What is Glitch art ( Digital Transformations part 3 - The influence of Glitch art )

Glitch arts influence can be seen heavily in the worlds of advertising , fashion and design such as trailers for the recent film ghost in the shell ;

Ghost in the shell trailer 2017

Simple Minds new promotional material with images by Heitor Magno ( find his work here Heitor Magnos' work) which refer back to images by Rosa menkman and especially her ‘vernacular of file formats’ - 

Heitor Magno cover for Simple Minds 'Walk between worlds'

Rosa Menkman from 'a vernacular of file formats'

' A vernacular of file formats' is a hugely influential treatise written by Menkman which runs through image formats , they way they can be be destroyed and re-written , and I see it as a huge influence on modern design aesthetics and advertising in general - you can find a copy of it here  https://www.slideshare.net/r00s/rosa-menkman-a-vernacular-of-file-formats-4923967

though her Glitch studies manifesto could be considered equally as important.

In footwear - Adidas GLITCH football boot system, its design ,advertising, concept and slang #GLITCHFAM ( similar to Glitch artists collective  where’s the glitch fam ( plus use in their adverts of concept of open source etc, words like hacked) which not only incorporates style elements and artifacts seen in glitch but also co-opts its language and some of its source , ie the open source movement where a lot of glitch arts tools come from and are shared ( more glitch aesthetic - lost count of how many times  people in certain groups ask if there's an ae plug in or photoshop method for creating glitch look and feel. Though it must be said from an artists point of view these take the appearance rather than the substance of glitch art , it isn’t a search for error that characterises these uses for the main , more a search for modernity and edge, the concerns of design over art.

Naimus studio for Adidas 2017

Though in textiles ( which with jacquard looms could be seen as a precursor to computing ) - Phillip Stearns has successfully transferred his investigations into circuit bent cameras into glitch textile design which has been taken up by Dior and others )  find his work here https://www.glitchtextiles.com/
and work for Dior -
http://www.phillipstearns.com/christian-dior/7htev3wi29yycyr9lvx4912x0km0dd

In the print medium Glitch creeps in everywhere , this from the Guardian is a very basic pixelsort ( an explanation of that term later ) the most overused method in glitch art .

What is Glitch art ? ( Digital Transformations part 2 - The rise of Glitch art ).

The rise of glitch art 

Most glitch artists would claim - Nam June Paik , and early video artists from the sixties , as precursors , they saw a way in which the medium could be made to interrogate itself , especially using video feedback and the misuse of hardware ( early circuit bending)

 

Nam June Paik - excerpt from Video film concert 1965  

and they would definitely claim the work and methodology of Stan Brakhage especially his use of film scratching and the non narrative nature of his work , as glitch art is mainly non narrative and also makes use of analog material such as damaged vhs and copying sources to the point of degradation.

Stan Brakhage - Dog star man (1961-65)

But the first real inklings of something like glitch art , a purposeful mistreatment of digital or analog devices / software to create meaningful error comes in the form of 'Digital Tv Dinner' by Jamie Fenton and Raul Zaritsky with sound by Dick Ainsworth which apparently was made by banging or pulling the cartridge out of a primitive games console, and recording the output which shows how low tech glitch art can get.

 

Digital Tv Dinner 1979.

But really took off with the beginnings of the INTERNET in the early to late nineties networks , the fall in the price of computing devices and software , hacker culture and the spread of open source ideas and operating systems , for instance the work of the Jodi collective (Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans)website http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/) which is well worth a visit  and a series of game modifications especially ‘untitled game’ which exploits an error within the game engine of Wolfenstein to render something close to art , these are also downloadable and playable .

Jodi collective - untitled game Ctrl-space 

for further reading see http://media.rhizome.org/artbase/documents/Untitled-Project:-A-Cross-Disciplinary-Investigation-of-JODI%E2%80%99s-Untitled-Game.pdf  

game ROM modification (vinesauce corruption(vinesauce is an emulator for playing game systems games on PC) and physical modification ) being one of the things that feeds into glitch art - 

see more here  http://corruptedbytes.com/the-vinesauce-rom-corruptor/

and physical games machine modification with parallels to Digital Tv Dinner  :

 All of the above , and an increasingly digitally saturated and mediated environment have lead to an Aesthetics of failure , one of the first conferences to recognise and bring together these various strands was held in 2002 in Oslo , Norway see here http://www.liveart.org/motherboard/glitch/

and then Chicago in October of 2010 saw the first GLI.TC/H Organized by Nic Briz ( see later - glitch codec tutorial) Evan Meaney, Joe satrom and Rosa menkman , one of modern glitchs greatest influences , especially her ‘vernacular of file formats’
see here http://gli.tc/h/online.html
and here https://rosa-menkman.blogspot.ie/

What is Glitch art ? ( Digital Transformations talk part 1)

We live in an environment which though increasingly mediated and experienced through technology, which promises a fitter, happier more productive life is filled with error.

 

The notorious Windows blue screen of death, a 404 error looking for a website which is unreachable or unreadable in an outdated browser missing plug-ins,

skipping CDs , VHS tracking errors ( for those of us who remember VHS), sat navs directing us off cliffs or to move to roads which do not exist , the crashing of driver-less cars which fail to recognize obstacles, creepy Alexa voices laughing randomly in the night.

 

 

In broken times we make broken art that reflects the fractured nature of our existence , the distracting siren call of social media updates , funny cat gifs , glitch art looks at everything with a hammer in its eye .

What is it ?

Glitch art is a way to interrogate that error - through the creative exploitation and creation of error within software and hardware .

When I talk about Glitch art I will be referring to visual art specifically - Glitch has a long history in music , especially Techno , Hip Hop and Electronica , Chiptune ( see Autechre , Aphex twin , Radiohead) and the newer Extratone genre, which goes back into the nineties and arguably the fifties with music concrete .

Where is it ?

Glitch art generally exists within the gallery of the screen, its natural environment and breeding ground , in places like You tube, on Instagram, Flickr, Tumblr with its rich feed of work

or groups like Glitch Artists Collective on Facebook,

or built upon banks of monitors in installations by Cracked Ray Tube ( one of the standard forms of new media art the stack of CRTs )

Glitch art is related to :

Though I’m going to be talking primarily about Glitch art its useful to define other movements which are contemporaneous , to avoid later confusion as visually one may look like the other but come from different intentions .

New aesthetic 

Google map error

a movement commonly acknowledged to have emerged around 2012 - it talks about the newer phenomenon of virtual and real life boundaries starting to merge and blur think drone photography , Pokemon go , ubiquitous surveillance and a nostalgia for older games machines , graphics and iconography - in music the chip tune phenomenon ( chip tune music made with older technology such as the c64 sid sound card and super Nintendo - a nostalgia for a future crossed with the knowledge of observation), it also appropriates some of the language of glitch art .

Vaporwave :

Beachport channel by Campton Raven

Vaporwave is the child of software and hardware dreams that never quite happen , a play on the term vapor-ware ( software or hardware  features that are always coming soon but never quite arrive ) it encompasses cool glitch jazz and synth tunes from Ceefax after station close down along with an iconography that plays with old computing adverts , classical sculpture , 80s smash hits design , dolphins and lots of irony - it’s a nostalgic look back to a future that never happened

Forward to a retro future ( artist unknown)

Perfect users - not so much a movement , more a mindset and commentary on how we use Facebook and social media in general, it uses some of the techniques and language of glitch art ( there is a large crossover of artists between each genre ) and in its reuse of notification icons and emojis it has a lot akin with post-modernism . Typified by the Facebook group perfect users and the work of William Wolfgang Wunderbar

And also the video work of Harlan Ogilvy

Fashwave ( vaporwave for alt-right Nazis )

Fashwave ( or alternately Trumpwave) is a strange phenomenon in that it appropriates the language of vaporwave , especially the classical sculptures ( remember Nazi culture leaned heavily on the neoclassical and an idea that modern art was degenerate ) fashwave works by co-opting INTERNET trends and furthering their message by infiltrating groups with co-opted imagery and trying to subvert the conversation and direction of groups by making the unacceptable gradually acceptable - essentially a Trojan horse.

okay , so now we have some definitions out of the way how did we get here ?

Horses

At the moment I'm obsessed by old silent cowboy films and horses, a constant theme in my work.  I've spent a couple of days putting together this video ( cowboy dreams ) from various sources and using various methods . 

I found the film ' The son of a gun' on the Internet archive site ( think I've mentioned that before) , looking for things to run through my latest set up , a resurrected circuit bent webcam I first used in 2012 and a tiny 5inch Roadstar TV I found at a local junk market in working condition that is perfect for running video through as it sizes down everything so the webcam can take in the whole screen - I'm using the lens of an old play-station eye toy as it focuses really well at close distance , and I've found some really nice bends I hadn't found before . The mini monitor has really changed the way that I'm working . 

 

The clip below is a short segment from the resulting film with sound by me , the full version can be found on my peertube channel here : https://tube.tchncs.de/videos/watch/30d0f0ad-e5b5-488d-8d0d-7ad90c3a046b

 

This is the web-cam in its new configuration , a lot more wires , dedicated pots , all held together with hot glue ! You can just about see the mini monitor in the background , so so tiny .

Front

Back

Digital transformations 19-20 may 2018

In may I will be speaking about glitch art at the Digital transformations conference in Ballina , Co.Mayo , the conferences website is here ( tickets to attend are on sale now) http://digitaltransformations.org/ . I'm very proud to be associated with this as it comes at a time when we need to have discussions about art , technology and the subversion of traditional art forms and their hierarchies  . As a little taster of what I will be speaking about I've written this short introduction .

Glitch art is everywhere , but maybe you don’t know it , adverts from Adidas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sotun9qMyrw , films like ‘Ghost in the shell’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4VmJcZR0Yg , music and music video Kanye west – ‘Welcome to Heartbreak’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMH0e8kIZtE , groups such as Autechre, Aphex Twin and genres such as chiptune and Vapor-wave , and fashion https://www.glitchtextiles.com/ . In the wild its a broken screen announcement on your daily commute or a rain hit satellite dish turning neighbors or the six o’clock news into a gibberish of blocks and melting faces and halting sound or an unfinished bittorent download that turns flesh into torrents of broken wax and colour. 

Glitch art works to subvert both software and hardware to render images, sound or physical objects ( deliberately editing 3d software objects exemplified in the work of Mark Klink http://www.markklinkart.com/gallery/ ) into something other , often unreadable and often painful to watch or listen – born on computers and the early Internet through artists such as Jodi http://wwwwwww.jodi.org/ its gallery is the screen , and the screen is everywhere . 

What is it not ? It is not ‘New media’ , that vague phrase used by the art establishment to co-opt technology and new forms into its lexicon , rendering it open to learned criticism and curation. Glitch Art leaves curation behind through the mechanism of its transmission , through Instagram , Tumblr, Facebook , it is to a large degree self curating through likes, reputation and sharing . It is not a filter applied through using photo-shop or after effects ( these are obvious and generally frowned upon ), it takes many of its tools and philosophy from the open source and free software movement, software and hardware are political as closed source hardware and software do not allow for tinkering and playing and restrict the freedom to experiment , inducing a mindset of consumption rather than creative participation . 

It is also problematic to older ways of looking at authenticity and authorship , much of its source, or sauce , is found material, material often than not under copyright , if it can be found on the Internet it will be used , and thus has much in common with remix culture, see Antonio Robert’s (hellocatfood) whats your glitch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPhwzzMXzt0 . It could be argued that Glitch art holds much in common with pop art but it is much more cannibalistic and far more ruthless . 

When a paradigm crashes it takes no prisoners and the language you have used before no longer makes sense.

Its all done with mirrors.

Yep I know , I haven't posted for a long while, but if you've been following my You tube channel then you will know I haven't exactly been quiet. So whats new ? 

Wellllll I've been having various computer based breakdowns and  rebuilds , also writing an article on glitch art for the New Art Examiner see it here http://www.newartexaminer.net/wheres-the-glitch-fam/  

But mostly Ive been making videos and refining what I can do in processing , this is the latest called 'The strangers Holiday v2 ',  v2 because I've used the footage before but this time I wanted to see how far I could really go with it   .

It started out as a straight forward capture from vhs-c , an old tape I had found at a local indoor charity market. Having captured the footage previously I exported it as 720p (1270 x 720) hd , because the black borders that result are quite important to the next process  . I then divided that footage into two at the same resolution , then divided each segment into single frames at 23frames persecond using ffmpeg, batch hex edited them using a commandline script then recombined them using ffmpeg again .Nice and word paddy at this point .

The next process is to divide each section into two and recapture the video as images again using a frame differencing script in processing . The set up i use looks like this:

Basically three mirrors , two straight and one curved and a monitor at the back of that - I'm also using a hd webcam to capture frames during playback which are then recombined after capture using the moviemaking tool in processing . So its a lot of files and a lot of rendering time involved - everything after is put together with the original audio ( plus some spoken html made using an old txt to speech program in win95 ) and a few effects added in Audacity using Flowblade .

Pretty broken things

When I'm making the videos and stills that I post on YouTube, Tumblr and my favorite group on Facebook , Glitch artists collective, I use three separate forms of source material : my own original content , out of copyright or creative commons , or very rarely contemporary news video or other work still under copyright . I try to credit if I'm using material I've sourced online - but generally the final work bears no resemblance to the original - that is the nature of glitch art , online content becomes raw material to be used and reused within the context of online culture , the raw material is just the carrier for what comes after .

I've spent the last week working on a video I ended up calling  'Pretty broken things' . Below is an excerpt , the full video is on my Peertube channel here 

I found the original on archive.org ( a good source for sauce) , I was looking for something to play with that reflected the spirit of 68 in response to an open call for video work I'd found on Artconnect ( http://www.artconnect.com/ )- a good resource for finding exhibitions and opportunities for artists ( if you are interested heres the link for the open call - http://www.artconnect.com/opportunities/vos-6-summer-of-68 ). This is the link to the sauce video - https://archive.org/details/gov.archives.arc.13260.

So just for the hell of it and to give an insight into some of the processes I use these days I'd thought I'd create a walk through of the tools and commands that I used .

So first off I sourced the video from the above link - but the resolution was below what I needed to play with so I had to upscale it in Openshot ( an open-source video editor common to most linux distros http://openshot.org/)  to 720p ( 1270x720 ) - left that running for a while until I had the final file which I then divided into two films of equal length , as I wanted to divide the film into individual frames for the next part of the process.

When I'm outputting to single frames it usually ends up as 1000 plus stills , so to make it easier I'll set up two folders within a master called a and b - . A contains the original stills , b is where I output the worked on frames . The first command to use (from the terminal) is within the a folder where I've also put the video section : 'ffmpeg -i acidclip1 -vf fps=23 image-%03d.xwd'  ( it took a few hours to do this and resulted in over 17000 frames ) so that command  uses a program called ffmpeg ( http://ffmpeg.org/ ) to divide each second of the video ( hasty calculation to make sure I have enough space on the external hardrive ) into 23 frames and output each frame in xwd format ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xwd ) , xwd is an interesting image format similar in texture and the way it can be made to break to ppm or bmp .

So now I have the raw frames I want to do something to them , ie break them in a particular way ( in the video you can see progressive lines and broken multicolours in bands and edge waving into the black edges of where the video was upscaled - one of my favourite effects ) . For this I use a bash script that I've worked on for a while , the original was created by Mandy Tonks as a way of creating what is know as the wordpad effect from the command-line , I found her website back in 2012 but the links have since disappeared - so Mandy if you have a new website that I can link to drop me a line ) . A useful explanation of what the wordpad effect is can be found here ( from 2008 ) http://blog.animalswithinanimals.com/2008/08/databending-and-glitch-art-primer-part.html . The command I use looks like this :

find . -type f -name '*.xwd'|while read filename; do echo ${filename};xxd -p ${filename} | sed 's/ddd/eee/g' | xxd -r -p >/home/ian/Desktop/ck/b/${filename}; done

It looks for a file with the .xwd extension ignoring anything else , then converts it to hex ( xxd http://www.linuxcommand.org/man_pages/xxd1.html ) then does a global replace (using sed https://www.gnu.org/software/sed/ ) of the first hex value ( ddd) with the second hex value ( eee) , then converts the output from hex back into the original file format , but in the new directory I've specified (b). It keeps on doing that until it has worked on each file in the current directory , its an automated form of hex-editing , one of the cornerstones of glitch art ( I will usually try a few different values before settling on a final overall run - its easy enough to let the command run through a few files then press ctrl c to halt it - I use imagemagick viewer or xnviewmp to check out they are interesting enough to carry on - some values will stop the file being readable so it takes a bit of experimentation ) imagemagick can be found here http://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php.

Xnviewmp here http://www.xnview.com/en/xnviewmp/ .

When all the files are converted ( in this case for both halves it took maybe a day to convert to images then hex edit  ) I change to the output directory and convert the stills back into video using ffmpeg again ' ffmpeg -i image-%03d.xwd acidclip1.mpg ' . I then remove all the xwd files - they take up a lot of space - in each directory with ' rm *.xwd' . 

Having done this to both files I then open openshot and recombine both files with the audio from the original - but now I want to change the audio so having experimented on the original file being converted to cavs ( http://xavs.sourceforge.net/ ) and hex edited producing some intriguing sounds

I wanted the sound to be almost legible as speech but not quite . Like aliens talking in the next room. So the file wouldn't convert back in full length after hex editing but it would play through using ffplay ( a function of ffmpeg - you can play a video from the commandline if you have x running say ' ffplay -i acidclip.avi ' . So with the video playing on one computer I fed the output through the headphone output to the input of another laptop and recorded it using audacity ( which can also be used to glitch images and video ) find it here http://www.audacityteam.org/ . 

So to assemble the complete video and audio I then opened the final files in flowblade  ( https://jliljebl.github.io/flowblade/ ) placing the audio over the final video and silencing the audio  that I didn't want - the audio that I recorded through the second laptop was only ten minutes long as opposed to the final 22 of the video so I had to play about a bit to get a full length , so I muted the original ten minutes and replaced it with the glitched audio, the placed it over the final ten odd minutes so they play against each other . I kind of like the effect .

And thats pretty much it for the process , it seems involved and complicated , a lot of it is waiting around for files to process when its something this long , and often because all my equipment is second hand and long in the tooth I'm carefully watching heat stats and loads so nothing breaks down - you have to know how far you can push your equipment , especially if you can't afford to replace it . 

Oh yes - I only use linux , that's it , nothing else , I distro hop quite a lot so the machines I use are a variety of debian based Lmde 2 and linuxmint 18 - both to be found here https://linuxmint.com/ .