Introductions and influences, Stan Brakhage and German expressionism
Some of the biggest influences on my own work have been German Expressionist films, film noir and the work of Stan Brakhage. I started off as a painter, primarily making gestural abstract expressionist work mainly in black and white. Influenced by painters such as Franz Kline. Eventually, influenced by the proto surrealist Giorgio de Chirico article on De Chirico here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgio_de_Chirico I painted almost photo realistic still lives , these still lives were more like stage sets , and indeed I built stage sets to draw and paint from but these were heavily influenced by German expressionist film making and more specifically ‘The Cabinet of Dr Caligari’ directed by Robert Wiene in 1920 with design by Hermann Warm, Walter Reimann and Walter Röhrig and just in case anyone hasn’t seen that film you can watch it or download it from here https://archive.org/details/TheCabinetOfDr.Caligari1920FULLMOVIE . You can watch a short extract from that here https://youtu.be/tol980w2aNk ( This lasts about three minutes 30 seconds and was prepared using kdenlive the video editor we are going to be using later on, from a newer restored copy that's been uploaded to archive.org )
What fascinated me about this film in particular was that it reflected the atmosphere of De Chiricos paintings but also rejected the naturalistic approach to film making prevalent In Hollywood and much of Europe . Its still pretty startling to watch today, the scenery draws on modernist art tendencies of the time and it does not try and hide the fact that it is an artificial environment, rather the artificiality of the films' environment heightens the feeling of dreamlike horror inherent in the film by not pretending to be anything other than a film. How does this relate to glitch art ? To answer that we have to look at the work of Stan Brakhage.
In the short documentary The untutored eye here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3rSP3-iWvs he called his films ‘ moving visual thinking’ his films of which their over 300 contain ‘no narrative character or sound’ sometimes the only sound to be experienced outside of the film was the whirring of the projector. ‘For Brakhage film was a medium to be explored itself’
Watch this short film by him 'Mothlight' from 1963 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfBdTsljCXk&t=94s
Mothlight is not a film in the traditional sense , the wikipedia article on it explains the background find that here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothlight and to quote from that article which in turn is made up from multiple sources:
‘Mothlight is a silent "collage film" that incorporates "real world elements."Brakhage produced the film without the use of a camera, using what he then described as "a whole new film technique." Brakhage collected moth wings, flower petals, and blades of grass, and pressed them between two strips of 16mm splicing tape. The resulting assemblage was then contact-printed at a lab to allow projection in a cinema. The objects chosen were required to be thin and translucent, to permit the passage of light.
in ‘metaphors of vision’ which can be found here https://ia800602.us.archive.org/22/items/metaphorsonvisio00brak/metaphorsonvisio00brak.pdf , its well worth downloading and reading he says
“Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'Green'? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the 'beginning was the word.”
To me both The cabinet of Dr Caligari and the work of Brakhage point towards and prefigure the possibilities inherent in Glitch art, by declaring that the stuff of film, its subject matter, can be itself. The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and German expressionist film denies the need for naturalism by recognizing via scenery and staging that film is an artificial construct while the work of Brakhage points to techniques like scratching and burning and painting on the surface of film or collaging found materials to make non narrative abstract films which points at the possibilities of manipulating the very stuff of film itself which have parallels to techniques in glitch art such as hex editing , displacement maps and generated artifacts.
Glitch art does not need to pretend to suspend disbelief in the theatrical sense with layers of generated realism, it exposes and makes us question more the nature of what we are watching, trusting nothing as when datamoshing confounds our expectations, it is to me a return to the possibilities of film and moving image that Hollywood even in its wildest fever dreams turned its back on .
Glitch art treats film or moving image as a source in itself, the material I find and use I see in the same way that I would see paint, a physicality to be squeezed out onto a palette and mixed and smeared and remixed on canvas, scraped away added too and painted over to take on previous texture and colour until I am finally happy with what I see on the screen.
Meaning can surface fleetingly in a fragment of a face or a sound or motion that points back to the original source but that is just transitory and dreamlike as to me narrative is unimportant. In our everyday lives we don’t live a narrative, we move from moment to moment without script, experiencing moments of perception or distraction Jumping from thing to thing visually distracted by one thing after another calling away our attention , be it a fragment of a conversation a moment of sunshine , a spilled cup of coffee , sound bleeding into our consciousness from the street or the neighbours Radio.
When I make what I make I seek to reflect that fragmentation by probing digital media with tools of disruption, in a non narrative and non linear fashion , to me editing the end results is more a process of choosing what I like more than attempting to fit together a story and I don’t intend what I make to be seen from start to finish more to be dipped into and fast forwarded or rewound as something strikes the eye of the viewer as interesting.
Confounding expectation
So what I’d like you all to hold in mind when making your own work are these things .
1)Naturalism in Film is a construct and a betrayal of possibility
2)Narrative is unimportant.
3)The moving image can be treated as a material like paint
4)In editing seek what is interesting visually rather than a story
5)The viewer is allowed to move backwards or forwards through the ‘finished’ piece creating it for themselves
Other considerations also come up into the making of work, before we get to creative commons and libre culture I’d ask that you consider this , there is a reason I use and install free and open source software and that is to do with taking on a value system which implies that what I can share with you , you can share with others , the software I use comes from a philosophy which denies selfishness and rewards altruism, open source software grants you the right to use modify and share the software with easily accesible source code, a right that you must also grant others if you make changes or use parts or all of that software , applied to culture that in itself is a powerful idea and one which allows for and fosters remix culture – lawrence lessig who started the creative commons movement talks about Remix culture
From the wikipedia entry for Lawrence Lessig -
‘Lessig has been a proponent of the remix culture since the early 2000s. In his 2008 book Remix he presents this as a desirable cultural practice distinct from piracy. Lessig further articulates remix culture as intrinsic to technology and the Internet. Remix culture is therefore an amalgam of practice, creativity, "read/write" culture and the hybrid economy.
According to Lessig, the problem with the remix comes when it is at odds with stringent US copyright law. He has compared this to the failure of Prohibition, both in its ineffectiveness and in its tendency to normalize criminal behavior. Instead he proposes more lenient licensing, namely Creative Commons licenses, as a remedy to maintain "rule of law" while combating plagiarism.'
see here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Lessig
And that is an Important point to make, creative commons and remix culture are about taking sources and remixing making new and interesting work , they are not about mere copying and passing others work off as your own , to make new is good plagiarising is bad . Which brings us neatly onto legalities and copyright.
Concepts and material
The legalities of copyright and remix culture – I’m not a lawyer but consider that to avoid Dmca take-down notices, or other wise , loss of accounts and lawsuits when working with found material its helpful to know what you can and can’t use and that copyright law varies between jurisdictions, just because something is or isn’t public domain in the U.S doesn’t mean it is or isn’t elsewhere. In my experience there is no point fighting copyright bots on YouTube or elsewhere , just take down the work and re-edit it excluding the part the claim is against or alternatively post elsewhere if an egregious copyright bot has made a mistake – create a PeerTube account !! Copyright laws are skewed to big corporations who have lots of money and time – we just want to make art so lets stay out of their way and undermine their power slowly and surely by creating better work that can be shared by all.
Also note that looking at the legal guide I’ll link in the subsequent blog post there was a change in American copyright law in March of 1989. To quote from that guide if ‘ The work didn't include a proper copyright notice prior to 1 March 1989 — , the work went into the public domain’ , this doesn't apply to works created after 1 March 1989, when a copyright notice became no longer mandatory to protect a work. However, prior to that date, notice of copyright was necessary on all published works. Without this notice, the work went into the public domain’ – See ‘ The night of the living dead’ which is one of the most obvious casualties of this which is how I could legally take that film from 1968 and remix it to make this https://tube.tchncs.de/w/6aRfctayR7gwds3pz3T5uK
My primary source for material to work with is https://archive.org/details/movies which hosts a lot of public domain material which is about the safest material to use for remixing and remaking but check when sourcing anything that the work is marked with either the public domain mark as specified by creative commons which looks like this
Or the creative commons CC0 mark , no rights reserved ie as it says on the creative commons website https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/ ‘CC0 empowers yet another choice altogether – the choice to opt out of copyright and database protection, and the exclusive rights automatically granted to creators – the “no rights reserved” alternative to our licenses.’
Work in the public Domain
What constitutes a work that is in the public domain and how does it get there ? Creative commons has a really good guide here https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/PDM_FAQ and a really good artists guide can be found here https://theartistsjd.com/public-domain/ and paraphrased below .
‘Simply put There are three common ways that work enters into the public domain:
copyright expires
copyright never perfected
work was never protected by copyright’
And if something is in the public domain ‘ you can use, modify, adapt, change, or build upon the original without asking permission’
But there are other less obvious things to consider when reusing, remixing and sharing public Domain work and the reason why I remove sound a lot of the time , unless the glitch process renders that sound unrecognisable .
Non-obvious considerations
These elements within a film that is ostensibly public domain may still be under copyright
Cinematography
Drama
Literature
Music
Art
Graphical characters (e.g., Bugs Bunny)
Fictional characters (e.g., James Bond)
This wikipedia article runs through the uncertainties here and also gives handy links to lists of films considered to be in the public domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_in_the_public_domain_in_the_United_States
A legal guide here https://www.copyrightlaws.com/what-is-the-public-domain/
And a record of what becomes public domain ( in the us) here https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2021/ . Every year new works enter into the public domain ( though there was a 20 year pause caused by that pesky mouse from 1998 to 2019 ) this website is a good guide to what has entered public domain by year
Credit the source
When using public domain sources I generally credit the source if reusing public domain films ie title , director and where I found it . The caveat when using archive.org is that you must use your judgement , unless it states explicitly the film is public domain be wary , read through the comment section below the work as some material may not be public domain and the comments section may point this out .
https://search.creativecommons.org/search/video?q=video&license_type=modification
And pixabay ( though it gives links to places like istock so be wary of clicking on those links) https://pixabay.com/videos/search/
Opensource films
opensource films https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_film these are listed in this link but check the licenses as to what can and cannot be done with them If you are going to use them licenses are explained on the creative commons page here creative commons main page https://creativecommons.org/
Other sources to consider are tilvids ( a curated PeerTube instance which specializes in videos that inform or teach ) here https://tilvids.com/ or peertube itself this instance has interesting content but there are many other instances https://peertube.tv/ but remember to check the licenses work is published under.
No derivatives
If you see this sign on any of the sources you are looking at to work with then basically you can look at it sometimes share it , use it in say a presentation etc but you cannot make derivative works from it , so that work is essentially for our purposes unusable – but by respecting that sign we strengthen the whole creative commons as a form of copyright that we have power over .
It would take too much time and become to involved to explain fully in detail the different issues around copyright that working this way entails so I’m linking guides Ive found and looked at in the blog post published after this , this is a short run through of some of the issues but I would encourage you to read about this.
A good guide to Uk and by extension a lot of EU copyright law ( for now) here https://www.copyrightuser.org/ it also has a good page on creative commons licensing and also a good guide to Uk public Domain definitions https://www.copyrightuser.org/create/public-domain/duration/ which at the moment should be in reasonable alignment with E.U definitions . Guide to remixing https://creativecommons.org/use-remix/
If we go here https://search.creativecommons.org/search/video?q=video&license_type=modification we can see that content is indexed by licence cc 0 being a completely free and open to any kind of reuse – cc public domain mark and theres a handy explainer at the side which allows you to search by licence and gives an explanation ( via clicking questionmark ) as to what you can do with that content. I’d refer you to the old Glitch Artists Collective on FaceBook adage ‘credit the source’ ( doesn’t currently support search of video but does link to other resources )
wikipedia article on Remix culture here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remix_culture
So one of the tasks I want to set you is to read through and decide what creative commons licence you would share your work under https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/
Lets make some work
Webcams
Because people will be using either windows or linux I have to give two different versions of commands and where possible I try to make that clear.
This first bit is just going to show you how we can activate and play with the output of webcams and it gives us a grounding in using the terminal git bash on windows , anyone on Linux we will cover that afterwards , I’m assuming you have a working webcam and know how to get to the terminal in which case just bear with us . It might seem a roundabout way to start working with found sources but there is reasoning behind this as a starting point .
Getting your webcam to work for live hex editing on win 10
For Linux users this is the command - just copy and paste it and hit enter , making sure you have a working webcam attached ( just use lsusb or lspci from a terminal to make sure and replace /dev/video1 with the device id of your camera)
ffmpeg
-i /dev/video1 -f rawvideo -vcodec rawvideo -pix_fmt yuv420p -s
640x480 - | sed 's/ff/18/g' | ffplay -f rawvideo -vcodec rawvideo
-pix_fmt yuv420p -s 640x480 -
** addenda during the session it became apparent that some were having problems activating their webcams using this script the alteration that seemed to work involved changing the 640x480 part to a common output like cif which would change the script to
for linux users
ffmpeg
-i /dev/video1 -f rawvideo -vcodec rawvideo -pix_fmt yuv420p -s cif - | sed 's/ff/18/g' | ffplay -f rawvideo -vcodec rawvideo
-pix_fmt yuv420p -s cif -
and for windows users
ffmpeg -f dshow -i video="yourwebcamnamehere" -f rawvideo -vcodec rawvideo -pix_fmt yuv420p -s cif -r 5 - | xxd -p | sed 's/00/00/g'| xxd -p -r | ffplay -f rawvideo -vcodec rawvideo -pix_fmt yuv420p -s cif -
Thanks all for sorting this out in session
*************
Windows users
first get ffplay to show you
what cameras you have available by opening
git bash, typing this in hitting enter
then
look for output that specifies your camera)
ffplay
-list_devices true -f dshow -i dummy
(from
powershell or cmd do if
you havent installed ffmpeg using chocolatey)
ffplay.exe
-list_devices true -f dshow -i dummy
find the bit where
it mentions your camera on mine its this "Live! Cam Sync HD
VF0770"
copy and paste that into this ffplay.exe -f
dshow -i video="Live! Cam Sync HD VF0770"
then
copy and paste ( shift+ins on win 10) back into git-bash
Hit enter and your webcam should now be visible . bit boring but now
we know how to do that we can do something more complicated
A note ## to stop any of these processes ie to kill the webcam feed or video playback either click on the x on the window that opens up or click on the top bar on the terminal to get focus and then press ctrl+c together ( linux and windows is the same ) .
but then we can do this (replace "yourvideodevicename" with the name of your device found using ffplay.exe -list_devices true -f dshow -i dummy)
ffmpeg -f dshow -i video="yourvideodevicename" -f rawvideo -vcodec rawvideo -pix_fmt yuv420p -s 640x480 - | ffplay -f rawvideo -vcodec rawvideo -pix_fmt yuv420p -s 640x480 -
If this command fails or you get no output click on the terminal to get focus press ctrl+c which should kill that program and return you to a blank command line with cursor andthen try changing both 640x480 to cif or vga , webcams can be a little funny and quirky .
Which will allow us to do something more complicated because we are piping the output of ffmpeg into ffplay rather than just using straight ffplay to show the webcam
so by altering that command slightly we can hex edit the output and get this
ffmpeg -f dshow -i video="yourvideodevicename" -f rawvideo -vcodec rawvideo -pix_fmt yuv420p -s 640x480 -r 5 - | xxd -p | sed 's/00/00/g'| xxd -p -r | ffplay -f rawvideo -vcodec rawvideo -pix_fmt yuv420p -s 640x480 -
Note that I’ve added in an extra after the first 640x480 ie the -r 5 part which turns the output frame rate down to 5 fps , that’s because on windows it seems to work better , on linux you can do the same but I haven't found the need to do this as Linux just seems to work faster with this particular command
on linux the same command would be
ffmpeg -i /dev/video1 -f rawvideo -vcodec rawvideo -pix_fmt yuv420p -s 640x480 - | xxd -p | sed 's/00/00/g' | xxd -p -r | ffplay -f rawvideo -vcodec rawvideo -pix_fmt yuv420p -s 640x480 -
and by altering the two 00 in this section ( which to explain takes the stream of raw video converts it to hexadecimal ( the xxd -p ) and changes values from the first value to the second using the stream editor sed | sed 's/00/00/g' | so if we change those to this
ffmpeg -f dshow -i video="Live! Cam Sync HD VF0770" -f rawvideo -vcodec rawvideo -pix_fmt yuv420p -s 640x480 -r 5 - | xxd -p | sed 's/88/ff/g'| xxd -p -r | ffplay -f rawvideo -vcodec rawvideo -pix_fmt yuv420p -s 640x480 -
we get nice red sparkles , but if we do this ( change 88/fff ) we get this which is a lot more fun
If you change the output size at the end the video becomes naturally glitched before you add in hex edit changes , and sometimes its also useful to run through different resolutions on webcams because I’ve found through experience that some webcams work better at some resolutions than others speedwise.
or sometimes experiment with different colourspaces by changing the yuv420p to one of these
monob,
rgb555be, rgb555le, rgb565be, rgb565le, rgb24, bgr24, 0rgb, bgr0,
0bgr, rgb0, bgr48be, uyvy422, yuva444p, yuva444p16le, yuv444p,
yuv422p16, yuv422p10, yuv444p10, yuv420p, nv12, yuyv422, gray
( not all of these will work or work with your hardware so experiment)
If you have this working you can see there is a bit of a delay in output , that’s due to buffering
try messing around with the size of video mismatching input and output ( though stick to standard sizes like 320x240, 640x480 , 800x600, 960x540, 1280x720 )
If you want to capture the output of this you can either use a screen grabbing tool or my preferred option these days is obs-studio and its pretty much the same on windows and Linux so Ill just run through that now
open
up obs-studio
click on the sources button add source, click on window capture , create new if you don’t have an existing one ( have the ffplay pipe window showing the webcam running in the background click on window and scroll down until you find [ffplay.exe]:pipe: select that press on okay you should now have the output of ffplay in the obs window but you may have to resize it so click on the video so you have a red border right click inside that to bring up the menu look for transform then select either stretch to screen or fit to screen either is good but fit to screen doesn’t distort the output and any black borders can be gotten rid of later using Handbrake.
This should give you the basic techniques for manipulating webcams and recording using just the command line and obs-studio when you have decided on sources to play with these simple commands can be changed so that you can playback video from the command line using this simple command ( find the folder where you have your videos right click and click on git-bash here or in Linux Open-terminal depending on D.E you are using )
ffplay -i yourvideo.mp4
if the video has spaces in the title then do this ( or rename it to something without spaces)
ffplay -i “your video.mp4” or ffplay -i ‘your video.mp4’
but we can also use the second command and do some live hex-editing by changing that command to ( same on both windows and linux)
ffmpeg -i yourvideo.mp4 -f rawvideo -vcodec rawvideo -pix_fmt yuv420p -s 640x480 - | xxd -p | sed 's/00/00/g' | xxd -p -r | ffplay -f rawvideo -vcodec rawvideo -pix_fmt yuv420p -s 640x480 -
Though
you might want to change the 640x480 to match the size of the video
which we can get by using this command ffprobe -i yourvideo.mp4 and look for the output which gives the size
This should give you the basic tools to start playing with the sources you've found and start making the basis for works by working on settings, formats and hex editing settings. More will be covered in the next post .
