BLOG 01/2003

30 JANUARY
It's SNOWING in Cambridge (UK)! Have you ever seen snow before? I haven't.
If I had one of those new-fangled piezo-electric photographic booths
I'd post up some piccies. Of the snow.

Travel update for Mill Rd, as of five minutes ago, when I popped over
to the supermarket for beer items:
The pedestrians are moving without problems.
The cyclists are moving, with some slippage and falling-off incidents.
The motor vehicles are not moving.

On the audio wavelengths, I hear many, many police/ambulance/fire sirens.
And how much snow has caused all this hoo-haar? About 5cm (measured vertically).

Wintery colours for this anomoly. It was an induced birth, in the sense that
I created a little black square gif image, then rendered it in a random browser,
with width="2003%" attribute. Strange things appear sometimes when you do this.


BU @LOOP

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.


PEERCD NIPPL NODUUL

20 JANUARY
Another top night at P&P last night.
Feedback with megaphones, weird bird-like cooing and fluffy pom-poms. Oh yes.
On the visuals side, I was playing with amplifying skin-contact electrical
signals, surfin' the radio spectrum, and having fun with my little microphone,
all visualized for your delight in radiologically-unsafe colours.

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

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.

This is the data from one of the video files used in a
glitch video I co-produced last year. Recycling is always good.


DRUG BATH MEAT PLATTER

16 JANUARY
I'm definitely leaning towards minimalist glitches. Just a few simple
lines and blocks of shade. And I do try and get the border widths to look right
by careful cropping. This one was just an insignificant little bit of
mantissa that appeared in a title bar. Nothing special, but when you scale
these little fepworths up, they can look quite pheuny.


COLAR SELLE

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

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)

05 JANUARY
I've bowed to pressure to reinstate the animated GIF loops; I've put my
favourites in the cyan-flavoured dismembered Post-It Note™ block.
Actually, all the animations are just regular BLOG entries, so you'll
find them all in the green blocks, somewhere, as a regular-sized animation,
which you then click to get the really slow, glitchy, shcizzy full-screen version,
on account of most browsers not being able to stretch animations to 100% width
and height very well. It's all part of the plan, y'see :)

Actually, I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed doing the SCRAMBLE
and CALCULATOR ones. The SCRAMBLE animation is from a 
properly code-bent (code-bended?) emulation ROM. By that I mean, I used a
hex editor to randomly change bytes until I got the damn thing to do something
interesting without just crashing (the code, not the spaceship...). I don't do this
modern-day so-called "code-bending" where clever geekoid-arty types reengineer
only the rendering engine part of the games, thus ensuring that they won't actually
crash or doing anything too nasty. Anyway, I've seen some of their work (this
may or may not be a lie), and, as you might expect from such a watered-down approach
to code bending, the results all look quite similar. Characters leave trails (yawn),
and get you various XOR effects (yawn) and the clipping logic goes a bit wobbly (yawn-o).

And I made the CALCULATOR one by rolling the batteries vigorously
in an old red-LED calculator from Oxfam. I had to hold it very still whilst I scanned it.
Really must get one of these new Professor Fox-Talbot's panoptician photolithographic boxes..

01 JANUARY
Glückliches Neues Jahr.