We had a nice day trip to Oxford on Friday, and on the train my mate Digital Dave was complaining about his camera playing up. I asked to see it and unbelievably, it was doing this to his photos! 

A fault in the camera was resulting in images from the memory being mashed together, so every time a new shot was taken, there were traces of previous images found in it.

Here you can see a chunk of an image he took of some t-shirts to put on eBay has forced its way into this pic of one of Oxford’s magnificent colleges. Digital memory is fused with its human equivalence, like the camera is daydreaming, thinking of the images it had taken a few days earlier. 

I thought it might be interesting to glitch the laser cutter, but realised I’d probably struggle to get permission to mess around with a few grand’s worth of hardware. So I tried glitching this video of the laser cutter instead.

It’s probably just that I’m noticing more but its getting a little strange how often things are seeming to malfunction, glitch or decay in the digital realm of my life. Spotted this at Paddington station on Friday.

I’ve had a few funny looks recently as I’ve been collecting this printer spool which finds itself spread around uni. There’s an ancient printer in particular up on the 5th floor, which is rather temperamental. Every so often it will pump out a sheet of this code. I presume its the HEX or ASCII of the image it was supposed to print, but it produces some really nice looking graphics.

There is a sort of dialogue that takes place between the user and the printer, an argument almost, as it tries its best to ruin your expensive glossy paper. You have to trick it into printing your image, rather than the page of code. With practice you can learn the combination of buttons to press to get the thing to work, but every now and then it will spurt out a sheet of this code, just as you think it’s started to behave. If I could find out how this happens, and if I could find an old printer, it would be great to do some further experimentation to see what sort of outcome I could achieve. As interesting as it is however, its not ideal the day before a hand-in…

[Click for full set]

Structural Decay from Chris Coleman on Vimeo.

Another project I’ve just stumbled upon which offers a striking resemblance to my ideas for an installation. Chris Coleman is an Assistant Professor in Digital Media Studies at the University of Denver and has some fantastic work, a lot of which explores very similar areas to those I’m interested in for this thesis project. On this project:

“The work was created as part of a multi-story one building audio and visual festival called “Murder the Word” in Buffalo NY. Sensors were placed around the building and were activated by the people moving through the space. When activated each sensor would trigger a specific audio and video clip dealing with and pre-recorded and then processed from that particular space. The clips dealt with the decay of the aging structure which is normally abandoned and how the human activity was accelerating its shift to a more entropic state.” [from Vimeo]

Looking into how I can ‘digitally decay’ video, I came across some Processing scripts which produce this ‘slit-scanning’ effect. 

The scripts work on both a real-time feed from a webcam and on a pre-recorded Quicktime movie. Below are some stills from my webcam, going to look into running this script on a movie file tho…

[click for the full Flickr set]

There are some great pieces of image based artwork on Flong. Im straying a bit off my topic here but Andrew Davidhazy is worth a look. His articles on strip photography and slit-scanning are incredibly interesting.

Bryan Mumford works with ‘Streak Photography’ which you may recognize, I think it ws on a T-Mobile advert recently or something… 

Eddie Elliott seems one of the first to look into slit-scanning techniques with digital video. “As early as 1992, he describes a variety of both utilitarian and playful uses of digital slit-scans, which he called “Video Streamers”. Elliott principally used Streamers as part of a larger visual interface system for editing and manipulating video; later, however, he developed an educational/artistic exhibit (shown at the San Francisco Exploratorium) which computed Streamers from live participant video. Elliott also created playful transformations of Streamers, such as the folding paper box template shown above. Elliott’s work is extensively documented in his 1994 PhD Thesis, which he produced in the Interactive Cinema Group of the MIT Media Laboratory” [Flong.com]