporwave is an exploration of a future that we were promised but never had. Like all of those encyclopedia articles about a future of flying cars and one pill meals in the 50's to sixties alternative Science Fictions promise of easy love and relationships, psychedelics that would set our minds free for a sharing communal future to now where we look back in fondness at simpler times of 8 bit consoles and home computers we could tinker with or listen to the sound of tapes loading and whirring, to the bright colours of new packaging and plastics, the  badge engineering of cars ( the promise of speed and sex appeal of advertising never quite met) or Quantel paint box powered TV graphics on our 4:3 ratio wood-grain TV's - the promise of Prosperos Books that graphics and computers and art would somehow converge in a new form of interactive  multimedia experience and VR , always VR, would somehow exist outside of The lawnmower man or even Jonny Mnemonic ( itself  a movie that failed to deliver on the promise of its story though lovable still) - the romance of internet spaces we could physically explore or enter into with a 3 dimensional presence instead of this addictive flat screen of monitor or more latterly smartphone.

During this worldwide pandemic still ongoing I am drawn more to Vaporwave than glitch-art as a genre as it says a lot about the emptiness of the world now ( weeks into the pandemic I noticed a lone plane in a spring sky and was surprised that it was the first I'd seen in a while) - if Vaporwave is the sound of dead Malls then the pandemic is a perfect fit of empty grey car parks and sparse   shopping centers  a meta virus that has transcended the screen to haunt our world - reality and fiction have swapped places - while statues are torn down irl ( rightly) for being signifiers of hate and memorials to colonialist genocide and oppression, rather than the proud monuments to great men ( always only ever great men which in itself is offensive) that they were presented as, the empty plinths echo the emptiness and meaningless of the statues in Vaporwave - reality has indeed encountered an error but the error is that it could ever pretend to be as bright or as interesting ( or as hollow and regretful) as this virtual world we are now sucked into, though we never meet anyone here just signifiers of indeterminate shape and space , we all live in the dead malls now.

And at some point we all need a virtual makeover ( original source photograph for statue via pexels, pexels-michel-caicedo-3713493):

Those things lost to time and bit rot - Blvckvan.

 

 

 You've all seen it, wandering the corridors of the web we come across a website or blog that has seemingly been left deserted, stranded in time an orphan to ideas or lives that have taken a different turn . The people we meet online, some we never know or meet in real life or even know their real names - and then there are those who appear and then just vanish. 

In my early days posting to Glitch artists collective there was a poster called Blvckvan ( spelling is correct) and they posted some of the most interesting work I'd seen. I drifted away from GAC for a while but then returned but Blvkvan had gone, disappeared. 

I found a wordpress blog recently and that set me to wondering what happens to all those who disappear on the web leaving only dead sites and a trail of images in search results which never resolve to a new address or identity. But of course nostalgia is the currency of the internet for times lived or times that were never lived ( see the early history of sites once used and now dead and gone like Friends reunited or Myspace).

For what its worth, and to see some really great work here's a link to Blvckvan's site - https://blvckvan.wordpress.com/

Glitch art , the politics of software,hardware and the death of the gallery system ( redux)

 

As skin said ' Yes its fucking political , everything's political'.

(Authors note – this was originally published in 2017, though I still agree with what I wrote then there is a further threat to fight off which is the financial corporate takeover of online art and practice centered around blockchain and nft’s which are essentially a way of turning any digital artwork into a speculative investment and thus returning control of the online art space to big Galleries and auction houses. Though I applaud the idea behind blockchain and especially the artists resale right and the ability to make money from work – these are essentially just another form of bondage to corporate interests and do not serve us as artists or the wider culture,society or the environment, it’s essentially late stage capitalism turning to cannibalism. So now its even more fucking political).

I'd just spent a week rebuilding a lot of my old laptops , it suddenly struck me that I needed to keep the systems on which I had made a lot of my earlier work functioning and intact , which meant a lot of trawling around in the loft in the hardware pile, and for one particular laptop a complete strip down and clean out after the cat that lives in the loft had, pre-spaying, peed all over the motherboard that I had left exposed after retrieving a CPU to test another laptop given to me by my brother in law. I also rebuilt possibly the most troublesome laptop I have ever owned - a Fujitsu Siemens v5535 . I think I've spent more time stripping and rebuilding that machine than any other . I return to it every so often and try and run Linux on it , again to be failed by the graphics card ( a sis m671 ) for which there are no working 3d drivers - you can get a flat 2d interface but that's about it , so inevitably it ends up being reinstalled with its original os , windows xp ( well it was vista originally but xp worked better as when I bought it in a fit of hopefulness and ignorance it was under-powered and just nasty - though like a lot of Fujitsu stuff , bomb proof ) . Having read that back a few years later I must add that the V5535 has now died.

I was first attracted to Linux and open source software in 2003 , I read something about Beowulf clusters , supercomputers put together from cheap or redundant hardware - and one day wandering around a library in Wales came across a book 'Linux for dummies ' which not only had the cds to install Redhat 7.3 inside , it also said I could copy the discs and use them on as many pcs as I wanted ( I'd just paid £80 for a copy of windows 98se to install on a second hand computer I'd bought after having buggered up the windows 95 installation ) , it was an eye opener - and over the next few years I tried to wean myself away from windows and proprietary software altogether - even when using windows the software that I was installing like The Gimp, Open-office, Vlc, and Bittorrent was open source . I didn't have the money to buy things like photoshop or pay for dvd playing/burning software other than that which was bundled with laptops I had bought . There was always some reason I kept coming back to Windows , especially when I was working on the film Colourkeeper , I needed a good solid video editor and I just couldn't find one for linux ( I was dual booting windows and Linux on desktops ) - in the end I found a cracked version of sony vegas which enabled me to finish the video ( Sony Vegas going for something like 300 euros at the time ) . Happily this has changed and now we have Openshot , Cinelerra, Shotcut and Flowblade to choose from . And still I couldn't get Linux to work properly on that pig of a laptop - So the next laptop I bought in 2008, an overpriced Acer Aspire 2920z, I made damned sure that It could run what I wanted to run , at the time, Linux-mint bought with a copy of Linux format magazine - this was before I had a full time internet connection - so It had all the software I wanted and would play DVDs , mp3s and ran really sweetly with proper screen resolution and hardware acceleration - and from there I didn't look back.

Which brings me to my first point - the hardware and software you use , just like the materials you use in traditional forms of art , help to determine and direct the kind of work you make, thus software and hardware are inherently political, If , say , a gallery or a publisher asks for a photograph ,music, a video or a piece of written work in a particular format and that particular format is only available through using a piece of software which will only run on one type of computer this naturally shuts out those who do not have access to that computer and that piece of software (this also applies to the computational cost of access to newer techniques utilising machine learning where the cost of hardware is prohibitive to many) this also predetermines to an extent the socio-economic status of those who can and will take part. Sometimes software will also place restrictions on what can and cannot be played by inserting itself into the playback process - I have applied to open calls in the past where thinking ahead I created a DVD which would play itself on any windows computer which didn't have video playback software of the kind needed to play my content , upon insertion into the gallery's computer the computer declared that the content couldn't be played as a particular piece of software which was set as the default to play content declared it needed updating or couldn't read the files on the disc because of the propietry nature of some codecs  - if the software hadn't been set as default the computer would have played the disc, if the galleries knew a little more beyond their own software and hardware preconceptions they could also have bypassed that and played the disc.

This is why I use Linux , and this is why I use open source software , I don't want restrictions placed on what I can and can't do on my own hardware - I don't want a computer made out of components which are deliberately crippled to only use certain operating systems or software . I also don't want software which directs my use of it or which leads me to easy results which look like everybody else's work - to use the computer as a tool for making art the final results must be open ended and not guided by templates or presets . We must meet the computer and software as tools which can be adjusted and modified ( by us , the users )as our needs change , just as I can mix paint with water , oil or any other damn ingredient I choose , wise or foolish, and paint on to any surface I choose , be it canvas , door , skin , metal or dirt .

Which leads me to glitch art , as circumstance breeds response so computer and the internet bred glitch . In an increasingly computerized and data-centric society it would seem inevitable that the fetishization of error as a response to technology and its colonization of both our public and private lives is the new art. If hardware and software try to direct us into paths of doing and thinking ( hardware and software also being a product of economic and political thinking ) what else would we do but applaud when that which determines so much of our lives breaks down leaving the visual traces of a failed photograph, a digital advertising hoarding that no longer tries to program us with a corporate message but instead melts and screams in dying colour and fading electronics - if computers and software create a false ideal of perfection ( photo-shop perfect model advertising , film digital-post production , the illusion of flawless surfaces, pro tool vocals from tone deaf singers, the power to edit in real time the perceived reality we are asked to accept through the ever present screen).

In glitch art we try to force the hand of chance by choosing to break files and machines in a way which brings results akin to the frozen moment when a graphics card fails or a cd sticks , to forge a different view , a glimpse outside of the simulation of appearances . In some of the groups I used to belong too ( loose affiliations within electronic meeting places , themselves guarded by the politics of the machine) we argued about acceptable software and methods - slapping a filter on something was not regarded highly , the easy photoshop glitch setting or preset also denigrated - the tools you use say something about the kind of work you make , Photoshop assumptions or after-effects prettification are seen as amateur or worse not serious or the derisive tag of 'wheres the glitch fam' - we look for the authenticity of effort and the struggle to find and innovate , though file formats may produce similar results , the flexibility of method equates to the difference of individuals drawing hand - no two are alike . We are also archeologists , seeking out old hardware and software which adds different texture or pre-internet exotica to our arsenal .

I abandoned painting sometime in 2012 ( a flexible year zero ) when it finally dawned on me that the gallery system was dead, more and more open calls coming with submission fees , competitions you could enter at a price, dishonest magazines saying how much they loved my work and pay such and such a fee for so many pages in one issue . As the unemployed have become profitable to workfare companies taking contracts from government to massage statistics and feed into the zero hours economy so the gallery system has ceased to invest in all but the easiest fruit and become a pay to play model ,which favors rich Sunday painters and the children of the wealthy ) any other money left in the system from arts councils or government hoovered up by special interest committees channeling money into this years approved cultural celebration ( money going into corporatised pockets modeled on shock doctrine capitalism - the charity business that perpetuates itself). The gallery business is a self filling pool becoming ever narrower through the myopia of money and the illiteracy of bankers and the 1% investing in art as a hedge fund , art created as investment becomes tomorrows Bougereau's . It is hard to fit that which exists within the environment of the internets immediacy and constant comment and frenetic pace into the dead world of curation and career mapped from art college to bank vault - career art made in cold studios to be seen by a few, assigned a value then hidden away in a vault to accrue more value depending on reputation and market conditions - this is a moribund format , an old model for old times .

What then replaces it ?

My second point - We now find ourselves in a very different place , the internet has become in some sense a leveler - the price of access is the same , every one who has access can play , I used to discuss in the  groups I belonged too what hardware was needed to make what we make , well most of my hardware is second hand , coming to me broken and out of date , you don't need up to date all singing photo-shopping hi ram hi spec apple , the price of play is connection only , software is free ( open source won't cost you a penny ) the laptop I'm writing this on was bought from a local second hand market for a tenner - nothing drops in price faster than technology you are told is outdated ( but that's another rant ) the operating system downloaded and written to a USB stick . The memory, processor, hard drive and psu pulled from a laptop a friend found abandoned at the local dump - the cost of admission is knowledge and the willingness to play if you use the technology you must learn how it works . As glitch becomes more seen and more available ( a network of infinite connections expanding ) I start to see where the new gallery is , its here , and I know what its currency is , Reputation , likes and novelty - it may not last longer than your flicking through it , but its there - a new aesthetic that any one can make - it does not exist within gallery terms or career terms, I suppose eventually the establishment will catch up with us , already advertising , that whore of a profession has started to co-opt its language and appearance but not its purpose - you can create the art of the future with the tools of the past - throw away your mac pros boys and gals and get down to the junk shop - the A.I content bots are going to take your jobs anyway .

Well, how did I Get here?

 Art and the internet as a self cannibalizing machine ( the nft of doom).

 

So, here’s the thing, you might recognize that this blog used to be called something else ( paintings are stories) if you followed the link to that site from elsewhere, apologies, there are reasons behind the appearance of my new persona and frankly the old blog title was beginning to seem a little anachronistic as I no longer paint and the reason behind originally writing the blog is no longer important.

 You may notice from my avatar that I appear to be someone you might know. You might recognize some of the content I’ve posted especially if you are, or have been, a member of what I considered to be my home on the internet, the Facebook group Glitch artists collective. I Had to leave there and pretty much all corporate social media  because being me I got to arguing with certain people and realized that there is something of a gold rush, land grab going on in the guise of a novel instrument of speculation known as an nft, work mysteriously turning up on marketplaces which have been shall we say appropriated and seemingly sane people turning overnight into zealots and proselytizers for something which at best seems dubious. 

I wanted no part of that given that I primarily work with opensource software and advocate and publish my work under creative commons licenses and could see that where there are cracks to form in social groupings this is where they will start in arguments for and against. In an environment where I was used to sharing ideas and methods I could see that that co-operative atmosphere could break down really quickly as we start to monetize what was  previously ephemeral and freely shared. Don't get me wrong I'm all for artists making money, I'm partial to getting paid myself, the standing joke in GAC and probably must other artist circles being when someone would enter into a conversation with an Artist looking for something for free with the standard line - 'It will be great exposure' so someone in Gac came up with the idea of the exposure buck as in ' Are we working for exposure bucks?'. I'm not just in this for the money( if I was, as an artist, I would be sorely disappointed) I actually believe there is a point in openly sharing work in the same way that opensource developers share their work, this is what the internet was built from, and its not a bad model for society, sharing culture and art makes us stronger and more cohesive. 

There also didn't seem  to be much thinking of consequences such as the ecological black hole that Blockchain and Nft's may well plunge us into. Are we as artists going to actively vandalize what little is left of our environment powering ever expanding server farms  which hold a record of who owns our non-existent art and non-existent money. Sounds pretty much like the plot to Accelerando by Charles Stross. If data is the new oil Nft's are the new Exxon Valdez , first in a long line of beached financial instruments waiting to pollute, poison and tokenize what is left of the old web and pull apart a vibrant and vital culture, nfts are a sign that late stage capitalism has turned to cannibalism and we, dear artists, are on the menu.

Don't get me wrong , I'm hardly a technological Luddite but generally when something looks too good to be true it generally is 

So in response to those events I’m slowly pivoting my online presence into the Fediverse and away from those other spaces. A lot of the posts I will be making in the next while will be copies of my blog and work from another space so bear with me while I get up to date.

Why have I started to use crash-stop as a username and as the new title for this blog ? I love science fiction and especially the work of Iain.M.Banks and his Culture series . In the Culture ships minds have both consciousness and agency, a crash stop is one of the  most ruinous things a ship can do to itself , but it also acts as an emergency signal,  it has consequences and that Is essentially what I have done.