VIERTEL 2 2004

26 JUNE

A BEFLIX APPROACH TO G-ART

I am practising Data Autopsy. With the arrival of gmail, I can
invite you, yes you, to email moi (beflix@gmail.com) with, um,
let's say up to 1MB of your Windows swap file. I will then sift
through it and try to find buried treasure, eg. 9orn bitmaps
and secret text fragments. I did this once with a Unix core dump 
file, and thought I'd found some incriminating 9orn in this 
eminent maths professor's core file, but it just turned out to
be the logo of the London Mathematical Society!

20 JUNE
I didn't realise that astronaut John Glenn was the first to use the
term glitch until Iman pointed it out on my recent visit. How embarrassing.
Ironically, I used Glenn's image in some recent VJing, as a generic
astronaut image. Funny how things turn out. I've put a link in the orange blocks.

This is along the same lines as the prev image. I used to spend
hours doing this when I was a kid. On my ZX81 you could mismatch
FOR-NEXT loops like this:

10 FOR X = 1 TO 100 STEP 4
20 FOR Y = -1 TO 1 STEP 0.01
30 FOR Z = 6 TO 666 STEP 66

40 PLOT X + ARCTAN(Z * X - Y) * Y, Z * Z - X * EXP(Y - X)

50 NEXT Y
60 NEXT Z
70 NEXT X

Hours and hours and hours were frittered away like this.
Usually you got a midget squiggle in the corner, but sometimes
you got a fantastic pixelly pattern. And because the ZX was so
slow, it was a suprise to see where each pixel was going
to be plotted. If the PLOT coords were really obtuse formulae,
it could take a whole second per pixel! 
Incidentally, the above code isn't tested. You have to be
careful not to let the coords in the PLOT go out of bounds
otherwise the program halts with an error code and sets fire
to the TV.

0/0


DROANN KHEL

19 JUNE
I have gmail invitations to give away. Email beflix@gmail.com if you want one,
but make it funny for gawd's sake. Yes! gmail. I've dumped hotmail. Just don't
forget to delete cookies before and after registering or they'll link all
your past and future searches with all your emails, store loyalty cards,
and phone calls to your parents. How exciting! I wonder how many bytes of data
the average person will create during their life, as a digi-shadow of all their
activities on the netverk. Mine currently stands at about 63K, which just fits
on an unexpanded Commodore 64 system, although the stack has to be overwritten
with my news postings about fractals when I was a young and naive student.

13 JUNE
This image is quite blurred and at low jpg quality to keep
the file size down. I'm playing around with trying to get
some sense of depth into flat images. Does it look a bit 3D
to you? I might have to issue you all with plastic 3D viewer
specs, such as the ones you get when viewing a solar eclipse
safely. By making the sun 3-dimensional, it becomes dimmer
because volume grows at a faster rate than surface area, so
the radionuclides have lower density.

I sold my first prints recently in return for 10 silver whelks
from the ocean deep. I asked my bank manager for a loan to
set up a print studio. She asked what I was making. When I
told her I was selling TV interference and random data, she
didn't seemed wholly convinced. Well, the joke's on her now, ja, nein?


IT'S LIKE I CAN REACH OUT AND TOUCH IT

08 JUNE
Hand-edited jpg of a black square. In the absence of
colour or structure in the source image, what we see
is the workings of the jpg compression. It's like going
to the top of Hawaii to look at the stars - you don't want
air turbulence getting in the way because it'll make
the light wobbly. I refuse to have wobbles in my pictures.
Here we make the fetish for the lines of the straight direction!


NO AIR

31 MAY
This Saturday I'm off to Muchmedia 04 School of Design Technology 
emerging creatives show at the University of Huddersfield. Iman is showing
his Neuromirror™ installation which is über-glitchy
and, apparently, very, very LARGE!
(You can get the exact address and times from his site if you
click on "Current Exhibition".)

Iman and myself are working on an extraordinarily ambitious collaboration.

24 MAY
This is one of my screen prints done earlier this year.
The pixelly bit is a grab from some visuals I programmed
last year - it's 8-bit audio visualised as 1-bit pixels.
The red bit? Well, I was persuaded to try something a bit more
freeform, so I got some spaghetti and went through some
tortuous process to get some straight, but slightly
off-kilter, lines cut into the blue filler, which you then
dry with a hair dryer. Anyway, unfortunately the blue filler
broke down during the print run and it just turned into
a big bloody streak. Evil colours though. That's the main thing.


METAL SNOW / SPAGHETTI REMIX

23 MAY
I've decided to embrace the future and try one of those
odd little RSS feeds. I think the idea is that it turns
me into a transmitter aerial. You have to tune to the
correct frequency to receive my waves. You turn the dial
by clicking on a link? Oh I don't know. I have the RSS XML
buttons though. You click them and something might happen.
Or do you save the URL in your RSS reader under "Extra Special Websites"?
Anyway, I'm sure it's great.

OK - I've just downloaded "Feedreader" - an open source RSS reader.
Typed in the URL of my feed : http://www.beflix.com/rss.xml -
and away we go! It's amazing. Cor. Definitely the way forward.
It's funny how I catch up with cool things about 3 years after they
become popular!

16 MAY
OK so no-one wants midget A4 inkjet prints.. I shall
create something different then! It's a tricky one,
actually. You see, glitches, because they're often
screengrabs, have only a finite number of pixels.
You can't zoom in and see more detail. And so, when thinking
about a suitable size, I thought that just making the prints
the same actual size as they appear on the monitor would
be best, at least for the more intricate images. 
Take the images on the BX08 page - if these were scaled up,
they'd look lumpy instead of fragile. 
I think that if I make some large-format images available
(ie. posters) then only relatively coarse, blocky images will work.

Haven't played with emulators much recently.
This is a frame from a movie file. Incidentally,
I use Bulent's Screen Recorder for my screengrab
needs. You can select a region to record and it's pretty
stable, unlike some emulators' built-in recording facilities.

I went for a run, then stood still. If you stare straight ahead,
you can see your peripheral vision glitching with each heartbeat.
The pressure makes the eyeball bulge slightly, distorting
the optic pathways. The light travels straight to the back of
the brain, along a fibre optic cable. When you're asleep, this
cable is used to transmit data instead of images. The human body
is amazing.


MAJUT

09 MAY
Oh sorry. A butterfly distracted me for a moment there.

Sensor 1 detects coin thickness.
Sensor 2 detects coin material content.
Sensor 3 detects coin size and shape.

Sensor X detects scrolled edge / milled edge.
Its output is a binary-valued decision tree with a 
firmly planted root and two green leaf nodes.

Sensor X was introduced so that you couldn't use a UK 5p
instead of the more fiscally robust German 1 DM! Doh!

This type of coin-handling, linked to m1c40p40c35504 c0nt40l,
is poised to revolutionize automagic vending.

You can insert your coins (milled edges only) into the
rapidly-expanding online dot-com boom-bust sell-out zone,
located in the grey blocks. BX09 has viruses for sale!
 
03 MAY
I am happy to make available, for the first time ever, some
exclusive prints that you can buy. They are small and deadly. BX08

01 MAY
I wrote a computer programme on the BBC2 telereceiver.
It was a mixture of BASIC (the host environment) and
hand-optimised 6809E assembler for the safety-critical
SUBroutines.
On bootup the screen is green.
The programme is a R.A.M. datavisualizer.
This realtime photostat of the screen should be in
black and white. The colours are created by chroma-crawl (or dotcrawl).
We mistune the frequency to make it go like this.
The code is handwritten before being typed.
The code, once entered, is SAVE onto Sharp 702 MiniDisc™ using low-quality
analogue wireguides.
The data can be re-remembered by the
computer if you play it back into its electric ear (only mono required).


JATAC-KE-ORIYUANOVASTAT

25 APRIL
30 April - 30 May joint exhibition of a couple of prints as part of 
the Machinista Festival.

The Arches Theatre Glasgow.

All sorts of extraordinary stuff going on...

Machinista Glasgow Offline Festival.

Oh dear. I appear to be going through a pale blue background phase.


LUB

18 APRIL
Drilling into your brain is generally not recommended.
The chance of bypassing all vital regions is 0.072, which is
below the acceptable risk-of-death threshold of 0.1.
So you see, numbers enable us to make the right decision every time.

In today's image, we see some green laser-like probes drilling into
a hostile data-dense environment.


KERTRECHTASE

17 APRIL
This link is long, long overdue.
Iman Moradi is a multimedia designer and academic.
He has produced a thesis of high academic fortitude,
depth of insight and lots of interesting twiddly bits,
on the subject of Glitch Aesthetics. It clearly sets
the standard against which other works will be judged.

Iman and myself are working on an extraordinarily ambitious collaboration.

Other News:
I know how naff it is to talk about web site issues, when
the focus should be on the glitsch-art, but I know you'll all be
as pleased as me to hear that my Grammy-Award-Winning Gästebuch
(located in the blue blocks) is functional again. It's not like
ordinary "guestbooks". Mine is a Gästebuch! And it allows you
to leave a one-liner message if you want. But, controversially, it
also allows you, gentle visitant entity, to create interesting glitsch-ASCII art.
Just scroll down the page to see what others before you have done.

11 APRIL
I have nothing new to show you here today. But there is an exhibition
somewhere marvellous in Great Britain, soon, with some of my work there,
which is just flippando, obviously. 

04 APRIL
Just a quick update. Kenneth Knowlton's site (the genius inventor
of the BEFLIX computer movie language in 1963, and an award-
winning mosaicist, amongst other things) is at:

www.knowltonmosaics.com

03 APRIL
I was at London's Paddington Bear train station when I filmed
one of the departure screens having a quiet fit. You should have
seen the odd looks I was getting. I suppose in these days of semi-hyper
security, even taking still photos is banned at stations.


UYVUO