GLITCH ART
Blog Best Bits 2002
05 JANUARY
Error of type: Error.
Extra information: A fatal error occurred.
Please restart your life and try again.
TEUCE
15 JANUARY
The synthesizer make like this.
The computer make stick together.
The button make go!
20 JANUARY
Just discovered that one of the tracks off Biosphere's Patashnik album
samples the scene from Scanners (David Cronenburg, 1981?) where the
scanners are sitting in a circle in the woman's house, pooling their
energies. That's made my day, because both the film and album are
mindbombing. The bomb is in the bag. I got stopped at customs and they
asked to see the soles of my shoes in case I had a bomb there.
I kept telling them - the bomb is in the bag, look in the bag. That is
where the bomb is. But they didn't listen, so I forgave them.
SKYBOMBER
17 FEBRUARY
Scramble vector graphics glitch, 1982 vintage (Vectrex emulator).
Check out the pixels!
This could be a highly scientific diagram of decaying alpha-particle
trails in a bubble chamber. Highly radioactive stuff - you should
be viewing this site behind 2-4mm of aluminium.
SWI2/CWAII/DAA
02 MARCH
I can give you retro! I can't give you the moon on a yellow stick,
but retro is on my radar. Glitch art in 1970's turquoises and browns. Yum.
When I was about 7 me and my Mum went to see a neighbour called Joan
who lived across the street, and I was amazed by all the turquoise stuff
in her kitchen. Fridge, iron, cooker, cups, table, chairs - turquoise
everywhere. I later learned that this is what people did in 1978 - they
purchased turquoise items for the home.
This glitch was made by making a Commodore C128 emulator execute a
Commodore Vic20 emulator. Incestuous eh? The result is similar to
what happens with humans - disturbingly mangled, a level from
Manic Miner or Jet Set Willy made from chemically-altered-state pixels.
JOAN'S KITCHENETTE
13 MARCH
Here's a (NON Glitch-Art!) image of the computer room at university in the summer of 1992.
The final exams were over, and I was monopolising all the PCs to calculate regions of a
heavily zoomed-in part of the Mandelbrot set. I sellotaped the printouts together to make
some big black-and-white posters. Great fun! I was really into fractals then - they seemed
to live on the Moon! This photo looks really dated now...brings back a weird mixture
of memories...
COMPUTER LAB 1992
27 MARCH
Summer's around the corner. It'll soon be satellite-spotting season.
When I see one, I type it's coordinates relative to my head
into my Casio pocket calculatrice, and average the coordinates
(sum of coordinates divided by no. of satellites) to determine
the location of the Mother Ship to an ever-increasing accuracy
whose truth is silly to ignore!
Debugging punch-cards. Soggy cards = soggy wisuelles, so don't
place your Top Deck cans on my neat punch-cards with accurate
rectilinear holes!!
30 MARCH
The computer is in control.
The computer can calculate up to 100 times faster than the male human brain.
The computer room can only be accessed by authorized personnel.
The magnetic tape contains all the data in binary zeros and ones.
Spool forwards, spool backwards to access memory in seconds.
Each line of computer programme codes must end with a carriage return.
The computer is programmed not to make an error.
Computers cannot yet match the human brain at chess, but in the year 2000 they might.
New peripherals such as the lightpen and joystick will make the keyboard obsolete.
Most typists can be trained to use the office computer in a few weeks.
01 APRIL
Determinism is the new chaos, and is well suited for the modern
practitioner of PROjected BInary Reproducible EXperiences (PROBIREX).
CORLJJN
07 APRIL
The problem is this: in transferring numerical data from some source
to a representation on a 2-dimensional surface, where do you make the cuts?
Each frame of this animation contains the same data (my Windows registry file), but
cut differently, ie. the "carriage-returns" occur at different frequencies.
Not long to go before my big VJ flop, er, success. I was checking out VJing
tips and tricks on some website, seeing as it's all new to me, and came
across a right load of crap. One tip was: Always make the images change at
least as fast as the beat of the music, so the images 'catch' the beats.
Bollox! If I want some nice static image for the audience to appreciate in quiet
rapture for half-an-hour or so, then by gum, that's what I'm gonna do!
The audience aren't a bunch of rudimentary life-forms who need a constant
drip-feed of flickering lights in their retinas in order to remain conscious.
You'll notice how, despite knowing nothing about VJing, I can still
hold quite strong (and, no doubt, wrong) opinions on the subject :)
09 APRIL
Sift incoming written data, like TELEXs.
Your typewriter ribbon needs replacing.
The Tipp-Ex is making the VDU messy.
The photostat is a serious piece of office equipment.
QESGUED
11 MAY
I like it when digital arty-farty types - me included:) - have stupidly
overblown web pages with tons and tons of CRAP, so much so that the
browser can't render it without having an aneurism. I feed off these pages,
because they produce nice glitches! It's like the Food Chain in nature.
I am the plankton feeding off the big fishy websites.
Also, everybody should have a recycling bin for glitches next to their computer.
If you only see horizontal lines in today's image, your monitor is badly
callibrated. If you can see all the other stuff without squinting
and pressing your nose up against the monitor, again, your monitor
is badly callibrated. See how I make you work hard to appreciate the art?
It is fun.
MILGD
24 MAY
Ever realise that an IBM floppy diskette being defragmented could look so beautiful?
Click image for larger pixels than are good for you.
NEUC
And here's another defrag screenshot (my C: drive). As usual, the colours have
been remapped in accordance with my inimitabe taste!
AORT BORT
01 JUNE
The VIC20 is truly a marvellous consumer product. I hear they still
sell them in Japan from futuristic vending machines.
AEBHILLE
02 JUNE
Remember, you cannot have half a pixel! It is either 0 or 1
(or 2 occasionally due to quantum burrowing effects).
Oh, where will it all end? You realise it's all pointless,
of course. If only flowers were binary, they wouldn't need
pruning, because you cannot have half a pixel!
On weightier matters, the Queen is 100 this weekend or something nice.
Lots of people are celebrating. The Queen has been ruling England
for 25 years today. Of course, I remember 1977, her Silver Jubilee,
which was to celebrate her ruling the World for 25 years to the day,
this weekend. Just imagine - she's now 50 years old next month.
The Queen. Cor. What would we do without her? Wrong question - one
should be asking oneself what one should do with one now that one
voted her to power in 1977, when we celebrated her 25th birthday.
Of course, in the olden days we celebrated her Jubilees on the second
Monday of every month, come rain or shine or smog. She quickly racked
up 100 Queen bonus points for reaching the ripe old age of 100 before
her 25th birthday. But nowadays, with a faux-Playstation-ethic in
our society demographics, the time-bomb of unopened Jubilee celebrations
could prove to be a ticking time-bomb of literally unopened Jubilee
celebrations.
God I'm bored. Heres a black square with some grey-to-white (variable)
pixels in it somewhere. I like it. I don't know if you like it. If I
did, I'd be on TV. Oh I wish I was famous. I really aspire to being on
TV and having my rubbish turned over by journalists. Yes, I strongly
believe that being famous would add to my quality of life and make
me deeply happy and satisfied with life. Here's the plan: I do lots
of these midget rectangles of glitch images. Then I print them up
on a rusty dot-matrix printer and sell them on the interweb to lots
of people. Then, when 10% of the population have one of my prints
on the wall, I am deemed to be famous. At this point I start to get
recognised in the street. People occasionally throw money at me because
I've brightened their day. Now I start to develop super-human powers. I
find it easy to cure the sick and maimed. Small animals are instinctively
drawn towards my presence. And so on. I know, it sounds like paradise,
and also a little far-fetched. But check this out - Tracy Emin has actually
acheived all this and more in her short life of only 22 years so far.
LFTLLIFFFTTLTTFTFFFLLL
06 JUNE
Something different is happening inside my brain this week.
08 JUNE
I've had a little chat with my evil psychiatrist, and we've
agreed it's OK to be subnormal. That's a relief. I can get on
with the rest of my life now. I have four little projects I'd
like to do, and they're all vacuous and meaningless,
but I'm comfortable with that now. Three of them are graphics
programming related, so excuse me if updates to the BLOG here
are a little less regular. I've actually been doing quite a lot
on the site during the last two months, and what goes up must
fall sideways, as they say in Styria!
10 JUNE
I'm in the mood for giving advice today, so if anyone needs help
with their life in some abstract way, drop me an email for
some impartial, potentially dangerous psychobabble nonsense.
16 JUNE
Went to the GameOn exhibition at the Barbican, London.
I was disappointed by my performance on Galaxians, but
made up for it with the high score on Missile Command.
Breakout on the Atari was really hypnotising. There was
an installation by Scanner and Friendchip, but it didn't
have sufficiently causal feedback to human input to be
satisfying. The other main installation, Ping, was a fake
game, but actually quite enjoyable. Mooncresta was as
irritatingly difficult as ever. The entrance fee was very
high, which is why we stayed for about 4 hours to get
our money's worth!
This glitch occurred when I selected Print Preview in GSView.
It should have been a neat page of equations typeset with LaTeX,
but instead I got something altogether more interesting!
DNEHLTEH
29 JUNE
This glitch is a heavily horizontally-stretched grab of my IE window
when it became all bewildered and confused. Poor dear!
Microsoft's Mission Statement, instead of being "A computer
on every desktop", should have been "A stinking pile of
error-spewing cardboard on every enslavement-station". Actually,
I shouldn't be rude like that - code is actually very hard to
write, especially if you want it bug-free! (Just thought I'd
patronise you all by pointing that out.) Are we done, good,
that's enough words, so here's the picture:
GOCCQ
05 JULY
Data spool reprocessing pipeline operational.
Hold bytes in wooden caskettes until magnetism wanes.
Collective effective dose equivalent commitment = 1024 Gy.
JOYOT/TOYKO
11 JULY
SuperPET optimally configured. Diodes getting hotter. Eh what?
Our radionuclide emissions make a jaggy path to oblivion.
CON*FON
19 JULY
Dispositional test #1024 (repeat):
Insert shards of left-rotated bytes into both retinal zones.
With all such experiments we must be prepared to accept:
1. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is no longer a law.
2. The outcome is a part of our being, and we are not wrong, so the outcome cannot not wrong.
3. The House always makes 2% margin.
GAUZE INJURE
20 JULY
A fine thread is attached to the top of everyone's head. The other
ends are all gathered together and tied to a "Heath Robinson" style
mousetrap on the Moon, our most friendly of planets
(unlike that evil entity Jupiter). Anyway, when Moon-mouse eats the
cheese, a sequence of events unfolds in real-time, culminating
with all our heads being pulled up and together to a single point,
resulting in a loud "clonk" and also some cross-fertilization of
idea-beans.
EIUNDIL
04 AUGUST
Here's the game: Launch your favourite emulator for a 1980s home computer,
don't write any programs, just start executing machine code bytes from the
start of the text screen area or graphics screen area. Sit back and wait
for something nasty to happen whilst making the toast. Yes, I know it's
lazy, but look at the results!
YJAW-KRAMB
15 AUGUST
HECEGOIN
I fixed the machine firmly in my good eye
and saw a grey heart in all our whichsoevers
and rightly-so.
Ordering the harsh chemicals today, and then it's go go go.
14 SEPTEMBER
The populous has been sated with the old ways.
I will rule you unchallenged for another 400 years.
Magic numbers for today are 4444^4444 and twelvty.
One of the nice things about having a few words
of German on this site is that I receive German 9orno
junk email. Aren't I lucky. Multilingual spam. Fabulous.
LEAX -1,Y
23 SEPTEMBER
Notice how, by careful colour manipulation, at least
two processes that caused this glitch can be separated out.
You've got rows of fairly regular notches, and then there
are the "lightning flashes" going diagonally through them
in some OR-type operation, by the looks of it.
Make careful notes. This'll be on the end-of-term exam.
HUON
28 SEPTEMBER
You wouldn't believe me if I told you this
video-RAM glitch came from playing one of those
Pokémon-type games. I have a cuddly
Psyduck poke-poke toy on my stairs. It unnerves
visitors with its duck-type psychic powers etc.
It is yellow. It is nice.
ARTENE
10 OCTOBER
Loose toner particulates MUST be vacuumed-up
to avoid accumulation on receptive bits, which could
lead to the unfortunate scenario where the
average value of a byte increases beyond 8.3 bits
from its nominal operating value of 8.01 bits.
REL
16 OCTOBER
Moving down to a one-bit dissection of my Windows swap file,
this sector reminds me of Frogger.
Sure, you can't see a frog or logs or trucks or diving
turtles or crocodiles, but it's still unmistakeably Frogger.
On an unrelated note, it is now apparent that this web real-estate
didn't win the Guardian newspaper's Best British Weblog Competition.
Not suprising, seeing as it's not really a blog, more a big
mess of shivering pixels trying to form short German werbs in FORTRAN.
Anyhow, I wonder which one of the minor celebrity judges got to review
this site... I hope it was that total loon Janet Street-Porter.
REDRADIUM
07 NOVEMBER
Uh-oh, today's the day. My code had better not crash or I
won't be best pleased.
23 NOVEMBER
This is from one of those "special marks" you get on UPS order tracking
labels. I scanned it, and then thresholded the colours to get rid of the
interpolation fringes you get when magnifying the original scan. Or something
like that. Now it could pass for a screenshot from one of those cheapo
Binatone console games from the late 1970s. It would probably be called
something impressive-sounding like Vortex of Doom, only to disappoint
lots of kids when they discover it's just some big pixels and no on-screen
scoring. And the High Scores table is lost when you take the batteries out.
LUEGN
13 DECEMBER
So, what color (sic) is my parachute?
My vertical hold's gone awry.
BWEE TRE5 5EA
28 DECEMBER
Next year's fashionable colours will mostly be:
Nuclear Green
Acid Green
Plutonium Grey
Radioactive Orange
Red-Eye Red
Autopsy White
Fallout Yellow
Summer Skies When You Were Young Blue
A88INTOB66
On to 2003 >>>