On 29th February I’ll be leading the workshop at Maker Monday at Birmingham Open Media.
Glitch Art describes the process of misusing and reappropriating hardware and software to make visual art. In this part theory, part practice workshop we will consider ways in commonly used programs can be misused to interpret various data in different ways.
For the practical part of the workshop you’ll need a laptop/computer (Mac/Windows/Linux) with the following software installed:
On 6th February I’ll be part of the TRANSFORMERS screening happening at the College Art Association Conference in Washington DC.
Computer programming is an often invisible force that affects many aspects of our contemporary lives. From how we gather our news, maintain our libraries, or navigate our built environment, code shapes the interfaces and information they connect to. Artists who work with these languages as material can critically excavate code and its effects. The works included in this screening include animation and video that are produced through the use and manipulation of code and/or data.
Back in June 2014 I wrote how that in 2013, after visiting The Cyborg Foundation in Barcelona, I became interested in exploring sonification. My experients at that stage culminated in the production of the Pixel Waves Pure Data patch, which allows the sonification of images based on the colour/RGB values of individual ppixels.
I spent the following months building and refining an update to the Pixel Waves software, with a focus on allowing multiple images to be played simultaneously. In a way, I wanted to create a sequencer but for images. After many months I’m happy to formally announce the release of the Pixel Player.
On 19th September I did a Sonification Studies performance at glitChicago. I had previously done a demonstration/performance of this at Relearn in Brussels, Post-Modern Plant Life in Leamington Spa, and at September’s Digbeth First Friday at Vivid Projects, but the glitChicago was what I consider to be the first proper performance. A culmination of my reserach, if you will.
The focus for me at this performance was to get a sense of rhythm. Previous performances experimented with using found image sources, which resulted in a somewhat chaotic performance. For the glitChicago performance I composed a series of images with repeating patterns.
In October 2013, whilst visiting Barcelona for the performance at Mutuo Centro De Arte for The Wrong, I had the honour of meeting Neil Harbisson and Moon Ribas, collectively known as The Cyborg Foundation.
Throughout the evening we began to see some similarities in how we interpret things we see and hear, as well as how we handle data. For example, in Waiting for Earthquakes, Moon Ribas uses a device attached to her wrists to receive live data of earthquakes around the world. This data is then interpreted in a live dance performance. Neil Harbisson was born with Achromatopsia, a condition that only allowed him to see in greyscale. In order to see, or at least perceive colour, he had an “Eyeborg” implanted, which translates colour frequencies into sound frequencies.
As readers of my blog will know by now you can easily import any data into audacity and play it as audio. However, most data that you’ll import and then play will just turn out as noise. That is simply because there’s too much noise in the image i.e. too many colours and too much data. So, if you reduce the amount of colours and data in theory you get something a little bit more pleasing to the ear. Experimentationing time!