The results of trying to take a screenshot using Shutter whilst spinning the desktop. See more on flickr.
Category archives: Art
When I Saw Pavement
09Jul10All the way back in May I went to see a band called Pavement. About two months later I finally finished off a mini zine documenting parts of my time there.
If you know your way around jpdftweak or other imposition software you can even combine it into a rather awesome poster!
Speaking of zines, I’m helping to organise the Birmingham Zine Festival that’ll be taking place in September. If you make zines you should get in contact through that website.
The Long And Winding Road
08Jul10The Long And Winding Road is a response to The Beatles’s decision to not release their music in a digital format. In 2006 history was set when Gnarls Barkley’s single, Crazy, became the first ever single to get to #1 on downloads alone. This is a trend set only to get more popular as CD sales continue to decline against digital downloads rising. The Beatles catalogue of music is only available on CD or vinyl, despite their last material to be released being in 1970. Aside from a very limited edition $279 USB stick featuring their discography no other legal digital copies exist.
The song The Long and Winding Road, the last single to be released from The Beatles final album, Let It Be, marks the end of on era and the beginning of another, in which fans are left waiting for the day they can legally obtain a digital copy of their music online.
This resistance to digitisation is not something new. The album version of The Long and Winding Road, which features unauthorised post-production was cited by Paul McCartney as one of the six reasons why The Beatles disbanded. There is also speculation as to why their music has not been made available online, with McCartney/Starr and their record company batting the blame back and forth. Regardless of blame or reason, it is only the fans who are at loss.
Here, I present digitised version of the song, taken from a scan of the sheet music from the Top Pops 6 song book collection from 1971 and attempt to interpret their music in a digital form. The process of digitising this work involved scanning the sheet music and using audio software to convert the scanning into audio. This, therefore, is the closest digital reproduction that I can make without having access to the original recordings.
I Am Sitting In A Room
30Jun10Inspired by Alvin Lucier‘s I Am Sitting in a Room piece I have taken Dataface one step further
In glitch art we only ever see result of the process of damaging an image, video or sound. Rarely can we observe this process as it happens within the computer in an instant. Using Alvin Lucier’s 1969 piece I Am Sitting in a Room as inspiration, in this piece I show the many steps taken to damage data to the point where it loses all meaning.
Font files are files that attribute a style to the otherwise plain text that we see on screen. The computer treats this only as an attribute of the text and can understand it regardless of what font file is used or how it looks to the viewer.
In this piece I have used a script, created in collaboration with G Bulmer, that explores the font file and damages it by randomising the values that construct each glyph. The computer, doing only what it has been instructed to do, continually attacks the font files’ data to the point where it is sometimes corrupted and not even it can interpret it correctly.
The resulting video shows the gradual damaging of the data. The viewer will struggle to find meaning amongst the visual noise whilst the computer still understands it.
The full text reads:
I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I have typed out this text using a font called Dataface and I am going to randomise parts of the font file’s code and save the results of it again and again, until it’s appearance becomes illegible and the font file is destroyed. What you will see, then, are the effects of randomisation, with the occasional glitch that occurs when the font file is so badly damaged that the computer is unable to read it. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of my ability to edit fonts but more a way to eliminate all meaning that this text might have.
Dataface
29Jun10After months of hard work I’m happy to finally release Dataface
Click to download
Special thanks go to various hackers at fizzPOP for all of their help, GB for programming help and Scribbleboy for general guidance. You can view of preview of the font here on Flickr.
There will soon be a lovely writeup of how it was done and the tools to use to create your own. Until then, I hope you enjoy Dataface!
![hellocatfood posted a video: [Warning] Contains lots of flashing](http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4119/4908683008_78e25c4388_s.jpg "hellocatfood posted a video: [Warning] Contains lots of flashing")
