It's already September, and that means a new edition of the Error Logs.

This month, we're going to be looking at one of the Grandaddies of Glitch and video art, as well as continue our dive into the world of Processing scripts with a tutorial on pixel sorting. And not just any old pixel sorting, but the Bonafide original pixel sorting script. 

News and Updates

It's not been a very interesting month for news. I've just been slowly making art and submitting things to open calls.

Don't forget that right now, a glitch art exhibition, Error In Control, is taking place in Tbilisi, Georgia. There's a whole bunch of talented artists and me exhibiting. Go check out their IG page.

I’ve been seeing glitch art out in pop culture a bit recently. Linkin Park’s new music video uses quite a bit of glitch art (although I view it as a massive missed opportunity to get some talented glitch artists involved). Speaking of which, both Slipknot and Interpol have been commissioning glitch artists from the community to design their tour posters (which is pretty cool).

Aside from that, it's been a month of inadvertent glitches. First, I managed to glitch out and break the FUBAR submission form when submitting my work for this year's festival. My submission got stuck in some kind of glitch purgatory along with all the Tupperware lids and lost socks. After that, my TV started glitching out and it created this really cool green static effect. I think it's caused by a faulty HDMI port. Hmm, maybe I can incorporate it into making something in future.

Actually, now that I think about it, it's been a whole year of inadvertent glitches. 

Here's a nice collection from my PC decided it wanted to become a glitch artist

Anyway, shifting onto works that I'm intentionally making, I've mostly been making CODEC based works that have a very cyborg feel. 

I've also been working on some animated works recently. It's a little bit outside my comfort zone and I'm learning new ways to do things, so the work has been progressing slowly. I'm also probably not doing this in the most optimal way. My workflow consists of me building each frame as a layer in GIMP and then exporting it as a huge GIF file. Then for ease of sharing online, I make a smaller MP4 version which involves me switching back and forth between Handbrake and Avidemux (and also doing editing at this point if I need to) And if I haven't ragequit from battling with an unstable Avidemux, I might have something to show for it at the end of the process. We’ll see how those come out and whether I have anything worth posting in future.

Glitchtober

Stop the press! I just realized as I was about to publish this that Glitchtober starts from tomorrow. If you don’t know what Glitchtober is, it’s an event that runs every year for the month of October. Each day has a different prompt and artists can make works inspired by the prompts. The Glitch Artists Collective will choose a few entries each day to share on their IG page. Don’t forget to tag jrdsctt and glitchartistscollective. Keep an eye on the GAC IG for the prompt list to drop.

Spotlight: Nam June Paik

This month's spotlight is going to be a bit of a history lesson. So let me put on my corduroy pants and tweed jacket (the one with the elbow pads that smells like stale cigarettes) and transport you back to New York in the 1960s.

Glitch art is a relatively young medium of art, and can be traced back to the work of early video artists, whose experiments with newly affordable video cameras and televisions would eventually pave the way for the circuitbenders of today.

Nam June Paik was one of those pioneers, and is widely considered to be the founder of video art. He was one of the first artists to take this new technology and push it in ways that it was not designed to be used. He was prescient and prophetic, and his contributions to the medium and popular culture cannot be overstated. He even shaped the language that we use to describe technology by coining the term electronic super highway.

So to start with, let’s take a look at how Paik’s early days shaped him into becoming the Godfather of Video art. After graduating from the University of Tokyo with a degree in aesthetics, Paik decided to move to West Germany to study music history. It was here that the first seeds of his later work would be planted. During his time in Germany, he met the composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage, whose experimental approaches to creating music, and using performance as part of the composition, would shape Paik’s approach to art. Cage, especially, had a big impact on Paik; Cage believed that works of art did not necessarily need a planned intention in mind when embarking on an artwork. Cage often used chance decision making when developing his music, such as using the ancient Chinese divination book, the I Ching, to make decisions when producing a piece. Cage also introduced Paik to the artist Marcel Duchamp, who developed the artistic concept of ‘Readymades’ – everyday items repurposed as works of art. The concepts of chance operations and readymades would have a big impact on Paik’s approach to his own art.
During this time, he would also meet the artist George Maciunas, who would later go on to found the experimental art movement Fluxus, along with future Fluxus members Wolf Vostell (another video art pioneer).

However, before Fluxus were to formally take shape, Paik finished his studies in Germany and decied to move back to Tokyo for a year to spend time with his family. Around this time, Japan was experiencing a technological boom. Sony had begun releasing affordable video technology for the home market, such as the Sony CV-2000, one of the first home video tape recorders, and the Sony Portapak video camera, the world’s first commercially available video recorder (I kind of touched upon how big the introduction of the Sony Portapak was back in Error Logs #6 when talking about Howard Gutstadt's cover art for Herbie Hancock's Magic Windows. Serendipitously, some of Gutstadt’s own work would overlap with FLUXUS, although he was better known for working with other groups)

Anyway, back to Tokyo. It was his friendship with an executive at Sony that allowed him to get his hands on a Sony Portapak and Sony CV-2000. Around this time he also befriended an electronics enginee , Shuya Abe, who would become Paik’s long-term collaborator.

Paik and Abe’s first work together, Robot K-456, was a robotic figure containing a loudspeaker that would play JFK speeches. It was programmed to walk, talk, and poop beans, as it walked around greeting people, as if it humanize the machine, This was taken a step further in the 1980s when the robot was used again in a retrospective of Paik’s art, but the robot was ‘accidentally’ hit by a car while crossing the road, leading Paik to declare it as “the first catastrophe of the 21st century (source, NJP ARTCENTER)

After his year in Japan, he decided to move to New York, where George Maciunas had also recently moved and was beginning to officially form Fluxus along with other artists that had previously met in Germany (such as Wolf Vostell), or that had come together in NY (such as Yoko Ono – yes, that one). Fluxus was founded on many of the Dada principles embraced by John Cage, such as chance operations and audience participation in the creation and performance of art. Many of the artists within Fluxus were from different mediums of art (from musicians, to painters, to poets), and Fluxus had a big focus on working within the spaces between those different forms of art. Paik was heavily involved in the works of Fluxus for the next few years.

Paik’s first foray into circuitbending was an installation piece called Magnet TV. He took a CRT TV and distorted the picture on the TV by sticking a big industrial magnet on top of the set. In his first solo exhibition, he invited the audience to move the magnets around to distort the image further. Every performance was different (harking back to Cage’s philosophy on chance operations). Paik predicted that television would dominate the lives of people, and would later go on to say “Television has attacked us for a lifetime, now we fight back”. Perhaps this was an early attempt for us to fight back and control TV.

Another artwork, which would go on to become one of his most iconic pieces, is TV Buddha. In it, a statue of Buddha sits in a meditative pose facing a video camera and TV. The TV screen continuously playing the video feed from the camera focussed on the Buddha statue. The Buddha sits watching itself, an infinite loop of births and deaths. Is it a message about how we are shaped by our media? Is it a prophetic musing on the vanity and narcissism that would later come to characterize the Instagram generation and their obsessions with the selfie? According to Paik, it linked back to what he said before about television dominating our lives. He saw television as a one-way medium, and this was a way for the viewer to control and democratize the medium.

Another work of his that I really like is TV Cello, which is a cello made from three televisions removed from their sets and inserted into see-through acrylic boxes, onto which, the workings of a cello have been attached. The instrument was then played by cellist and frequent Nam June Paik collaborator, Charlotte Moorman. (Paik and Moorman were introduced to each other by the avant-garde composer Stockhausen, and Moorman used to share a room with Fluxus member Yoko Ono). While the cello is being played, videos of Moorman and other cellists are played on the TVs and mixed with live footage from the performance. At certain parts of the performance, it creates this almost infinity mirror effect (which you can watch in this video of the performance from the Art Gallery of NSW and edited by Stephen Jones)

To celebrate the Seoul Olympics, he created a huge installation made up of 1,0003 monitors named The More, The Better. The monitors broadcast entertainment from all over the world. The sculpture itself was designed by the architect, Won Kim, and was designed to resemble the Tower of Babel. Commenting on one of his earlier works (Global Groove), Paik predicted that “This is a glimpse of a new world when you will be able to switch on every TV channel in the world and TV guides will be as thick as the Manhattan telephone book”. To me this work continues this theme and almost predicts the rise of video streaming services like YouTube, where we can easily access videos from around the World.

All of the videos on the monitors were corrupted with a video synthesizer that Paik and his technical partner, Shuya Abe, built. This video synthesizer would have been one of the first video synthesizers ever built and was the size of a fridge.

Sadly, none of the original video synthesizers that Paik and Abe built still function, but you can watch this video of Abe giving a talk at Waseda University where he demonstrates the Abe Video Synthesizer, a recreation of the original Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer (sorry it’s in Japanese but you can still watch him demo the machine)

Honestly, it’s kind of hard to write about all the different ways Paik contributed to glitch art in such a small article. Nowadays, he is celebrated as the Father of video art and the creator of one of the first video synthesizers. But he wasn’t just that; amongst other things he was also a big influence on cyberpunk (“Skin has become inadequate for interfacing with reality. Technology has become the body’s new membrane of existence”), he brought Korean art to the international scene while conversely bringing a more Westernized view of art to Korea (which was then under a military regime), and even helped bring Samsung to more international prominence (Samsung, which was then relatively unknown outside of Korea, supported Paik by providing him with monitors for his works under the condition that he exclusively use their TVs). He was a prophet and futurist that predicted how society would be shaped by (and how we would shape) mass media and communication. Many of his works still seem prescient to this day. Now that many of the things he described have come true, and as we move onto new frontiers, I wonder who are the modern-day Nam June Paiks - those who will corrupt and subvert new technologies in order to deconstruct their value.

Tool Time: ASDF Pixel Sort

And so, we continue our deep dive into the world of Processing scripts. If you haven't read the last two issues of the Error Logs, in which you can find a primer to Processing, as well as some live video glitches, then be sure to give those a read. Although it's not strictly necessary to read those before reading this, especially if you're already familiar with Processing.

This month we're going to be taking a look at the OG pixel sorting script, ASDF pixel sorting.

What do you mean you don't know what pixel sorting means. Really? 

It's that effect that's often used to make it look like columns of pixels are melting. Although there are quite a few other tools and effects that look similar that are not strictly pixel sorting (Wind, for instance)

Here’s one of the famous images (actually by the man himself)

So what makes pixel sorting pixel sorting? Well, more specifically, pixel sorting uses sorting algorithms to arrange the pixels of your image in a particular way.

We use sorting algorithms in daily life all the time.

Imagine you have a list of bands; (Nirvana, Metallica, the Spice Girls, and Alvin and the Chipmunks) and you wacked that list into Excel and sorted alphabetically. Obviously, it’d come back with Alvin and the Chipmunks, Metallica, Nirvana, and the Spice Girls. Ask it sort by greatness and, well, you’d probably get the same list.

Pixel sorting works in a similar way, but instead of sorting text, the algorithm sort pixels (duh). Modern pixel sorting algorithms generally give you a lot of control over what you can do, Ironic that such a controllable, orderly sorting algorithm has become such a staple of glitch art.

Now that we know what pixel sorting is, what does ASDF stand for? A Sexy Databending Farmhand? Ancient Society of Drunken FFMPEGgers? Adobe Subscribers Don't Feel?

Well, I'm no investigative journalist, but I assume it comes from the name of its creator, Kim Asendorf. Kim Asendorf is an artist and creative coder. He's the dude you have to thank that pixel sorting even exists, because he came up with the concept. Before he came along, all the pixels in the world were unsorted. His algorithm brought order to the world.

ASDF Pixel sorter is a pretty basic pixel sorting algorithm, and it doesn’t have some of the bells and whistles that later algorithms have, such as different sorting methods or a user interface. But, due to the fact that the algorithm is setting up to perform the pixel sorting process twice, first horizontally and second vertically, it does create a unique, sand dune looking effect, which is a marked contrast to a lot of pixel sorted images you see where the algorithm has only been applied either horizontally or vertically, which makes ASDF outputs stand out from other popular pixel sorting algorithms.

The algorithm was made back in 2010 and has become more popular since. I’ve seen some sources state that the promo posters for the live action movie of Ghost in the Shell was some of the first uses of pixel sorting in mainstream media. You can see some subtle pixel sorting blended into this poster (although it’s not the focal point of the glitch effect)

To use the algorithm, you’ll need to download the scripts from Github and run them in Processing. I generally use Processing 4 for this, as it it seems to be the most stable (I’ve seen other tutorials use other versions but it only seems to run well in 4 for me. Considering that it was made back in 2010, I assume it runs on most versions).

So, once you’ve got the script open in Processing, the first step is to make sure that you save the image you want to use in the same folder that the script is saved in. Then, in the script you need to change the file name from the default placeholder to whatever your image is called.

To run the script you just need to press the play button and it’ll apply all of the default parameters to the output window. Pressing any key or clicking the mouse will save the output and close the window. Be careful because if you run the script again and save the output, it doesn’t create a unique filename when saving, so it’ll overwrite the last output if you’re using the same sorting mode.

Anyway, there are a few different parameters you can play with. The first is the type of sorting mode. You have three options

So, what does this mean? For simplicities sake, let’s just imagine that we’re only going to sort the pixels by rows for this explanation (so not sorting columns). The algorithm doesn’t sort the whole image (otherwise the output would be pretty limited). it goes through each pixel and each row and starts sorting the pixels once a condition has been met. And it will stop sorting once another condition has been met. The different sorting modes change what those conditions are.

In the case of black mode, the algorithm will start sorting once it finds a pixel that is not black and stops sorting one it hits a black pixel. White mode works pretty much the same way, so just read the previous sentence again and switch out the word black for white (and the word algorithm for ‘your mum’). Brightness works pretty similar, but rather than black or white pixels, it starts sorting when it finds a bright pixel, and stops when it finds a dark pixel.

Here are some examples where I’ve just switched the sorting mode, but left everything else as it is

You can see that sand dune looking affect, especially in the black mode image (inside the hood) and in the brightness mode image (on the mask)

The next main thing you can play around with is adjusting the threshold of where the pixel sorting stops. So, for example, in black mode the algorithm starts sorting when it finds a non-black pixel and stops sorting when it finds a black pixel. It knows what a black pixel is by comparing the pixel to a value (called a threshold value)- if the value of the black pixel is lower than the threshold value then the algorithm decides it’s not black, but if it’s higher than the value then the algorithm judges it to be black, and the algorithm stops sorting that line of pixels and starts searching for the next section of pixels to start sorting. However, you can change the value of what the algorithm considers a black pixel (or a white pixel in white mode or a specific brightness in brightness mode)

To change the threshold value, just change the number. Obviously, you should change blackValue when using black mode, brightnessValue for Brightness mode, and whiteValue for White mode.

He’s some examples of different threshold values in Brightness mode

Basically, if you just want to pixel sort the bright colours, keep the number high. If you want to pixel sort everything, keep the number low.

You can also do the same in black and white modes, but you’ll notice that the numbers are higher, so you’ll have to change them by a more significant amount to get any change in the image.

And you don’t need to stop with just that, you can then play around with your results and do other things to the image using other tools and apps.

Next thing you can do is play around with where on the image the algorithm starts performing the sorting from. By default, the algorithm is set up to perform the sorting from row and column 0, which means it does the sorting throughout the whole image. But if you change the number 0 to something else, it will only start sorting once it reaches that number row or column

So, in the example below, i took a 1200×1200 image and set the rows to start at row 800 and the columns to start at row 600

you can also use this function to turn off either the row sorting or the column sorting, which you can do by changing the value to the final row or column (so if your image is 1000×1000, change the value to 1000). This will give you what I consider as a more ‘traditional’ pixel sorting effect which has kind of become the defacto standard of pixel sorting outputs (without the ‘sand duning’)

The final thing that you can play around with is reversing the order of the sort. By default, the algorithm is set up to perform the sort on the columns first and then the rows. Whichever direction is performed last will have a greater impact on the final result.

To reverse the order, you need to change the code a little. To do so, just cut and paste the code for the column sorting so that it’s below the section of the code that handles the row sorting (and make sure your square brackets don’t get messed up)

As you can see, the result looks more like the pixels are travelling in a vertical direction.

So that’s about it for what you can do with the Tool. Here are some pieces that I’ve made in the past specifically using this pixel sorting algorithm

Here's a list of some great pixel sorters (I'm sorry if I can't include you - my newsletter provider gives me a warning if I include too many links. I don't want to get put on any naughty spam lists)

And if there's one guy you don't wanna piss off, it's this guy 

So, if you want to see more Pixel sorting, have a gander at these artists 

Phase Off

Bpp Chourmo

Leisure Wolf

ex2.fc

Jrdsctt

Heinz Schielmann

tastypxls

Nry.ae

Darkened Mood

Giacomo Carmagnola

Now, making art is a bit like magic and it's bad form to go into how other artists make stuff. So that list is more of a list of artists who are known for pixel sorting. I don't know for sure which pixel sorting tools these artists use (actually I would say from what I can tell, this list of artists mostly use different tools from each other)

Anyway, that brings us to the end of another month’s Error Logs. Let me know if you end up making something cool with the ASDF Pixel Sorting tool.

And if you haven’t already subscribed, please think about doing so.