Here's another video toy for everyone. Move the mouse around to determine where the distortion goes.

Once I get a handle on XCode I'll probably bundle them all together and release them as a sort of comprehensive live-video slit-scanning toy on macupdate or something, and then release the source files on kineme

My brother just forwarded this cool post about the aesthetics of 'digital decay' to me. If anyone comes across this here entry, click on through to that link because it's really neat. And I'm in it, too, somehow!

Anyhow, I've been messing around in Quartz Composer again recently and just figured out how powerful the Queue and Iterator patches are—and finally knowing how to use them has opened up what I can do with it considerably.

Slitscanning isn't novel by any means, but it's still an amazing thing to behold, and I was reminded of it yet again recently by Keith Schofield's latest video for MIMS (he's used it to great effect before)

With these things said, I present my latest personal project to you: QC split scannin'

Somewhere in alpha or beta, maybe gamma or whatever
download it here through mediafire!

It requires the following things: a mac, an isight, and os 10.4 or above. The split-scanning can be adjusted in resolution if your computer has trouble keeping up with it or if your computer is so incredibly beefy you could run it at full resolution (640 x 480 for the camera, 640+ splitting lines)

As a live-camera toy, it's just sort of fun to play around with:

The qtz file I have can be hooked up to other sources, like movie files or what have you, and it becomes a tool for analysis.

Aside from rendering even the quickest action in Bill-Viola-like stately fluidity, it presents the movie as a scrolling timeline, revealing pans, cuts, the motions of the characters, the changing of light and shadow. Technically, it's a series of 1-dimensional images (more conventional slit scanning keeps the "scanned" row static—this moves it down a unit each frame, presenting the illusion of a complete image being shown)—but with the sacrifice of detail in an individual frame, you're allowed to see the change of the film over time.

If you look in the flong.com link above, there are myriad ways to implement this technique—I'd like to integrate a few into my project (Keeping the Khronos project in mind, especially). I'm really interested in what Quartz Composer can do (as long as I'm putting off learning Processing, ha ha)

Also, I have this half-finished video synth implementation that would work gggrrreeeattt with this (the main problem I was having completing it was that grabbing input from video means dealing with the herky-jerky-ness of video grain and motion—not that it's a bad thing, just not the aesthetic I was looking for )

I have spent a long time away from this website. I have seen a lot of things, and been a few places, and I don't know how things are going.

However, I just experienced Youtube Doubler for the first time today. Youtube Doubler is the work of artist Brian Kane, and suffice it to say that if it brings me out posting again it's pretty darn cool.

I've seen a lot of stuff before that utilized the simultaneous playback of youtube videos (for example, a lot of the stuff on 53 o's), but it's absolutely great to see it in a form that anyone can use. Here's a combination I've been looking to share with someone for awhile now:http://www.youtubedoubler.com/?video1=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fv%2FlUUzFzCHJ84&video2=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fv%2FUoLf01Q1DSc

edit: the youtube preview widget this site is using is eating the links alive. this reformat should work but it doesn't look as nice when I can't hide the url behind a link tag. gross.

Also interesting is HDADD, also by Brian Kane. It builds on the aesthetic used in youtube doubler, with individual movie-playback areas sitting next to each other, heavily edited to become works of sound poetry or music videos. Kenneth Anger editing, except with space separating cuts as well as time. Each presentation is available for download through itunes, so go ahead and check 'em out.

The video out on this vcr is totally broken, so no interesting videos, but you get to see to see how the tape loop is made! You can see what I'm getting at here.

bonus image:

richard wrote:
I wonder what would happen if you opened up a video file in a hex editor and deleted random parts?

this:

An mp4. I opened it up with TextEdit, then used Find/Replace to replace all of a certain character ( "&", I think) with "F." Then I opened it up in VLC and captured the result.

another wmv:


and then:


not from me:

running a quartz composer file, converted to a wmv, through vlc, then scrubbing the hell out of the timeline. Digital video is surprisingly malleable, especially once you find a media player like vlc that refuses to stop playing a video even though errors abound. Quicktime wouldn't even touch the file. Could you imagine a movie reel projector at the theater that would stop playing the moment it encountered the first scratch on the film?

When I look for things that I find beautiful, it seems that I find myself looking for things that are dying. Things that are decaying, going wrong, falling apart, disused, unwanted, rotting; some man-made thing that starts out perfectly machined and ends up falling apart in some way. I can't walk past a single building without thinking to myself "man, that would be awesome to walk around in if it was half-broken down and covered in moss and vines" (my internal monologue generally doesn't use a very extensive vocabulary). There is aesthetic fulfillment in the simple act of walking and exploration, in experience, not just in looking or listening to something (though they are part of that experience).

Bringing this love for decay back to a larger perspective, it's something I look for in, well, everything. I'm a long time fan of electronic music. While by nature it's sort of cold and impersonal, I find it infinitely more appealing once it begins to straddle that machine/organic dichotomy this writing is about. I wouldn't find Boards of Canada compelling without that hint of tape fuzz, those slightly out-of-tune synths. Nobukazu Takemura's work would be completely sterile if it weren't for the skipping CD's he uses extensively. Tim Hecker and Fennesz would be lost without distortion and feedback. I feel everything I listen to has to be messed with, changed up in an unpredictable and organic way in order to make it compelling on a human level.

With all that in mind, I will start the entry content proper proper with this declaration: I have been doing some things with Super Mario Brothers. Hacking them, as it were. But it's not so much an activity with intentions and objectives so much as it is a psychogeographical map of a video game. psycholudogical, maybe, though I try to stay away from coining phrases that nobody needs.



The process reads like this: Download the rom from someplace(it's illegal, so don't do it if that sort of thing upsets your stomach and ruins your day), open it up in your text editor or hex editor of choice, move and change things around(keeping exactly the same file size), save your changes, then open up the rom in your emulator of choice (I use Nestopia for Mac OS X), see what happens, repeat. 99% of the time the answer is "not much" or "nothing" or "this is frustrating, I can't start a game or move my character at all." But take heart! For the 1% of hacks that display some sort of difference from the original while remaining playable, it's very much worth it.

The resulting images and experiences one gets from hacking Super Mario Brothers in such a fashion are glorious. Colors shift at will, Mario walks through walls, music changes when you stomp on an enemy, the background turns into walls and walls of text. When you insert glitches into the game, you decay it in some fashion. Artist Cory Arcangel and the Paperrad collective made an excellent little movie (open it up with an emulator and don't press anything) about this.

Most of our digital media is dying faster than we can preserve it. CD's become unusable over time, storage formats become obsolete and discarded, leaving people with no way to save their information. Tapes die, hard disks crash, sometimes a power surge happens and bits simply get shifted. Design firm Experimental Jetset has been creating an archive of lost formats, and simply to see the number of storage mediums that we no longer can use, whose reading devices are decaying and being irreparably broken faster than they are. We lose our culture, byte by byte, with every single floppy disk that gets exposed to just a little bit too much air. Nearly nothing is left of things I've made from the ages of 10 to 14—no writing, no hypercard stacks, no games, no game hacks, no game saves, no art, no sound files, no recordings of my friend and I goofing around with the microphone, no claymation movie made with a webcam and too much free time.

And yet, isn't there something appealing about all this? The futurist (both modern armchair- and 1914- types) buried deep within me takes joy in the thought of having a world with no past (extremely doubtful that it is, that the world will lose all its information due to obsolete formats), a world where the library burns itself down, bit by bit. It is silly, though. It's a problem that's been acknowledged and is being addressed by projects on the internet (through the MAME project, for example, or TextFiles), and the forces of society at large (anyone who fights against Digital Rights Management software fights for cultural preservation). So I feel safe saying that modern history will be able to last a little longer. But for now, enjoy the aesthetic its decay has created, and glitch away!

____________________

I've set up a directory containing the best of my glitched roms and their sounds so far at sawtooth.ptoing.net/misc/nes/
Feel free to look around! Post your own in the comments section if you feel so inclined!