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GLI.TC/H Birmingham

Published on 05/12/2011 in Blog. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

GLI.TC/H Birmingham happened on 19th November at VIVID and I’ve only just had time to recover from it.

As the curator of GLI.TC/H Birmingham I’d like to give my own set of thanks:

  • Arts Council England for supporting GLI.TC/H Birmingham.
  • Birmingham City University, in particular two staff members:
    • Gregory Sporton, for supporting the event, even if he doesn’t quite get what it all is!
    • Lorna Hards, whose course, Methods and Models of Curatorial Practice, gave me the confidence to curate GLI.TC/H Birmingham
  • VIVID, for accepting the proposal for GLI.TC/H Birmingham to be part of their “The Garage Presents…” programme and for providing an amazing space to hold this event in as well as technical and programming assistance
  • The GLI.TC/H Bots (Rosa, Nick and Jon) for being great friends and for allowing me to curate GLI.TC/H Birmingham. Moar thanks to Jon Satrom and Nick Briz for traveling to all three GLI.TC/H events (Chicago, Amsterdam and Birmingham)
  • Flip Festival, for hosting a great night of GLI.TC/H video previews. Photos/programme available here
  • Leon (Chromatouch), Pete and James and Sarah, for being great assistants and filling in gaps that I overlooked.
  • fizzPOP, for being a great hackerspace and providing assistance in the workshops
  • All of the artists that gave workshops, delivered lectures, performed or had videos/bumpers screened at GLI.TC/H Birmingham.
  • All of my friends that attended GLI.TC/H Birmingham or supported it in another way. I know that a lot my friends don’t quite understand glitch art, so it was great to see them at it!
  • And last, but not least, thanks to you, the audience, for traveling from the far reaches of England (and in some cases the world) to attend GLI.TC/H Birmingham. I hope that the day gave you a better insight into the world of technological failure!

    I was personally pleasantly surprised by the turnout throughout the whole day, to the point that we ran out of seats! So, thanks for making it a great success :-)

Videos of all of the performances and lectures are available, thanks to Pete Ashton, on this YouTube playlist. Here’s the video of Jon Satrom’s prepared desktop:

Pete also took photos for the event and many more are available in the GLI.TC/H Flickr group. If you have any photos please add them to this group! Here’s one of my favourite photos, featuring Nicolas Maigret from Art of Failure:

Glitch Birmingham 34

I can’t personally comment on what is next in store for GLI.TC/H (GLI.TC/H 2012???), but I’m already planning future, much smaller, glitch art events to take place locally. I’m always up for collaborating on this, just get in touch.

Now time for sleep.

Extrafile

Published on 17/08/2011 in Blog. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

By now we’ve all seen so many jpg and bmp glitches that they’ve almost become just another effect. Unfortunately, due to the limited amount of image file formats there are only a finite number of ways to exploit them.

bascii

Extrafile, by Kim Asendorf, is a great response to this. The application allows one to convert standard image formats to ones that he has created (4bc, bascii, blinx, cci, mcf, uspec, xff), each with their own properties that sets them apart from standard image formats.

blinx

Kim asked myself and a number of other artists to mangle, hack, reconfigure and exploit these file formats, the results of which are quite unlike any “standard” glitches, if such a thing exists.

The program can be downloaded for Mac OSX NOW! (Linux port plzkthxbai)

Glitched Badges

Published on 02/08/2011 in Art and Blog. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .
Glitched badges

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

Zen audio hack

Published on 08/07/2011 in Blog. 5 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Awhile back I acquired a Creative ZEN Stone mp3 player. It was a a little scuffed around the edges but otherwise a perfectly functional mp3 player. For some time I was using a pair of regular headphones but then I tried using in a pair of iPhone headphones (and then later HTC headphones). The results are somewhat weird. Take a listen:

Listen!
Original song: Fade to Daft by Look What I Did (download for free from here.) I had to record this by placing my headphones on my microphone for reasons that I’ll explain later.

You may not be able to hear it but it sounds like one of the channels is being muted, whilst the other sounds like it has an echo effect. Also, it sounds as though the bitrate has been reduced to about 24kbps!

At first I couldn’t understand why this was happening so I consulted fizzPOP (who have just started hack sessions again) and it’s apparently due to the rings on the headphone jack.

Headphone hack

Wikipedia, which is so obviously a reliable source, informs me that this is a TRRS plug, the extra ring being used for the microphone/control button. This extra ring is obviously interfering with the devices and making it sound glitchy. Naturally my first instinct was to record it, but this presented many problems.

First, in order to record the output of the player I needed a male to male 3.5mm cable that uses TRRS plugs. A quick Google search revealed that these don’t exist so I had to make my own.

Headphone hack

Some of thinnest wires in the world evar!

As I had discovered earlier, the headphones capable of reproducing this glitch are iPhone headphones so I soldered two of the cables for these together, essentially creating a male to male 3.5mm cable with TRRS plugs. Happy times! :-)

Or so I thought.

The problem I now still face is that the socket on my laptop is obviously capable of accepting TRRS plugs without glitches so the audio comes out clear when recorded via Audacity (well, it would be clearer were it not for my crappy soldering skills!).

This is where I require help from those more adept with audio than I. Is there a way to record the glitchy sound in the same “quality” as it is output from the mp3 player? The recording above was made by holding my headphones to my laptop microphone, which doesn’t faithfully reproduce the truly weird audio experience (though does produce a lo-fi aesthetic).