Glitch

Glitch: The fine Art of metaStructure

Original Art ‘Mood Lifter’ by Maggie Taylor | Glitched by @71m3574mp

{ This is by no means a comprehensive guide to, or of, glitch. This is just a primer for the uninitiated. To wet the proverbial toes so to speak. Glitch is an enormous world of unexpected turns and breaks and jumps of relative experience, crossing all bounds of physics and time space. The vast lands that are Glitch could not possibly be summed up in this single post. If nothing else, consider this an obscure introduction to an even more obscure topic. }

What is Glitch?

A “glitch” is a temporary corruption, resulting in unexpected behavior, of a given system. This is important to understand for it is that unexpected behavior that is the point of origin for any glitch. In fact a glitch can not exist without it. Chaos is the life in any mundane order. To glitch is to experience, if even for a brief moment, that point where life breaks free of that order. To apply glitch to Art on one hand is an attempt to create a glitch at will like one would create a stroke with a paint brush or a chord with a piano. As well, one could argue the intent actually has nothing to do with the glitch ( or the Art for that matter ) and instead is simply to present an environment in which the likely hood of a glitch is probable. The method one uses will differ per medium, desired result and the Artists themselves.

One of the stand out glitches I personally experienced over the years was during a performance at Mass Art. A group of us were performing an abstract piece based on a hand drawn diagram. Our instrumentation consisted of microphones, percussion, a guitar, analog tape player, turn-table, and a Frankenstein rack of effect pedals and processors. Anyway, about 3/4 of the way through the diagram, one of my effects processors burst into flames as I was turning the rate knob of an analog delay. The last gasp of the processor was this gloriously broken deterioration of it’s last sample running through the melting circuit. The only sound I’ve heard in life which even approaches that moment is in the “Matrix” when liquid metal pours down Neo’s throat after taking the pill. On the one hand, unfortunately that night wasn’t captured and the moment only exists in memory. On another it is exactly that ephemeral experience which is the nature of the “glitch” itself.

Experimentation and atypical application are the necessary ingredients in manipulating the source medium into a truly glitched result. My intent in writing this isn’t to push any form of purist attitude but rather to draw a distinction between applying some form of predictable filter and actually manipulating the raw source medium.

Data Bending

Any data source can be manipulated in various forms resulting in a distinct corruption of that data. Sometimes (more often than not actually) the corruption is brought beyond acceptable lines and the result is just a broken data source. For instance opening raw .bmp data as a source in an audio editor and then applying filters such as echo or reverb can have beautiful results however it can also just break your .bmp all together, completely killing any image data it previously had ( PRO-TIP: don’t work on original files. make copies ;p ). It’s up to you the Artist. Sometimes you may be looking for a complete data killing error.

Here is a very cool real-time tool for glitching .jpg files by @snorpey …
https://snorpey.github.io/jpg-glitch/

Basically what’s going on here is the altering of raw byte data. In the tool above, JavaScript is being used to accomplish this by employing algorithms to programmatically alter the byte data. You can get these exact same effects by editing the .jpg in a plain text or hex editor as well.

As a general rule of thumb you have to avoid the headers of the file otherwise you will kill the source. If you’re editing plain text skip down a few blocks. To avoid headers in an audio editor you skip ahead in the timeline several seconds before applying any edits or effects. With text editing sometimes you’ll see plain text strings like an identifier for the camera it was taken with (eg. iPhone etc). After identifying the headers make your edits to the body, save and look at the result. There are endless ways to make edits. Duplicating entire blocks, moving them around , entirely removing them, replacing specific strings. This is where the Art and experimentation comes in. The painting above, “Mood Lifter” by Artist Maggie Taylor, was brought into TextEdit, offset, saturated and curved, then photographed up close on an LCD screen to achieve the final effect. Zero Photoshop :]

Another very cool data bending tool is File Radio…
http://robclouth.com/audio/file-radio/

“File Radio plays through all files on your computer, interpreting the data as audio. For each file it finds, it reads through it 4 bytes at a time and converts them into a float which is sent to the sound card.”

In addition there is real time visual output formed by manipulating pixel data…

What’s great about File Radio is that it truly embodies what it is to glitch in that it takes ambiguous data and applies it in a format other than it was intended resulting it beautiful chaos. Using File Radio, I’ve generated GB upon GB of material, both audio and video. One particular experiment I’ve used some of this material for was to use the video source as a texture projected onto randomly generated 3D primitives. Below is a cylinder projection created using file radio output in Blender, an open source 3D production environment…

Music

When it comes to music there is a wide variety of which involve glitched signals ranging from complete purist noise to one-shot kit samples to simple textural elements and time-shift. It would be impossible to discuss all of the many possible set ups and genres which incorporate glitched audio in one sitting. After all it is ever evolving by nature and there are no real set methods. It’s all about discovery. As far as the audio goes, today’s DAW all enable a wide variety of sound input possibilities. You could use system or midi audio as a source for instance to record one-shots from a circuit bent instrument for a sequencer or run the audio through any number of modules to effect the audio, record it, loop it or send it back out of the DAW to some other process or physical output. Ableton, Audition and Sunvox are just a few DAWs which I myself have used in production like this.

Another approach to today’s glitch music is more of a post-production aesthetic and involves editing within audio software, making slices, arranging samples and applying filters with little real-world analog input or threat of instability. The main difference being is the amount of reliance on probability and chance. This is not to say that filters are 100% predictable, they certainly are not. However there is something to be said for building something with your hands, breathing it life, and then just letting it go. I by no means am creating some competition of digital vs. analog. Nor order vs. chaos. Source is source and Art is Art. With today’s generative algorithms, you don’t need to catch things on fire to attain novel results. It certainly is fun though.

Circuit Bending

Since we’re again on the topic of catching things on fire, where raw bytes are the process in Data Bending, actual physical connections are the medium in Circuit Bending. Circuit Bending is the creation of unique musical or visual instruments from hardware not necessarily intended as such. This can involve rewiring circuits, making jumps and breaks or inserting hardware into a circuit to effect it in a new manner by pushing it above or below its limits. Some circuit bent instruments can be very unpredictable and completely chaotic where as others can be quite melodic and entrancing. The Speak and Spell is a classic target for Circuit Bending. It’s ridiculous actually, the amount of circuit bent projects out there. Just type “Circuit Bending” into your favorite search engine and go. It’s endless and far too wide a subject to approach in any meaningful manner right now though here are a few links to get you started...

http://www.anti-theory.com/soundart/circuitbend/
http://circuit-bent.net/
http://hackaday.com/2011/01/11/intro-to-circuit-bending/
http://www.intelligentmachinery.net/?page_id=384

(0d4

Glitch is so much more than a genre. It is a reprocess of hidden architectures. Glitch is breaking any system enough to reveal it’s interior alternative expressions though without entirely corrupting its base function. By revealing this inner content through unique modification we are allowed the role of creator and observer, able to blend time and space long enough to spark the next Artistic and inspired iteration, a priori, ad infinitum, sans fin.

Below are some Artists which employ elements of glitch in their work, some more than others. Between them all a fairly good representation of some potential applications of glitch are presented from simple textures and breaks to straight up digital vomit. This is just a sample though. The world of glitch is endless. A veritable Tardis if you will.

External Links:

http://gli.tc/h/
http://gli.tc/h/wiki/index.php/Glitch_Artists
http://glidottcslashh.tumblr.com/
http://www.tacticalgl.it/ches/
http://0p3nr3p0.net/submit/sudlab_index.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch
http://jonesypop.com/goldmosh/
http://www.hz-journal.org/n19/betancourt.html
http://pixeldrifter.tumblr.com/
http://www.eeemo.net/
http://revisit.link/