A Brave New World

So I've frightened myself a little, as far as I've come as a graphic designer in this brief alone there still so much I've realised I want to learn. The data bending and corruption has kind of lead me to gain a real understanding of how to process data and source codes, and the possibilities out there are endless. Through the help of Mike, James and Samantha Jones, I have been put on to several new pieces of software. The least daunting is Quartz Composer, a Mac developer program that contains all of a Mac OSX's processing capabilites. It works through source code as well as a manual way of creating, manipulating and triggering data in so many different forms. Much of the software you see on shelves for Mac's is created using Quartz. I'm really excited about learning to get to grips with the endless possibilities it provides.



As well as this James and Mike have are in the process of setting up Jitter for me on a computer in the AV dept. A 3D and real time video processing software, using MAX coding language. The evidence of things you can create through MAX/MSP literally gets my heart rate pounding (I know, I'm a geek).


(A custom patch built by Autechre)

Finally, and the one I've started to get stuck into, processing here's an example of my first ever full coding language-generated visual...



Really unimpressive I know, but its got me pretty excited. It was weirdly satisfying typing for a while - which is visually pretty mundane - then clicking to reveal a little image. My guide so far had been this huge encyclopedia of the history, processes and theories surrounding the program.





I'm obviously at very basic stages and didn't expect to have anything to exciting before the deadline but Processing seems to be an amazing digital environment for me to begin to truly understand data and coding language. I really feel like I've taken a baby step into a whole new world.

Camera Feedback

I spent several hours down in the AV department experimenting with recording and documenting the communication error between the camera and on-screen preview. Matt had never attempted to use the new high speed cameras, which was one of the things we tried out. Unfortunately the results produced by this were very unfruitful, the only method we could use was filmng the onscreen feedback from a standard HD camera, which was too slow to have any effect on the high speed model, so it was just a film of a film of a film...you get the idea.



However, using the XD Cam (in particular a Sony PMW-EX1) we managed to generate an array of amazing forms created by static, experimenting with the gain, shutter speed, shutter angle, zooming in and out, messing with the iris and just generally working with almost every possible setting to see what it would produce. I had over an hour of recorded film, so considering the final edit was five minutes long there was alot of unused work. Here are some screenshots from stuff I didn't use.



There was alot of this, and it looked great on the big screen when I was actually filming it, but it didn't work as well with the more erratic fast-paced feedback in the movie, it was a resulted of putting the camera out of focus at a very slow shutter speed.





We played with creating movement between the camera and screen, producing interesting results , however I felt they disrupted the flow of the final piece.



The ghost of the 'frame' of the television set was included a lot, but I decided to not again actually showing the object of the television set cause similar flow-disrupting effects.





The first 10-20 minutes of filming there was a lot of text on-screen, which I thought was pretty cool at first but when we removed all the menus from the screen, it seemed more easy to get lost in the feedback uninterrupted by text. I enjoyed using the text as a reference to the 'glitch' in the final piece and they allowed a questionable 'transition' between the more organic feedback sequences. Apart from not having any luck with the high speed camera, this experiment flowed pretty smoothly, and I'm very happy with the end results. It was also good getting used to using the AV Department and while I was there speaking to Matt and seeing what else they had an offer, I'll definitely be down there more in the future as there's a ton of things I'd love to try out. Anyway, this is the compressed version of the final piece uploaded on Vimeo, I'll need to figure out what format I want to provide the final HD movie on.

Communication Error from Joe Durnan on Vimeo.

Although from research and common sense I was aware that this sort of feedback was a result of a optical loop between output and an input. Matt joked that as an infinity curve, it was the answer to a range of Einstein theories. Saying that a simple process like this could be used in education as a visual reference to certain scientific space-time theories.

The Universe Corrupted

The full episode of The Universe (S03E09) is about an hour long so I've uploaded some highlights from the datamoshed .avi , at first it seemed it was going to be impossible to edit at as no player would accept the corrupted file. But I managed to open and edit (only to a certain extent) on MPEG Streamclip. Thankfully, once saved through MPEG Streamclip, I could open in Quicktime and easily removed the audio, which was a less interesting result of the corruption.
What I'm guessing has happened is the corruption of the data has caused a misplacement of the key frames, so the transitions between 'scenes' are the most interesting.

Part One

The Universe Corrupted pt.1 from Joe Durnan on Vimeo.

Part Two

The Universe Corrupted pt.2 from Joe Durnan on Vimeo.

I chose this TV program not only because I was interested to see the result it had on the complex cgi environment, I also felt it was critically appropriate in terms of the texts I've been reading and the concept of 'simulations' to aid our undrrstanding of the 'unseeable'.

Datamoshing

The DataMoshing community - like the world of Data Bending and Glitches - is a pretty niche, underground phenomena, however its interesting to see its use in a commercial environment, outside the world of creative computer geeks and as a result its increase in popularity. Embedding was for some reason disable on this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJ7jCWufP00&feature=related

Creating Geometric Shapes

So using a very very simplistic form of applied mathematics I attempted to create some geometric shapes from the static produced by raw files. As best I could I would use pixel measurements to define the shapes I created using the eliptical marquee and the custom-shape polygon tools...







Using a standard layering process and simply changing the Levels and Variations of certain objects I created some pieces I'm quite happy with. I'll admit I changed them a little by hand to get the shapes I wanted. Just a little experiment.





On this I used all 4-Channel interlaced raw files to create the shapes from, as well as editing Variations.

Corrupting Files

Corrupt USB Flash Drive...

I've been trying to work out exactly why this USB stick does this to any files placed on it but it's all pretty hard for me to understand and this was the only article I could find that properly explains how Flash Memory works. What I assume, from the research I've done, is that because USB Drives work electronically not mechanically there would have to be some sort of communication error to do with the tunneling, a process that alters the placement of electrons in the cells of the chip containing the flash memory, perhaps a loss off memory in the targeted area of the chip erasing some of the data of any files stored on it?





What I just said could be wrong in so many ways, and I guess it would be interesting to open up a working USB Flash Drive and tamper with it to see its effects, but I appreciate the fact that this is a happy accident as Iman Moradi put it a 'Pure Glitch'.

It was interesting the different effect it had on different file formats, for example any audio I put on it was completely uneffected, as were bitmap files. Large jpeg files reacted in similar ways, they would start with subtle lines appearing across the right hand side, before some much more dramatic changes in loss of data. This is a 1.3MB jpeg file, orginally a photoshop file (which was unneffected as a psd).

For some reason, files would not change if you placed them onto the computer and back on to the flash drive. They had to first be altered in some way, ie. rotated on Preview, or the levels changed slightly. So it became quite a slow process but it was fun seeing the progression of the corrupion of these files.

These images were generated using found images online (jpegs) of the Witch Head Nebula, using the same process, the effects were quite different in that there was no subtle data loss to begin with and a lack of the ghosts of the original image seen in the larger file above...

I got a little obsessed with using pictures of nebulae, I just fully loved the contrast of the blocky corruption in the amazing organic shapes. Totally preferred the more subtle, initial corruption over the complete pixelated messes..

After that it just got ugly. PNG files would just die right away after the first exposure to the USB drives corruption...
And my favourite.. a full episode of The Universe as a corrupted avi file. Its an hour long and no video editing software would accept it as some essential codec/header was deleted through corruption. So all I can show at the moment is screenshots from VLC (the only program that will play it), until I figure out how to upload it (its over an hour long) or edit it.