I just finished up a new video in collaboration with musician / sound artist Evan Kühl.
The audio is the first track (untitled) off his recent EP, Fralix. If you are interested in hearing more, contact me at bitsynthesis@gmail.com and I will put you in touch with the artist.
Check out the video through the Artwork section of this site, or click the image below to fly direct.
Please watch in HD, with better-than-laptop speakers.
Back in April I interviewed Rosa Menkman for what came to be this article. She is an absolutely prolific artist working in the field of audio and visual glitches. Much of her work can be found on her website (see above link), flickr photostream, and Vimeo page.
A total of 5 artists were interviewed for the article, but due to concerns about length I only included excerpts from each. Since then, I have been periodically releasing the full interviews here on Bit_Synthesis.
This is the full interview with Rosa Menkman.
Me: How do you first develop and explore an idea/concept?
Rosa Menkman: For me working with glitches is part of my ongoing theoretical research. This means that sometimes I am inspired by something I read while at other times my practical work inspires me to read more about a particular subject.
Me: What methods, mediums, and tools do you use?
RM: I don’t feel like I am stuck into using any particular hard or software, or within the distinction between analogue and digital or sound and image. I have my preferences, but my final choice of method really depends on the moment.
Me: What are some of your influences? Where do you find inspiration?
RM: Last week I gave a little talk about my musical inspirations, from a chipmusic perspective. [[ rosa-menkman.blogspot.com/2010/04/alternative-composing-in-chipmusic.html ]] I think Goto80 has been a really big inspiration to me – his work has a lot of tension in it; it takes place within this vortex of randomness, brokenness and perfection, which keeps me interested. I am naturally a curious person so I ask a lot of questions and always search for these tensions in my own life and research. Besides music, I think my main influences and inspiration are in concerts and festivals, books and bad television. I think i find most inspiration between the cracks of whatever else I do in daily live.
Me: Do you see flickr as a community, or simply a platform on which to display your work?
RM: I used to be more active on flickr, but because my personal work revolves around video, I think I moved a lot of my attention to platforms like Vimeo. There I started a similar (video) pool, which I called noise artifacts. [[ vimeo.com/groups/artifacts ]] I think the community on Flickr used to be more active, there used to be a little bit more discussion on there. Now it seems to have become more of a dumping pool – or platform.
Me: What are the pros and cons of displaying work on flickr?
RM: I don’t like it that flickrs video embedding has such bad compression, also, lately I have been seeing flickr compressing my (original size) photo files. Other then this there is no real bad points. I think it is a great way to find more inspiration and find people that have similar interests and research.
Me: Besides flickr, where else do you display/exhibit your work?
RM: In vimeo and on my website. Outside of the internet also in various places, in galleries, exhibitions and festivals. Sometimes I also give lectures and workshops on glitches, file formats and other related subjects.
Me What display environments and mediums would you like to explore in the future?
RM: In May I will be doing a live audiovisual television show in Denmark. Therefore I am getting deeper into composing and sound generation. I am also hoping that during the summer I will find some more time to play around with videomixers and other hardware.
Triptych.tv is a video blog created and maintained by a trio of artists working with video and web technologies: jimpunk, Mr. Tamale, and Rick Silva (aka. Abe Linkoln)
Loading the site is like piloting a spacecraft through a wormhole. I never know if my browser will survive the journey, or if time will slow to a crawl before the page blinks out of existence – taking all my open tabs with it. On the occasion that this doesn’t happen there is no predicting what insanity will be waiting on the other side.
Triptych.tv strives first and foremost to be overwhelming and in-your-face. It certainly succeeds in this regard, presenting a chaotic layout with multiple quicktime videos automatically playing and looping on the front page. Violent and schizophrenic visual imagery is joined by a multitude of overlapping soundtracks to create an intimidating and abrasive audio/visual collage.
The content tends to be very self-aware. Images of the editing software used to create the videos often appears within the videos themselves, creating a sort of metarecursive effect, and the web-based blogger interface appears in a few posts, most notably in TRIPTYCH.TV – Edit Post – View Site. Source media and effects are often re-used across multiple videos, creating an unexpectedly strong feeling of connection between the different works.
I wouldn’t describe a trip to Triptych.tv as a pleasant experience, but I keep coming back all the same. There is something exciting about the seemingly haphazard combinations of found images, cheesy animations, brutal glitches, and exposed software interfaces. Perhaps it is the feeling of unity between such chaotic elements, as though the minds behind it have a clear vision of what should exist in the Triptych.tv domain. Perhaps it is the relief that comes from not hiding the origins and technical realities of the media, of accepting that it is only what it is – there are no unmet expectations or failed attempts to inspire meaning or emotion through narrative.
Whatever it is, I find it remarkably easy to get lost in some of these loops, though I now load them one post at a time from my RSS reader – the front page is a bit too much after the first experience.
I recommend visiting the site to view these videos (and more) in their natural environment.
I interviewed Daniel Temkin as part of the research for a recent post on Vague Terrain. The full article only includes selections of each interviewee’s response (due to space considerations). The full responses were very thoughtful and interesting, so I will be publishing them here over the next few weeks.
Without further ado, here is the full Daniel Temkin interview.
Me: How do you first develop and explore an idea/concept?
Daniel Temkin: Often, experimentation on the files comes first, and the ideas develop from practice. It’s this hands-on approach to file manipulation that appeals to me about databending. Sector, the series much of my early databent work belongs to, began from looking at different file formats as raw materials with their own qualities, and asking what JPEGs want to look like, vs. say, BMP files. We think of file formats as interchangeable, and under ordinary circumstances, anything particular to the format should be invisible. I used the glitching process as a way to reveal and explore these qualities. For instance, JPEGs are compressed and so repetition is built into its structure. After experimenting with various techniques, I found a bug in several image editing programs that alter the way JPEGs are rendered when the metadata describes a different sized image than what is delivered in the image scan. Using that, I could cause the repetition of the image to be revealed. BMP files, which use index color, have a small color palette at the beginning, which is easy to scramble, or drop junk data into, creating trippy, sherbert-y palettes. Each effect I used in Sector was meant to address a specific file format individually.
Me: What methods, mediums, and tools do you use?
DT: Most of the software I write to glitch images begins with automating manual work I often do to the files, and then expands in complexity as I discover new effects. Some of it builds on bugs I’ve discovered accidentally when using various image editing software. Much of it comes from testing what would happen if I tried to process data of type A through system B and see how it is transformed.
Other glitch artists’ techniques have also been useful as a place to start exploring. Stallio in particular has published a lot of useful info on his blog. His tutorial on the use of sound editing programs on image files was of huge benefit to me.
Me: What are some of your influences? Where do you find inspiration?
DT: My Sector series was heavily inspired by Bauhaus-era work and Pop Art, both of which I see as natural companions for glitch art. Repetition of images is of course common in Warhol’s work, and also occurs often in databent images. Iconic symbols work well with databending, since the images are still highly recognizable when bent. In this project, I used databending partly in response to Warhol’s ideas of automation in art; it’s what happens when the machine breaks.
It struck me that the orthogonal shapes often favored by some artists from the Bauhaus era: Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Josef Albers, Hannes Meyer, among others, share a visual similarity to 8-bit pixelated images. When I first broke an SNES game and produced a semi-random pixelated pattern, it reminded me of Albers’s glasswork. But databending adds a grittiness to the images, a hint of chaos. It’s that balance of chaos and order in the work that interests me, something I’ve explored in my ROM-based images for Sector.
Me: Do you see flickr as a community, or simply a platform on which to display your work?
Flickr has a wonderful community of glitch artists, who are very approachable. For artists starting out with databending, it is a fantastic resource.
Me: What are the pros and cons of displaying work on flickr?
DT: There’s definitely an “instant gratification” aspect to Flickr. If you simply post an image and send it to a bunch of different groups, you can get positive responses, but not necessarily the thought-provoking or instructive comments that will help you move forward. But Flickr is a great place to first connect with other glitch artists, the people who you can email to discuss databending techniques or concepts.
Me: Besides flickr, where else do you display/exhibit your work?
DT: I’ll have work at The Bent Festival starting this Thursday. It’s a great meeting ground for artists and musicians that span the different styles and media of glitch art and circuit-bent music. This Summer I’ll be an artist-in-residence in Southern Italy, where I’ll be further developing an approach to databending I’ve been experimenting with recently, which provides a more textured, somewhat less digital-looking final image. Updates and upcoming events will be posted on my blog, at danieltemkin.com/Blog .
Me: What display environments and mediums would you like to explore in the future?
DT: Most of the databending software I’ve written has been geared toward producing a final still image or set of images. I’m experimenting with writing software where the program itself is the final piece, rather than a tool to create an effect. It’s a different sort of challenge, but an approach I’m excited to explore.
There are a lot of interesting techniques, but glitch art is still in its early stages. I’m constantly surprised and delighted by the new approaches to databending I see on Flickr.
Mencoder, the free audio / video manipulation software packaged with MPlayer, offers a free command line (CLI) method for combining many video clips into one. (It can also do a variety of transcoding operations in the style of ffmpeg, but that is not the focus of this post)
Why would you choose this over the multitude of free GUI transcoding programs out there?
Once you learn the syntax, you can append videos much quicker with Mencoder than a more user friendly GUI program (which may use Mencoder behind the scenes anyway). And, it works on Linux, Macintosh, and Windows machines, so you don’t have to learn 3 different programs if you work on multiple operating systems.
Here’s the basic format of a Mencoder append command:
mencoder -oac copy -ovc copy -o 'combined_clip.avi' 'clip1.avi' 'clip2.avi'
Simple as that. The breakdown is as follows:
Knowing this, it is easy enough to script the process. Say I have a whole directory of video files that I want to combine (ex: VID001.AVI, VID002.AVI, VID003.AVI, etc.). I could use the following ruby script to string them all together in their numbered order:
#!/usr/bin/ruby
vlist = String.new()
vpath = "/path/to/my/video/directory/"
vdir = Dir.new(vpath)
vdir.each do |v|
if v.include?(".AVI") == true
vlist << "\'#{vpath}#{v}\' "
end
end
cmd = "mencoder -oac copy -ovc copy -o \'combined_clip.avi\' #{vlist}"
system cmd
Save the script as VAppend.rb and run it like so:
ruby VAppend.rb
(you must be in the same directory as the script in order to run it with the above command)
I have a new article up on Vague Terrain discussing the state of the flickr Glitch Art pool. This is my first attempt at a sort of case-study of a virtual artist community. The writeup includes some interesting interviews with 5 prominent glitch artists / pool members, and is worth checking out for that reason alone.
http://vagueterrain.net/content/2010/06/flickr-glitch-artists
The above animation is called LodTq11277307051, and was created by Max Capacity, one of the interviewees.
The full interviews (the bits included in the Vague Terrain article are excerpts) include a lot more worthwhile information and musings. I will probably post them here on Bit_Synthesis in the near future, so keep an eye out for those.
Eddie Whelan, or eddie the wheel, is a video artist and musician listed on MySpace as hailing from Wilmington, Delaware.
The projects that I have become attached to are those involving bears. Specifically: Atlas Bear and Metal Bear.
In both of these pieces, Whelan is very successful at playing different elements against one another. Initially, the organic subject matter (bears) clashes wonderfully with the sharp, flatness of the color bars. But over the course of each video a reconciliation takes place and by the end the organic and the digital have melded into a cohesive force. Metal Bear forms an angry, jagged image, while Atlas Bear resolves to something much more sublime.
The audio selections are also very fitting, and compliment/re-enforce these moods well.
Version 0.1.7 of Upflickr has been released. It’s not a very exciting release, but there are some very minor tweaks, a few additions to the documentation, and most importantly a newly included BSD license:
I ran into an invisible barrier with my favorite free video editing software, Avidemux: a limit on the number of clips you can draw from for a single project.
Avidemux will only accept segments from up to 100 clips.
If you are appending each clip manually, there may or may not be an error message (this is not how I encountered the limit, so I’m not sure). However, if you, like me, are using scripting to append a large number of files, there will be no error message; just a crash file. This crash file will show one app.load() entry and 99 app.append() entries, and the comments will state something like // 100 Videos, regardless of how many more your script attempted to append.
My workaround was an obvious one: if you have 300 videos to splice together, create three or more smaller videos first and then splice those together.
For example…
And then…
Of course, this takes a little longer, but if automated from the command line with another script it’s not so bad.
Claudius Maximus, is a London based artist and programmer. He works in both the audio and visual realms, often with elements of live performance or algorithmic generation.
I discovered Claudius through his role as a moderator on the Pure Data forums, but he also uses a variety of other programming tools, including lua, haskell, and supercollider. He also has written his own command line torrent builder.
It appears that he uses only free/libre and open source software to create his pieces, which are then hosted on archive.org under a creative commons license.
The latest post on his website is a drone audio piece called Cathedral Algorithms, a recording of a live performance from the latter half of 2009. I find it very meditative, in that dissonant way unique to drone music and working around heavy machinery. Check it out.
UPDATE 06-14-2010: Claudius Maximus has now uploaded a video to accompany the Cathedral Algorithms audio track.