Gli/t.ch Fest 2010!!
Glitch is awesome. Totally effin awesome. You can bend, shift, color, texturize, distort, destroy, splice, obliterate or reverse both sound and image to your heart’s content and create fascinating things people haven’t seen before. Plus it’s ofter done by intellectual geek-types in skater shoes wielding soldering irons and mad h4x0r skillz and that’s a recepie for success if I’ve ever heard one…
Well I was fortunate to attend some of the events at this year’s Gli.tch Festival in Chicago this year, and sweet datamoshing Jesus do I have a lot to share with you. The Glitch scene is incredibly and unsurprisingly open-source and collaborative and throughout my adventures through the circuit-bent 4 days of the Glitch Festival I was exposed to a wealth of information, awesome personalities and minds, and innovation that’ll blow your mind and wish you could code better.
I’ll just walk ya through the few days I managed to attend and post some of the helpful links I grabbed off their site and other relevant places, if you’re into making your own glitch art or music/sound scroll down a bit and you’ll find some links to helpful plugins, tutorials, and pages.
I ended up hitting 3 of the major events: the Rosa Menkman lecture, the first night of screenings and performances, and the hacking and bending workshops. If you’re interested in the other events and screenings I didn’t have the time to get to, check out the Gli.tch site here and have a look around! Don’t forget to check out the blog as well, not sure how long that’s going to be up but nevertheless here are some more helpful links in czeching out the scene…
- http://gli.tc/h/wiki/index.php/Main_Page <– The Wiki page for Gli.tc/h with tons of links, software, tutorials, plug-ins, tttheory, history, and other poorly-compressed deliciousness
- http://cliplead.blogspot.com/
- GLITCHFEST 2010 YouTube Page
So as I said, the first night I was asked to go with some friends to the lecture by Dutch artist and theorist Rosa Menkman, a cute chick who, to my glee, rocked some sweet skater shoes with her dress and investigated some fasinating implications and theories that Glitch carries with it. Here’s her slide presentation, it loses a bit without her vocal explanation but it’s still quite interesting:
Oh, and she did a cool write up on Datamoshing, a relatively easy video compression glitch trick. Too bad I ran up and gushed about how awesome glitch is to her and obviously creeped her the hell out haha.
The next night, the first round of video viewings and performances were on the menu so I treked down to Transistor, which is a super sick store in the Southern corner of Chicago’s Anderson neighborhood, that sells all kinds of keyboards, art…
…books on music like this one about the development and various permutations of the vocoder (I’ve heard from multiple sources that this book rocks all kinds of ass)…
…and things like these magnificant FX boxes built by a local.
So anyways I walk in through the door into Transistor and past a crowd of people but I notice absolutely nothing at else at first save for this godly, transcendant setup to my right. My mind starts racing and I wonder if the public is free to mess around with this cherry gear and whether it’s for sale (I later find out it’s Jason Soliday’s setup after asking him, “Hey! So is this like, open to the public or anything?”, to which he replied in his annoyed, gritty voice “Uh, this is my stuff man”. Oh.)
All around are the jumbled masses of wire-tangles and plastic and metal boxes strewn across the room, adorned by an array of pots, faders, buttons, and switches. I love this shit!!
This is only a corner of the place but obviously it was packed with the usual motley assortment of art-types you’d see at a Wicker Park gallery opening or something, except for the wonderful addition of a sizable number of geeky lookin dudes, which warmed my heart, lemme tell you.
So finally they got some of the videos going and for the most part they were both puzzling and fascinating, which is the criteria for any modern art work these days anyway. As you hopefully can tell through the dark picture , people were pretty enthralled throughout the show, clutching their amusingly stereotypical PBR’s in amazement and staring.
Here’s a shot I got from this piece, I remember it distinctly for how unnerving and awesome it was. It’s by Omar Mashal .
Hard to see who’s in this picture, yes, but I can pick out Nick Briz, Jon Satrom, Jason Soliday, and maybe Vadim Sprikut; all of whom are important figures in the scene and I find it kinda hilarious to see them all plopped down in front of the screen Indian-style (or criss-cross-applesauce depending on how goddamn politically correct your elementary school was, because not all Indians sit crissy-crossy, children).
Dude, it wasn’t that loud, chill yourself.
This is Aaron Zarzutzki. Aaron performed a funny and satirical piece where he basically pretended to fuck up and proceeded to glitch the screen out through his cool video interface he apparently made based around the text ART IS DEEP or something like that. It was pretty cool and seeing some video art that was so interactive and having the crowd shout out suggestions was a ballin dynamic. The thing that seperates Aaron Zarzutzki from the rest of the artists in particular is that he is a bit of a jackass. The guy was yelling the whole time (which I totally support and I wish more artists would stop being such demure little bastards) but once the other artists and performers were going, Aaron continued to shout loudly with other people in unrelated and distracting conversations. The note I took down in my moleskine summed the guy up pretty well for me: Zarzutzki is kinda cool and funny and interesting performance. Kinda an asshole..
I think this is Ryan Dunn, correct me if I’m wrong, and if it is you can catch some of his work here. He did a pretty impressive performance using the type of impossibly tangled mass of patch cables, faders, knobs, and pads that are iconic of the experimental music scene.
Remember that time I said that Zarzutzki was a bit of an asshole? Notice who happens to be standing in everyone’s way during another artist’s screening. That’s a bingo!
I don’t remember who this was but here’s the full listing of those who screened and performed that night.
Keep rockin man.
Finally managed to snap some lit photos of Soliday’s gear; looks like a standard Mackie mixer, a synth and a SEXY SEXY Moogerfooger, which I’ve wanted forreverr (note it down on your Christmas lists!) attached to some sort of super sick custom tone generator. He would tap and slide on these wood panels and create crazy noises and I’m not totally sure whether it operates on pressure or skin conductivity but in any case it’s superbadassfantastic.
Other than being a complete badass, Jason also runs the experimental music and sound venue Enemy, located near Humbolt Park which hosts workshops, guest speakers, and performances, all of them being pretty damn cool.
So Jon Satrom and Jason Soliday, or as they’re collectively known, XTAL FSK, rocked the house with Jon on the video and Jason on the noises
Notice how no one’s actually watching Jason as he obliterates and reconstitutes sound with his bare hands; there’s pretty pictures going on onscreen.
So the next day was the most exciting of the lot: hacking workshops and theory, oh me, Oh My! Problem was I ended up running really late due to taking the wrong train line and looked like this the whole way:
FROWNY FACE!
Anyways I finally made it to the Nightingale Theater after passing it a few times…
…in addition to some interesting street-based art things
And made it there just in time to catch up on the circuit bending tutorials that had been going on!
So I sat down amongst a tangle of headphone jacks and dollar-store toys as designated teacher Roth Mobot, among a few others, ran down the basics of circuit bending and demonstrated how some precise soldering and a cursory knowledge of circuit boards can allow you to produce some really fun tones and sounds
You can find the tutorial pdf handed out to us at the workshop by the awesome Roth Mobot (check out his site and blog, some pretty fascinating mods he’s done) here HOST THE PDF. Try it out for yourself!!
Basically it’s just licking your finger to establish some conductivity and thumbing around on the circuit board to find where the part that controls pitch is and then soldering resistors and potentiometers (pots/dials) in to control said parameters.
What a gloriously dense tangle of patch cables and electronic components. I’m taking a class in circuit bending here at SAIC next semester so expect to get some sort of tutorial or write-up!! (Update: They don’t have that class in the Spring semester, EFF!)
Next up was the amusing and useful Hacking Codec Tutorial by Nick Briz. Here’s his blog, hopefully there’ll be more content up on the process soon! Anyhoo, Nick handed out these well designed and cool custom Ubuntu/Linux OS’s to load into our computers…
Pretty nifty.
So Nick walked us all first through the simple process of glitching through word processor compression, which involves importing an image file (preferably an uncompressed format like a .bmp) into a word processor like WordPad, editing the ASCII text, and saving. The result is some trippy control over various color “glitches” and modifications.
Basically on a windows computer;
· Make a copy of an image file, preferably uncompressed…
· Right click on the image file,
· Open with, Other/Choose Default Program…
· Pick a text editor, I’m told Wordpad does cool stuff with gifs and jpegs sometimes but Notepad is the way to go for uncompressed files like bmp’s and tiff’s
· Remove just a bit, change one letter, anything small. Save.
· Check out the results! Start messing around with different sections and see what the result is, you can end up having tons of control of the image file if you know what you’re doing. Every compression format has a different style though, and even different resolutions of the same format can change things up drastically.
For more in depth info, stAllio! has a databending and glitch-art primer rriiighhht oovverrr here!
After some stimulating theory we proceeded to get underway with a tutorial on video codec glitchin’.
Like I said, I’ll post up a link to the tutorial once Nick has it online, but the basic gist is that we all brought up custom Ubuntu operating systems with some open-source video players given to us on that slick CD I showed a second ago. Because it’s open source, we could go into specific compression codecs and mess around with particular integers to make pictures and scenes bleed together similar to the datamoshing I linked yo ass to.
Unfortunately for one guy next to me, the codec glitching actually eff’d up his normal operating system all pretty-like. Way to take one for the team, man.
Make sure to take notes boyee!!
Last up was “GltchLnguistx: The Machine in the Ghost / Static Trapped in Mouths”, a theory lecture on Glitch and Glitch art by Curt Cloninger. Here’s a rundown of some of the talking points I jotted down in my increasingly ragged moleskine:
· Code is still physical
· Source vs. compiled data aren’t opposites
· It’d be cool if you caused the glitch on yourself as you twist the dials
· All of the conversation in the piece “Mouths in Static” is modulated by the glitch
· Glitched letters are a trace of the event
· Thinking about glitching makes you realize all the shit that goes on
· Glitch ethics might be widening our view of what’s “noise”, what should get filtered
· You go crazy for so long but at the end you just go “that’s pretty”
· So it’s like you smoke pot and think you’re deep but really just the pot
· In the end, it just runs on human hardware
That may very well be of no use so here’s the actual essay Curt posted, it’s pretty fascinating if you’re into all that artsy, thinkin-type stuff. Have a look around the rest of his site too while you’re there, it’s not like you have anything better to do.
After that was a tutorial on the Quartz Composer program which apparently something for a Mac video program. I don’t rock a Mac and never will so I bounced right outta that nonsense! After leaving a buncha JTS business cards that is.
So that’s it!! Hope that was helpful, keep on checkin out the site for more updates!
Writer for Join the Studio. Im an artist, Turntablist/DJ, producer, designer, student at SAIC, and I run The Studio with a bunch of other awesome people.
Art portfolio: www.behance.net/samrolfes
Free music: www.soundcloud.com/shardstyle
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