prosthetic knowledge

Glitching Video With Audacity Tutorial 

QAP has put together a tutorial to process videos with glitch effects by using the freeware sound program Audacity. Using videos from different file formats produce various results:

So here it is ! I’ll tell you how to generate glitching video really simply (no coding, no play in HexEditor, just some clicks and lot’s of encoding and decoding) ! if you are here, then I don’t need to explain you what is a glitch, and I won’t run into technical explanation about U-LAW, A-LAW, video compression and stuffs. if you’re curious about it, there is still that good guy of wikipedia around here.

I’m doing this little tutorial cause I spent lot’s of time working on generating glitching videos, and around 80% of this spent time leaded to unreadable/unusable video files, so there is no need for everybody to do the same mistakes!

Ok so, no more chatting, here come the glitch!

You’ll need your source file that you wanna glitch, obviously a video file, but it needs to be “pre-encoded” using specific codecs, and each of those specific codecs lead to different kind of glitch (see the gallery below to see what kind of glitch you wanna do and so what kind of codecs you’ll use). And just Use your favorite encoding program (like SUPER, AviDemux, VirtualDub, or even After Effects etc…) to encode it.
The smaller the video is, the faster Audacity work on it. But as there tons of different codecs, there are some that are really not powerful for video compression and give you huge files, but for some of them, you’ll get astonishing glitches !! 

There are plenty of video and still examples - I’ve picked my favourite above based on the video file format they have used: .theora, .qt_mpeg4, qt_animation, and .flv.

You can read the tutorial and check out the examples here

killer.gif by Olli Tapio Leino (連藹理)

An experiment, converting John Woo’s “The Killer” film into a long animated gif, complete with soundtrack:

GIF89a was the standard format for images, mostly porn, distributed in bulletin board systems (BBS) in 1990s. Many remember the characteristic appearance of dithered low-colour images saved in GIF89a format, optimized to take as little space as possible to facilitate distribution over pay-per-minute modem connections or on 3,5” high density diskettes (1,44Mb). Contemporary internet culture still makes use of GIF89a as short animations embedded on websites. As the history of moving image formats is defined by JPEG and GIF89a is deemed ‘incompatible’ with the properties of moving photographic image, the aesthetic range of the latter in a cinematic context has remained unexplored.

killer.gif consists of John Woo’s 1989 classic Hong Kong triad movie The Killer (喋血雙雄), broken into 1747 GIF89a animations, divided according to color spectrum modulations. While this is to facilitate optimisation to a restricted palette, allowing distribution on diskettes, it also creates an alternative punctuation operating sometimes in parallel, sometimes in a stark contrast to the cinematic language of the director John Woo and the producer Tsui Hark.

killer.gif critically interrogates remix culture by claiming independent status based on a seemingly simple format conversion. However, by way of conversion, killer.gif proposes a McLuhanian experiment in alternative technohistory. While the disappearance of photographic detail into the tingling visual surface of Floyd-Steinberg dither initially distances the audience from the narrative the patterns that emerge from the GIF89a optimised presentation cast new light on the triad killer trying to come clean.

Soundtrack and subtitles are left untouched to control the experiment to focus on visual surface only. For this submission the conversion has been recorded and exported into a Matroska Media Container file to facilitate easy screening. Please note that at the curator’s request it can also be screened directly from GIF89a format or presented as a video installation.

More screencaptures can be found here

Jordan Tate, New Work, 2010. From Jordan Tate

Taken from gif. jpg. png. tif. at HEREart at Rhizome.org

“gif. jpg. png. tif. (gjpt),” an exhibition currently on display at HEREart , explores the relationship between standardized digital image formats and visual representation. Curated by Jess Ramsay and featuring work by Jason Huff, Jordan Tate and Adam Tindale, Seyhan Musaoglu, and Giselle Zatonyl, the exhibition demonstrates how fully digital imaging has permeated visual culture. The works in the exhibition approach the pixel as a key structural component of visual representation, manipulating it to expose the formal characteristics of digital media.

Link

Coca Cola identity sketches via eaudesignlondon