Happy New Year!

To say I had absolutely no idea what I was going to achieve in one day would be quite an understatement.

In the end I took along my laptop, the unfinshed audio cable hack, an Arduino, and the Vtech Learning Alphabet Classroom Toy toy that I had previously bought for a fizzPOP Circuit Bending Hack Session:

My previous attempts to hack it back then were largely unsuccessful. I was able to cut out the audio completely and break the toy on several occasions, but what I was after was a way to control or glitch the audio and LCD screen.

Part of my problem was that there were very few components to play around with. Aside from the buttons themselves all I had was a circuit board that had very tiny components.

Thankfully, with the help of Dom and Ashley I was able to locate the resistors and attach a potentiometer. Results varied throughout the day, but I was able to get it producing something out of the ordinary!

But then it borked.

Regardless, it’s progress! I’ll be continuing work on it soon, and may even try hooking up the buttons to an Arduino or my computer to trigger other things.

Thanks to Dom and Ashley for inviting me down there for the day, and for the pizza

(there’s also a performance video of it)

Without revealing too much here, the piece is a trip through memory lane and nostalgia in a world that is moving from analogue to digital.

All of the concepts behind the piece can be explored through the blog that I kept during the development of the piece and also through this video where I explain much of it all in a roundabout way:

It’s definitely a concept that I’ll be revisiting in future works!

Guess which parts I provided…

For this video I utilised the What Glitch? scripts (specifically the pcx script) and Joe Friedl‘s – (aka grampajoe) Autodatamosh Perl script.

You can buy Meatfeast’s EP, Hands Like Claws, on Amazon or listen to it on good ol’ Spotify.

Skin cells breaking up.

Made using a mixture of Pure Data, Gridflow and Din.

Discuss it with others on the Pure Data forum.

.our_name/website {
GLI.TC/H
gli.tc/h
}
.theDates {
Chicago_USA: Nov 4-6 2011;
Amsterdam_NL: Nov 11-12 2011;
Birmingham_UK: Nov 19 2011;
}

I’ve also recently started making diagrams of my Pure Data patches. I hope they go some way to helping people learn Pure Data

Pretty pictures

Yo dawg, I herd you like badges...

A limited amount of glitched badges featuring stills from this video are now available for £2.25 plus postage and packaging. Sold in packs of two randomly chosen designs. Can also be exchanged for beer</joke>

Click to buy

We’ll give you a randomly generated film title, some dialogue and a prop list. You’ll then have 48 hours to write, shoot and edit a complete five minute film… hard work but fun!

I provided some glitches – using the What Glitch? scripts – and other graphics for this film, which you can watch below. My glitches are at about 3:16.

Unfortunately the film didn’t win but it did go on to be shown at Cannes in a Van. Go team Film Division!

Despite the film having been shown elsewhere I’ve only just watched it and I must say I’m rather impressed with what a highly dedicated – and possibly crazy (we stayed up ’til 5am editing) – team can come up with in 48 hours. I’m told that a directors’ edit, which will include many of the effects that didn’t make it in time, will be out in the near future. Anyway, enough reading, go watch the film!

Our software tools, in their affordances and potential use cases, define for us, to a certain extent, what we may and may not do. Those decisions are put in place by the people who design the tools. Together, as users, developers and all areas between the two extremes, we boil in a constantly reconfiguring sea of use possibilities, material and mental affordances.

You can find out more about the magazine through this brilliant presentation from FOSDEM 2011.

I’m still waiting for my copy to arrive from Canada, so for now the PDF will suffice. Go support the open source and free culture scene and get your copy!

I was unsatisfied with the way the default smilies on my blog were looking at me so I decided to glitch them

Download them from here

These smilies were made using GlitchSVG and a bit of post-processing. To use them on your WordPress site just replace the ones located at /wp-includes/images/smilies/ with these ones