GLITCH ART
Blog Best Bits 2003
09 JANUARY
Yes, well, having just slaaagged off substandard code bending with
lame trails, here's some bended berserk with lame trails. Note
the high-tech reverse gravity image processing effect to give the realistic illusion
of playing on a 2-player cocktail cabinet, or cocktail table, whatever
it's called. As we join the action, the little man has died due to
a round thing overwriting his pixels. Hey look kids, the background is
a bit like a polluted downtown NY suburb at night. Very atmos. All the
lights in the offices... I want to buy a frequency scanner and eavesdrop on
the conversations inside. Yes, that's right. I want to eavesdrop on
imaginary conversations in an imagined world in a screengrab from a
game about killing robots. I hear white coats approaching...
Recipe Tip: To make the perfect pastry base, first you need a stable mind
with not too much going on inside.
BENG PETH EDRASSA (COCKTAIL CABINET REMIX)
13 JANUARY
Furthermore, before civilization, the only straight line humans
saw was the horizon. The modern cathode ray tube, when
linked up to powerful calculating devils, can count
up to 100 times more swiftly than the finest human brain.
Raster lines create interlaced thoughts. The eye is damaged
by chronic exposure to insufficiently smooth images; the high-frequency
modes wither in the radioactive winter of the stoic Apfel I-Book™.
Thoughts on mining aesthetically-rich seams in high-dimensional (euclidean) parameter spaces:
There has to be a better way. I mean, it just doesn't make any goddamn sense;
stepping in tiny-tiny footsteps from aesthetically good point A to aesthetically
good point B just gives you a whole pile of flapjack inbetween. Unless
you're lucky.
PH1-DEX
18 JANUARY
Sixteen brush electric motor drives spindle.
Uniform density may be assumed.
Moment of inertia is proportional to square of radius.
Frictionless bearings. Inextensible tape. Ignore air resistance.
At operating rotational velocity, compute the data transfer rate.
One hundred millibytes per hour.
19 JANUARY
Watch the onset of chaos from the comfort of your own skin. Damn period 3.
I might try and generate these glitches live at Plug And Play. Just to prove
I don't cheat. It's an experiment that would be sure to go wrong, but that's
where my shadow-puppet skills come in as backup.
CORPUKE
25 JANUARY
Today's glitch art visual blog entry (spot the blatant keyword usage), together with
the piece entitled PH1-DEX, from 13 January, are a pair of evil twins.
Beware I live.
Run coward, run.
Anyway, apart from the overused samples that don't impress anyone, seeing as
you're all so über-retro rom-styleee generation-Z persons (moi, I'm
a good ol' fashioned Gen-X-er) oh what the hell am I flapping on about now, oh
yes, this glitch image was a glimpse into the inner workings of Flash, on the
Warp Records site. Tsk! Look at that. Call this heap of shite a blog - I can't
even be bothered to do the hyperlink. I think hyperlinks are almost irrlevant
these days (oh God, that'll get them going) because Google does it better. Yes.
That's suitably cryptic. Look, the page loaded badly ("my insides are all wrong")
and it looked nice here it is now go we have your money thank you goodbye.
22 FEBRUARY
I remapped the colours on this originally greyscale glitch to
represent the colours of some Olympic sports team circa 1971.
You know what I mean - all washed-out blues and yellows and oranges.
The original glitch was tiny, and I can't remember where I caught it.
So that's good.
Das Deutsch lernen geht ganz gut. Darf Ich Herr Glitsch vorstellen? Ja ja!
Next week: buying a postage stamp for your email.
DUL HEIDL
15 MARCH
Been re-reading Generation X by Douglas Coupland. I think
I last read it about 5 years ago. It always makes me feel a bit weird.
Great quasi-slogans are peppered thoughout...
PURCHASED EXPERIENCES DON'T COUNT
LESS IS A POSSIBILITY
SOIL ISN'T A DOCUMENT
...and so on.
I've been a little bit deficient in bringing you glitches recently,
due to other demands on my brain-cycles recently. Not fully up-to-speed
yet, so this one will have to remain bichromate. It is a simple bipartite
study in the growth of a young sapling. A tree will grow in time. The tree
will grow old and wise, before being chopped down to make fashionable
retro wooden hard diskette drives for the 30-somethings in the year 2030.
Reet. I'm off now to program some depression-inducing visuals for Ed from Suppose's
event on Thursday. I should have a placard around my neck
saying FRESHLY-TYPED CODE (think FRESHLY-CUT SANDWICHES).
Of course, freshly-cut sandwiches are just a marketroid way of passing off
lame old stale bread and festering potted-meat fillings to an unsuspecting
public who pay good money.......as for freshly-typed code, well,....
SPIN-DOWN-PARK-HEADS
22 MARCH
I think it's fair to say we all had a great time at the first Suppose extravaganza.
Clicken Sie das Fernsehen für machen sie es großer. Avert your eyes
from the ionizing radiation.
NUKE SMALL LANDMASSES
12 APRIL
Always use high quality tape and progressive acceleration technology
in your spooling motors to avoid stretching during random-access
of the corporation data.
Laminate to reduce eddy currents in the ferrite core.
SCHLOK UND AWW
18 APRIL
Can no longer open Photoshop after defragging my sun-hardened diskette.
So now I am forced to find new ways of working under algorithmic control.
The computer console makes all the decisions. I press the round grey button
and pay for its electric thoughts by direct debit.
ALLOCATE PLANET
22 APRIL
[...this] radioactive dance around uranium fuel tubes.
Stare into the eye of this Medusa for long, and you
will surely die.
GHORON POISONING
06 MAY
I'm working on a TV documentary for BBC1:
Ternary - The Forgotten Base
00000000000112000000000000000
00000000001111200000000000000
00000000011111120000000000000
00000000011111120000000000000
00000000001111200000000000000
00000000000112000000000000000
SIMULATE CITY PREDICT OUTCOME
15 MAY
Wallow in the VOR-FOAM...tell me what you feel...
I've been doing some image acquisiton for the Helsinki-winki visuals, but
my stalwort, the local Salvation Army shoppe, has not come up with
the goods this time. Only some pictures of white-toothed octagenerian
American joggers with a Christian-blue sky. I will scan them and kill them.
S C A N _ A N D _ K I L L
This site gets monitored hourly by the FBI. Don't linger
for long or they'll follow the gamelink cable back to your Pokémon Gold.
When you feel the cable tugging, make a note of the High Score,
take out the batteries and RUN!
VOR-FOAM
17 MAY
Finnish is so cool.
"Goodbye" is pronounced "Knacker me in" without the gaps between the words.
And there's no word for "please". I like it!
05 JUNE
Helsinki was fun. Nice bunch of people too.
There was a barbeque party on Suomenlinna island. I don't
regret not taking part in the open-air sauna followed by
icy plunge-pool. These things can trigger heart attacks,
especially after boozing too much.
And yes, of course I wore a beflix
glitch t-shirt for my talk! Oh hang on - I've just bought a
digital photolithographic box so I can show you now...
T-SHIRT (BEFLIX IN-HOUSE FASHION DESIGN DEPT.)
Hmm. That looks like bird shit. In real life it's nicer, and it's
screenprinted in silver, not white.
14 JUNE
New Delta-Wave™ technology microwave ovens cook food
from the inside, and perfectly evenly on all sides. The food
is enveloped in a high-density flux of magnetron lines of
influence. Magnetic monopoles pulse beams that slice through
all matter, but which are safely contained inside the oven
cavity. The result is the most technologically advanced cooked
food known to man, its process of cooking only being betrayed
by a slight radioactive taste and a thin layer of silver dust
on the outer surface.
C64 \> POKE 53272,16
GOD IS JUST ANOTHER ARTIFICIAL MOON
12 JULY
Today is the 2nd birthday of GLITCH ART!
Bless you! Bless you all who have been touched by
my robotic hand this past year!
There's a traditional Nuke Party™ at my place this afternoon -
bringing 20g of decommissioned nuclear material and a box
of Ice-Pops™ gains entry b4 9pm. And there will be
yellow byte-sized party pixels for nibbles. Paper plates are non-mandatory.
A value in your eye is worth two in the tummy.
Pixellating your brainwaves for 2 Human™-years.
Irradiating your retinal input devices for 712 Earth™-days.
Reprogramming your beliefs for 17088 Telstar™-hours.
19 JULY
Yay, another NEW BLEEP noise extravaganza and retro gameplay-inspired fun
next month. Look forward to trying out some new ideas, provided I can get the
code sorted out. Everything boils down to lines of (quite literally) bloody code.
This is just a straight-up data visualization of a program exe.
I'm playing around with my current fixation of "greyscale plus a bit of blue".
Colour is everything, don't you think? I mean, the images on this venerable
site are abstract taken to extremes, so aspects such as colour and
even aspect ratio are given more thought than might otherwise be
the case.
The strip on the right-hand edge looks like factory chimneys
polluting our green and pleasant land. Hmm, yes, and the bit next to it
even looks like a railway.
It's funny how people see things differently. I went to see some
artists at their studios, as part of Cambridge Open Studios 2003.
In particular, I was chatting to Mike Tedder
about one of his paper collages which was particularly striking.
[Boulogne Sur Mer]
Mike said this image of a young boy wearing big yellow-rimmed goggles was taken
on a lovely bright sunny day. I couldn't resist saying (truthfully)
that I thought it looked like the boy was watching a nuclear bomb test,
and was wearing the goggles for protection from the glare.
Gathering more confidence, I said this was because the shades of
blue and yellow in his image weren't happy - instead
they were dirty, menacing hues. Well, anyway, he seemed a bit amused at this!
I bought a card with the image. It's good, it'll go up in the Operations HQ.
BORROW ONE FROM TENS COLUMN
17 AUGUST
Systems for destroying.
Systems for imagining.
Systems for conditioning.
Systems for destroying.
Systems for systematizing.
Systems for destroying.
Systems for destroying.
All these systems whirr around our minds, but none of it is real.
QOO8
14 SEPTEMBER
Update: I couldn't let you exist for another week without new eye-warez.
This image is a visualization of the 3818 raw data bytes of the CodeRed2 virus
executable. It's the start of a new family of glitches. Welcome. You'll never leave.
FAEL-SAEF
04 OCTOBER
Highly amplified glitchy ALT text printout.
9orno-pops. Breakfast mandatory 9orn for sociological sectors D, E and worse.
I think that the blog format is getting a bit naff now.
As this site degenerates, er, matures into a Vosene™ commercial, a deadly crucifixion
might be the order of the day. But, until then, I might as well do the
bloggerly thing of shooting 9mm hyper-hot-webboo-links into your stereo eyeflams.
As regularly doped-up glitch junkies will know, I almost always never
modulate the clean, clinical, hospital-hygiene-fetishistic, nuclear
untouchablenessness of my site with links to other sites because they're all wrong.
But I like this one: SATAN'S LAUNDROMAT. You can't go wrong with a name like that.
It is funny and thoroughly unwholesome, unless you have strong views
on laundromats. Oh god, I can't believe I wrote that. You know I write all
the textual gems for this site on Post-It Notes™ and my neighbours'
discarded envelopes, and then type them up in best typewriting onto parchment
on Thursday lunchtime, then make three photocopies of a carbon-copy onto
white, blue and yellow paper. I file the yellow copy under "Y" for yellow.
I compress (by scrunching into a ball) the blue copy onto floppy diskette format,
for a lifetime's digital longevity in digital quality format. The white copy
is laser-printed onto your television screen via Minitel™, where you can
make a handy backup copy on thermal paper. But thermal paper fades after
47 seconds, so leisurelyly scan it into your Apricot™ and floppy-ize it for
even more digital longevity. Next week's topic is too.
BALLOON ZOO
03 NOVEMBER
Buff. The most enigmatic of non-colours. I think it was specially
invented by the evil Pantone™ empire in order to confuse
young programmer-spore in the early 1980s.
BUFF IS NOT WHITE
13 DECEMBER
Video card cruddiness gave birth to this. The brown colouring-in
is entirely my fault. I sign all receipts in my special big brown crayon.
You should see the funny looks I get. People!
Still hungry? Kids! Have a barium meal but then it's straight to bed.
Don't forget to set your counter for 8 Siefert sharp. (CEDE unknown)
FUTUR BROWN
14 DECEMBER
Amiga emulator executable data visualised. It's like standing at the beach,
looking out at the waves come in, and they make diffraction patterns due
to the increasingly shallow water - this causes more drag, reducing the
speed, so the wavelength has to change. Something like that. The world is
amazing when you're a kid, it's all bright blue skies and stripey t-shirts.
I am 4.
Push pedal make zoom-zoom.
Push pedal make zoom-zoom.
Push pedal make zoom-zoom.
Push pedal make zoom-zoom.
Pull lever make change mode.
Push pedal make zoom-zoom-zoom.
Push pedal make zoom-zoom-zoom.
Push pedal make zoom-zoom-zoom.
Push pedal make zoom-zoom-zoom.
Pull lever make change mode.
Push pedal make zoom-zoom-zoom-zoooooooooom.
Hit button make stop. Honk-Honk!
LOW-DENSITY DESTINY = FLOATING FUTURE
21 DECEMBER
All our vision of future has gentle coloured fringes that
should be welcomed into our daily-thoughts.
Only psychopath burn floppydisk without tears.
You can't spin it fast enough by hand - that is why you buy computer.
Wet data forced to edge like salad-spinner by special force.
Fire unzips data into steam, vapor. (sic)
Some warping of substrate, inner sterile sleeve.
No, not repairable. Need to replace whole module in one go.
Risk of electric shock? Yes, of course! It's designed that way for special reason!
PREY UNTIL EYES BLEED
On to 2004 >>>