Tag Archive for 'databend'

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Interpretations of Reality

On 8th April I took a self-prescribed zine making day. Ever since the Gallery Of Owls meetup last year I’ve been increasingly interested in zines as a means of communication and the DIY scene as a whole. After many failed ideas I finally settled on showing the journey of a pixel and how it can be mutated through different ways of manipulating it, specifically through glitch art.

What is presented is the simple manipulation of the cover image over twelve pages.

In my never-ending quest to explore glitch art off the screen, what then intrigued me was how I could print this. I then had the idea to print these images onto of printed material. In this way we see how glitches can alter our perception of already existing media. Does it add to or detract from the original intent or is it even noticeable?

To pay homage to zine culture I’ve use pages from some of the zines that I’ve collected over the years as well as found papers that have been clogging up my inbox.

Glitched Badges

Badges from my video are now available from the Created in Birmingham shop!

glitched badges

This marks somewhat of a new shift for me as it’s the second time that I’ve taken glitch off the screen and into a more physical form. I do like that when I sent the images to print I received this e-mail:

Thank you for our order from —.

Just wanted to double check your artwork – the five files we’ve got are different colours of large pixel-style blocks, is this correct? Just wanted to ensure the files have come through to us correctly.

I’m looking at setting up an online shop for people to buy the rest of the badges and perhaps other glitchy stuff.

Dataface update

You may remember from my earlier blog post that I’ve been working on a databent typeface. It was mentioned a fair while back now, but I have been doing bits of work on it every now and then. Here’s a bit of my progress so far:

Ass you can see some of the characters are more recognisable than others. In fact, looking at it again I can’t really remember what some of them were. As I’m planning on having most characters mapped out, in upper and lower case, progress will be a bit slow, so I’ll aim for April for a completed font.

Echobender

Myself and Mez recently finished a script called Echobender that automatically databends images.

Click to download

To use it you’ll need:

  • A computer with Linux installed. I don’t have a Windows or Mac PC so I can’t test it on those
  • Sox. On Ubuntu you can install it via sudo apt-get install sox
  • Convert, which is part of ImageMagick. On Ubuntu you can install it via sudo apt-get install imagemagick

Once you have those installed just execute ./echobender.sh from the terminal and then drop a .jpg or .bmp file into it. The output will be in a folder called “echo”.

If you look closely at the script you can see a way to convert any data into an image! I’ll leave that one up to you… Here’s the source code for all those interested:

#!/bin/sh -e
# Echobender
# By Antonio Roberts and Martin Meredith
# www.hellocatfood.com | www.sourceguru.net
# GNU/GPL

segons=`(date "+%Y%m%d%H%M%S")`
outfile="${segons}"

if [ ! -d ./echo ]; then
	mkdir ./echo
fi
clear
echo -e "\033[31m---------------------------------------------------- \033[0m"
echo -e "\033[33m Echobender \033[0m"
echo -e "\033[32m---------------------------------------------------- \033[0m"
echo -e "\033[35m---------------------------------------------------- \033[0m"
read -p "DROP A FILE HERE> " foo
echo -e "\033[32mLets bend $foo \033[0m"
echo -e "\033[35m---------------------------------------------------- \033[0m"
foo="$(echo $foo | sed -e "s/'//" | sed -e "s/'//")"
bn=$(basename $foo | sed -e 's/\.[a-zA-Z0-9]*$//')
imsize=$(identify -format "%wx%h" $foo)
cp $foo ./echo
convert ./echo/${bn}.* ./echo/${bn}.bmp
cp ./echo/${bn}.bmp ./echo/${bn}.raw
sox -r 482170 -e u-law ./echo/${bn}.raw ./echo/${bn}2.raw echo 0.8 0.9 5000 0.3 1800 0.25
convert -size $imsize -depth 8 rgb:./echo/${bn}2.raw ./echo/${bn}.$outfile.bmp
rm ./echo/${bn}.raw ./echo/${bn}2.raw ./echo/${bn}.bmp ./echo/${bn}.jpg
echo -e "\033[33mJob done. Check ./echo \033[0m"
echo -e "\033[31m---------------------------------------------------- \033[0m"

Thanks to Imbecil‘s MPegFucker script for much of the inspiration.