Of interest to me are the visual tools they have created, including the Television Oscilloscope and Cellular Automata Video Synthesizer Kit.

I’m inclined to think of these as toys or works of art rather than serious visualization tools, but whatever you call them they certainly are cool.

The video is pretty outrageous, keeping with a hipster, retro, in-your-face attitude. The chaos is very fun, and the use of keying and layers helps maintain an anchor of focus in the midst of it all (in the forms of Rusko and his female companion).

The plot and imagery don’t develop much after the first 30 seconds, but it’s a delightfully unabashed embrace of analog glitch aesthetics (I definitely appreciated the old-school VHS blue-screen at the end).

I also really enjoyed the video for Electrical Way by Zoos of Berlin. You can find it on the Pomp & Clout website.

So the day has come: Bit_Synthesis has a Twitter account.

The account will be maintained by longtime friends, artists, and collaborators Jackie Bousek and Georgie Schaefer – as well as myself.

Tune in for yet another barrage of media and information.

Just as significantly, he has been (and continues to be) a strong member of the glitch-making community. The tutorials on his site have inspired and educated many newcomers. When I first started experimenting with glitches I came across these tutorials via flickr and they opened up new worlds of possibility.

I interviewed Stallio for my Flickr Glitch Artists post on Vague Terrain. Here’s the interview in full, un-edited.

Me: How do you first develop and explore an idea/concept?

Stallio: glitch projects are usually about solving some kind of puzzle: how to bend a certain type of file, how to get the effect i want, how to get it to glitch in the right place, how to get the best colors, etc. source material is usually chosen because the form is right for some reason, but sometimes i will want to glitch a certain type of subject matter.

Me: What methods, mediums, and tools do you use?

Stallio: i’ll use any software i can figure out how to databend with. mostly i use hex editors, wav editors, and notepad. which tools i use depend on what kind of effect i’m going for.

Me: What are some of your influences? Where do you find inspiration?

Stallio: if i see that others have gotten an interesting effect then i may be inspired to figure out how they did it and try to duplicate that effect. but beyond that it’s hard to discuss “inspiration” for databending considering that so much of it is just trial and error until something interesting happens.

Me: Do you see flickr as a community, or simply a platform on which to display your work?

Stallio: it’s a bit of both. i definitely would have fewer fans and wouldn’t have “met” as many other glitch artists if not for the flickr pools.

Me: What are the pros and cons of displaying work on flickr?

Stallio: though there are things i don’t like about flickr, i can’t think of anything i don’t like about hosting my images there right now. it’s easy to work with, automatically resizes my work to a few standard sizes, and i can post my work to the pools where i know it’ll be seen by an appreciative audience.

Me: Besides flickr, where else do you display/exhibit your work?

Stallio: i have my own web site, and have shown my work in a couple galleries.

Me: What display environments and mediums would you like to explore in the future?

Stallio: i’ve been trying to move away from purely abstract glitch to introduce more traditional illustration aspects, for example doing illustrations and using glitches for textures/fills.

This is the version currently used by GlitchBot.

CALL FOR ENTRIES: GLI.TC/H

http://gli.tc/h

GLI.TC/H is an international gathering of noise & new media
practitioners in Chicago from September 29 thru October 03, 2010!

GLI.TC/H is a physical and virtual assembly of artists, hackers,
moshers, dirty mediators, noise makers, circuit benders,
p/h/i/l/o/s/o/p/h/e/r/s, and those who find wonder in that which
others call broken.

GLI.TC/H seeks: Realtime + time-based performances (audio/video),
utilizing broken/bent technologies/strategies. Workshops, sharing
knowledge of hardware/software hacking, cracking, breaking, kludging,
piracy, & tool building. Artworks and Projects, artware, videos,
games, films, tapes, code, interventions, screen-captures, systems,
websites & installations. Texts, lectures, essays, code, articles, &
hypermedia.

DEADLINE: 2010.08.20

send an email to glitch@gli.tc
link to your work, abstract, or other documentation
please include a short explanation and your bio
let us know your geolocation and if you want to physically (or
electronically) attend the conference. If applicable, send spatial,
technical or temporal requirements for the project.

NOTIFICATIONS WILL BE SENT BY 2010.09.10
GLI.TC/H
submissions: glitch@gli.tc
queries: i@gli.tc
home: http://gli.tc/h

Since GlitchBot has its own page here on Bit_Synthesis, I won’t go into too much detail (just check out the above link). A brief overview follows the slideshow.

GlitchBot is an automated glitch creation program / persona that specializes in glitching still images on flickr.

GlitchBot uses appropriately licensed images from other flickr users as source material for its glitches, which it then uploads to its own flickr page.

GlitchBot creates a new image every day, usually just after 1:00 pm EST.

GlitchBot is written in the Ruby programming language, and utilizes Upflickr for uploading and organizing its images.

UPDATE: here, I braved the insanity of the Paper Rad site to find you this image. Their DVD has more examples of the moving picture variety.

Given that Cory and Paper Rad tend to be known in similar circles, it is not surprising that in 2005 they got together to collaborate on a project, which became Super Mario Movie. This is a fun little piece, though a bit long at points, that explores the difficulties of life as a character in a deteriorating video game.

The ROM file and video are available at the above link, or you can watch it below in two parts.

Me: How do you first develop and explore an idea/concept?

Max Capacity: I’ve always been drawn to the aesthetics of degradation and decay. And I love obsolete media. I went to school for photography, and I used to purposefully degrade my film, my negatives, and my prints through every stage of the process to create random chaos. I recently realized I’m taking a similar approach to video game graphics and pixels, just with different methods and mediums. I find that old video games have a certain nostalgia to them that appeal to people of my generation on an emotional level. I still remember all the NES games I managed to beat as a kid. I’m still proud of those accomplishments, even. Pixels themselves in old video games had to represent something much more epic in scope. Today’s video games don’t need to be symbolic or representative, they look like what they’re supposed to look like. So the video games become a fun medium or subject matter to degrade, as there’s still a certain level of basic recognition after the fact.

Me: What methods, mediums, and tools do you use?

MC: I try to use whichever method I figure is the most appropriate to achieve authentic glitches. Or failing that, whatever methods I have available to me. My NES circuit bending is all hardware, so I actually have to go through the process of testing and bending the circuit to get desirable results. The same with circuit bent cartridges, which have their own issues, since I have to disassemble the cartridge case and work on it while it’s live. I’d like to digitally transfer those images, but since I don’t have equipment for that, I take photographs of a TV screen displaying the glitches. It’s not perfect, but the photos have their own desirable qualities. My plan is to get a DVD-R deck so I can record video output and then rip the DVD. But that’s a little out of my modest budget for now. The rest of the glitches are perpetrated using emulators. Atari cartridges, if not connected properly, will “fry” which causes all sorts of random glitching. The Stella emulator emulates that feature, and allows for easy screenshots to be taken. Similarly, I experiment with loading improper files into emulators, sometimes just by changing file extensions to fool emulators into trying to load up bad files.

Me: What are some of your influences? Where do you find inspiration?

MC: I take influence from everywhere around me, especially media like movies, video games, comic books, novels, whatever. I can’t help but think about Warhol or Lichtenstein when I look at pixels. Pop art and punk art are big influences. I eat up anything by Yves Klein or Jim Phillips. I’m a huge William Gibson fan, and all his books give me tons of inspiration. Science fiction movies, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Frank Miller, Ghost in the Shell, Akira, lots of anime. Looney Toons, I watch cartoons constantly. Kraftwerk and Atari Teenage Riot. Friends and internet buddies too. Tumblr is a never ending source of inspiration.

Me: Do you see flickr as a community, or simply a platform on which to display your work?

MC: At first Flickr was just a platform to display my work, and for me to refer back to from blogs and such. But I started hooking up with other people who are interested in or doing the same things I am. And holy shit, people actually like my work on there. So the community aspect is absolutely one of the main contributing factors to how much time I spend making stuff. I live for the anonymous praise.

Me: What are the pros and cons of displaying work on flickr?

MC: I haven’t seen too many cons to displaying my work on Flickr, except maybe that I do most of my work late at night or early in the morning and there’s no one online to see it when I post it. The people on Flickr are great though. Some of my friends and fans on there are amazingly talented. Flickr groups are a great way to hook up with niche audiences and find cool people

Me: Besides flickr, where else do you display/exhibit your work?

MC: I post everything from my Flickr account onto my Tumblr blog (maxcapacity.tumblr.com), which is a great way to meet other Flickr users. There’s a lot of crossover between the two sites. I haven’t displayed any work in the material world in public since college, but I’m trying to figure out how to change that.

Me: What display environments and mediums would you like to explore in the future?

MC: I started out with NES and Atari, so I’m branching out now forwards and backwards. I’ve been working with ZX Spectrum images, and started collecting glitched screens and test patterns from arcade emulators. I’m also exploring what I can do with VHS, since it’s rapidly becoming obsolete. And I’d like to start editing together short moving images in gif or video form of my glitches. Also, I’m learning more about electronics so I can do more hardware glitching and get into live visual displays.

LAPS is an ongoing, internet-based audio loop that highlights the inherent errors and noise introduced by streaming audio across the network. Beginning as a silent audio file, the stream is bounced between a number of different servers, eventually returning to the home server where it is played back on the project homepage and sent out for another loop.

Each pass adds new artifacts to the audio, effectively creating something out of nothing.

The loop has been running since July 1st 2010, and has already produced an interesting and rather meditative low rumble accented by some high pitched bleeps and squeeks. Listen to the live stream here.