What techniques do you use to make glitch art?
October 11, 2010 7:24 PM   Subscribe

What are some techniques you use to make glitch art?

Ive been reading all the guides I could find on Google:

Primer Part 1
Primer Part 2
Using WAV editor Audacity

and the datamoshing tutorial here

I was curious if you guys knew any other good guides, tools, or methods for glitching video/images.

Any and all suggestions welcome, however, it'd be nice if it was just software databending and not circuitbending haha.
posted by muffins to Media & Arts (11 answers total) 25 users marked this as a favorite
 
Back in the 80's, we used to take the noisy artifacts from the start up motion of a VHS tape and re-scan the playback screen with another camera-recorder in slow motion. We would have then edited the chunks of spew, but we didn't have frame accuracy yet.
posted by ovvl at 7:36 PM on October 11, 2010 [2 favorites]


Response by poster: That's awesome. I really wish I had the setup for that kind of stuff. It seems that some of the most aesthetically pleasing glitches come from old technology.
posted by muffins at 7:48 PM on October 11, 2010


Take a given video clip and encode it to MPEG-4 ASP (DivX, etc.) or MPEG-4 AVC (x264, etc.). Use a shitload of B-frames. Now cut it on an early B-frame and don't use any "smart cut" feature offered by your editor. You will have a blocky mess, which in some decoders will also cause random color fluctuations until the next keyframe. Not very useful on its own, because everyone's familiar with the look of MPEG-encoded video run through poor editing (thanks, Youtube!), but might give you some neat input for further modification.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 8:18 PM on October 11, 2010


Anton Marini, aka vade, has a number of glitch-like plugins for Quartz Composer.

There's also the old trick of opening a file in a hex editor and just shuffling bytes around (ignoring the header and footer) to see what happens.

On a related note, the GLI.TC/H festival passed through Chicago last week, during which there were a couple of workshops detailing both hardware and software glitching. And apparently, there's now a wiki with software links!

(Disclaimer: I had some work in a gallery for the festival)
posted by tip120 at 8:50 PM on October 11, 2010


if you have access to a linux box /dev/dsp can be fun to use
posted by 3mendo at 9:28 PM on October 11, 2010


AVIGlitch is a new Ruby library for glitching video (some visual examples are shown on that page).
posted by wackybrit at 9:53 PM on October 11, 2010


On a Mac, open any JPG in 0eXD. Pick a string of a few characters (2-4 for best results) and do a find and replace on them. Save as.

Alternatively, simply scroll past the obvious header info in the file and then copy a large section, delete it, and paste it somewhere further along in the file. Repeat.
posted by EL-O-ESS at 9:54 PM on October 11, 2010


Best answer: I posted a short list of tutorials posted (self-link) although the two by stallio that you listed are really the best -- there's a lot you can do with sonification. You should check out the Glitch Art group on Flickr, people often post what method they used to get different effects.

Also, I don't have a link for it, but definitely read Rosa Menkman's A Vernacular of File Formats, break out the hex editor, and start experimenting.
posted by rottytooth at 10:44 PM on October 11, 2010 [1 favorite]


(oh, and one more self-link: my own tutorial which is not on my list since I just reposted it -- it's for an ancient version of Photoshop, but it works with some other Adobe programs -- Lightroom for instance, at least up to 2.7)
posted by rottytooth at 10:47 PM on October 11, 2010


I would warn you to make sure the volume is turned down when playing with audio like this. I managed to blow a speaker on a laptop with cat /random/binary/file > /dev/dsp while the volume was cranked up.
posted by zengargoyle at 11:12 PM on October 11, 2010


Response by poster: Thanks for the link Roy. I'll check out the Flickr group. Seems like in general those few tutorials are the only ones floating around.
posted by muffins at 11:33 PM on October 11, 2010


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