BLOG 03/2002

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.

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!!

24 MARCH
Saw the film with lasers at Tate Britain yesterday. Pretty good,
but unfortunately the filmaker forgot to put in laser bolts and
gushing blood. Superficially, of course, lasers are like vector
graphics - both travel in straight lines! So, in the absence of
real lasers, I've done some code-bending on Scramble for the 
Vectrex platform. Click image make fatter!


CEUORIANTHAENYUENES

20 MARCH
Eastern-bloc hi-rise tower estate. Little square windows, aerials
fighting for space on the roof. Grey rain everywhere else. That reminds me -
I love aerials - in the sense that they scare me. I was always scared of aerials
when I was a kid. Maybe it's the prongs (I'm sure there's a technical term for
them - dipoles maybe?) Can anyone remember the name of the guy who 
published a book of his photos of aerials? This could be going back years
and years and years...I think I got this from Blue Peter!! (This will go
*whooosh* over the heads of any non-UK readers.) I'll put it on my TODO list -
find the aerial guy on the web (anyone that weird is bound to have a website).


AERIELETTE SUSPICION

17 MARCH
Normal service will resume shortly! I'm currently drained of creative juices due
to too much recent glitch output (which I still can't tell you about yet), so I've
taken the opportunity to fiddle pointlessly with the site navigation, but
also to write some real-time glitch-generating software, which will
doubtless be the source of some very scary, bleak animations and stills in the near
future. So stay tuned! Anyway, if you're a new visitor to the site, you've got
lots of picture BLOGs to catch up on, starting with the early crappy ones, to the more
recent, slightly more sophisticated ones!
Righto, I'm off out now to look at more sofas. (Still sitting on the floor after 5 weeks...)

15 MARCH
I DREAM OF 5 (blue blocks). Put your VR headsets on, because Blue=Interactive!
This site is a bit like The Crystal Maze (UK TV show, but perhaps exported to
other countries?), with the Zones having different styles and types of game.

13 MARCH
I've just been reading artbyte, October 2001 Issue
(the UK gets it just everso slightly later than the US..), as a little treat
and bit of cultural education, seeing as I'm so ignorant about digital art culture generally!
For example, when Per Platou of Oslo-based artist group Motherboard
(together with fellow director Amanda Steggell) contacted me regarding the Glitch Symposium,
he was convinced that I was familiar with the work of artists x, y and z such as Xenakis, m9ndfukc,
and Woody and Steina Vasulka, and it was a little embarrassing to admit that I hadn't heard 
of any of these interestingly-named people!

So anyway, I've got this nuclear-green-coloured magazine, which looks very lovely, and will
look nice on my coffee table (when I eventually get one), but after skimming through the articles
I just feel drained. One article is about a symphony for mobile phones, another is about sampling
sounds from the human body, another features someone who's made some fake sci-fi TV props such as
a jokey Lego monolith from 2001 A Space Odessy. I suppose it's interesting, superficially,
because it's sort-of new-ish. But it doesn't stir up any emotion in me whatsoever. I don't want
to go to the symphony where the clever artist is going to be using the audience's mobiles to
make the, er, tunes. I hate the sound of mobile phones. (I don't own one.) It's clever, granted,
or at least, it's technically non-trivial, like Damien Hurst's half-a-cow-in-gloopy-liquid.

It seems everybody's getting into glitch-this, glitch-that. I'm partly to blame, of course,
if only because of this site. Still, it's nice to be part of the scene whilst it's hot, I mean, cool..
But after all the interest has died down, I like to think I'll still be pootling away on this
site with my monochrome horizontal-or-vertical straight line pictures! I like them. That's the point.
I don't like curves. I don't like effects with transparency. I don't like 3D graphics. What I
do like are straight lines, preferably in dark grey and off-white tones. I also like
pixellated things in nuclear greens and oranges - a sort of Atari Missile Command aesthetic!
I don't see how some professional artists can skip from one cool, clever, interactive thing to the next
cool, clever, interactive thing and actually like what they produce at a deep, emotional
level. People's tastes change gradually. (I used to be into Depeche Mode, and now I'm into Autechre,
but it's been a 20-year process.) I guess things are different when you have to compete for funding.
That's a good thing about not being an artist - I earn money by doing audio DSP programming,
so I can slap any old shite on these pages and nobody will care a picofarad! Not that I do that, you
understand, dear visitor...I take ages over some of my glitch images - up to a whole hour
in some cases!

This has turned into a bit of a rant, well done if you've read this far :)  I think I have a 
few more incoherent bits to say, but that can wait for another time.

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

09 MARCH
5th annual general meeting of the Bonsai Glitch Club,
sponsored by BEFLIX Corp. ("The Digital Corruption Company").
This years' topic was "Trim Hard, Crop Hard for a Healthier, Denser Glitch".
Then we all went off to Joan's for a mad evening of Vectrex Pinball.
Here's a photograph I took of the screen.


INTRACHEMATOIJD

03 MARCH
This pic is just part of a web advert. I'd tell you the name of the company
offering these dating services, but I don't want to contaminate my lovely
abstract site :)  People are always asking me what the titles to the
glitch art images mean. Actually they don't. So will someone please ask?
Then I'll be able to blather on about it at great length the next time
you drop by again. Ta muchness!


HUORECEFLENE-A

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

01 MARCH
Just got a moment to write this before going out tonight - sorry for
the slightly lower quality of glitch art in last month's offerings. I'm very, very
busy right now with some exciting glitch projects which I'll tell you
more about when things are more concrete.
Been selling the glitch concept to the Russians - it's like plutonium over there!
OK, look I've got 11 minutes in which to make a great bit of glitch-art
before I go and get schmoozled. And this is the result: It's a bit of VIC20
with the Double Size and Single Scan settings to give the rasterized effect.
Very 60's! I love straight lines. Horizontal ones are the best.  


VOID*