Every technology has its own accidents. Rosa Menkman is a Dutch visualist who focuses on visual artifacts created by accidents in digital media. The visuals she makes are the result of glitches, compressions, feedback and noise. Although many people perceive these accidents as negative experiences, Rosa emphasizes their positive consequences.
By combining both her practical (art school) as well as an academic background (Ma New Media and RMa Media Studies), she merges her abstract pieces within a grand theory artifacts (a glitch studies), in which she strives for new forms of conceptual synesthesia.
http://rosa-menkman.blogspot.com/
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Well Dave’s camera has been playing up again. He’s been on his jollies after Linz had used it to take some snaps of the kids in her school class, and the results are quite freaky. Pictures of hot, Spanish beaches are infused with glimpses of children playing. Just take a look at the results…
What I find fascinating about these glitches is that each one seems to tell a story. This story of course is an entirely subjective reading by each individual viewer, but this adds a further layer of interest to the image. In this example the stormy mood of the seascape could be reflecting that of the classroom. Obviously this wasn’t one of Linz’s classes! See the full set here
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I now have an elite, highly trained squadron of Digital Decay spotters in place throughout the capital. This particular shot was captured by Agent Barker whilst on patrol on the tube network.
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Some more attractive and useful video glitching work from ISVSH. This clip is particular relevant as it is somewhat similar in appearance to what I envisage my installation projection to look like towards its latter stages. A collection of images change so quickly that we only get the very slightest impression of what they are, the odd face or figure is apparent but the overall effect is very abstract.
bijinoise from isvsh on Vimeo.
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Well I’d love to say that I’d managed to do this intentionally, my Thesis being all about Digital Decay and what have you, but the truth is that I didn’t. I simply pulled my phone out of my pocket to find that it had went berserk…. Anyway, since I LOVE digital decay, I wasnt even bothered about the prospect of my phone being knackered, so borrowed The Cat’s (not so good) phone and got a few snaps along with a vid. The excessive noise in the background is a mixture of Mark Steedman and a laser cutter.
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After struggling initially to find a way of automating the process of glitching images, I found a couple of web-based methods which proved useful. The first is an add-on script for Firefox browser called GlitchMonkey. When activated, this script randomly scrambles the images of a web page. I experimented with some popular sites…
The second system is called Glitch Browser. This is a webpage created by the same collaborative as the GlitchMonkey application which allows the user to enter a URL and have it glitched in a similar way.
“Computers are not allowed to make mistakes. The glitch browser represents a deliberate attempt to subvert the usual course of conformity and signal perfection. Information packets which are communicated with integrity are intentionally lost in transit or otherwise misplaced and rearranged. The consequences of such subversion are seen in the surprisingly beautiful readymade visual glitches provoked by the glitch browser and displayed through our forgiving and unsuspecting web browsers.” (from www.glitchbrowser.com)
I was excited to see that when a URL is entered into the Glitch Browser’s site address bar and the page is glitched, a new, unique URL is in turn generated in Firefox’s main address bar. It would therefore seem logical that if I take this newly generated URL for the glitched web page and put it back into the site address bar on the Glitch Browser website, the result would be a double-glitched image. This process could be repeated over and over in theory. The results of this cyclic process, however, are not not as expected or desired. The images on the webpage seem only to glitch in the very first iteration.
The next stage in the experimentation was to turn on the GlitchMonkey plug in script and run it on the Glitch Browser web page. As can be seen below, this seems to proves successful in creating a double-glitched page.
If the URL generated from this is now used in the same manner as previously, pasting it back into the Glitch Browser site address bar, but this time with the GlitchMonkey script running, we get differently glitched pages in each iteration. As of yet I am unsure whether this is actually glitching images over and over, or if the script simply glitches each iteration once, but in a random, unique way each time…
Either way, the results are fruitful. The main drawback I feel is that only the images on each page are being glitched, not the text content. There must be a method of decaying the page as a whole however. I will look into the idea of decaying websites through the decay of its source code. Scrambling it in a similar way to the image code with HexEdit could produce some relevant results, and the concept of a website relates well to our perception of physical space, with many metaphors now being commonplace when referring to digital web ‘space’.
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