Hope you all enjoyed last month's first birthday issue. Cleanse away that hangover with a nice big glass of water and an alka seltzer, we've got business to attend to.

In this issue we're going to be taking a look at my glitch art year in review, look at a cool glitch video from one of my favourite bands, and get to grips with some slitscan Processing scripts.

You might notice that this month’s issue is a little lighter than usual, just because things are a bit chaotic right now. That means I’ll be leaving out the Artist Spotlight this month, but I’m sure it’ll be back next time.

News

What's going on in my life right now? Like last month, things are busy, so I don't have a ton of time for art right now. 

I’ve only posted a couple of things on Instagram in the last couple of months. Part of me is getting off on the sick thrill of fading into obscurity, like being stored on a dusty shelf in the back of an old warehouse, only to be found in 60 years like one of those old film reels on a Hollywood lot that makes people think "what the fuck was going on with people in the 2020s?"

But it's not just about being busy. I'm also kind of all Meta-ed out these days. We've all experienced the changes that Instagram has gone through over the past few years as the enshittification process sets in; the shift in focus from images to content videos, the 'you'll like what we tell you to' attitude as we've been forced away from hashtags and following feed into algorithms. The strangle on reach and the constant push to boost your posts, the lack of human support when your account gets restricted by an algorithm that can't tell its arse from its elbow. The list goes on.

So, I decided to honour IG’s descent into shittiness with petty acts of subversion, which then turned into a challenge to see what the silliest reason I could get banned from the platform was. First off, according to IG Head honcho, Adam Mosseri, you can get your posts throttled if you include third party watermarks. What better way to celebrate such a welcoming attitude towards its userbase than by posting glitched logos of Meta’s rivals

And then when I got bored of doing that, I also thought it might be nice to share some suggestive meats

I haven’t quite got banned yet, but I’ve notice that some of my comments get hidden, so I seem to have been banished to the shadow realm.

Nefarious stuff.

But this is a good reminder that your social media doesn’t belong to you. It can be taken away at any time for any arbitrary reason. Often for reasons that don’t make any sense, dictated by an automated system not fit for purpose. Don’t give away your agency when it comes to displaying your work.

So I'll be taking a break for a little while. I’ll still be posting a fair bit on Meta platforms, but I’ll be doing it on my own terms and in a way that doesn’t benefit some bellend in a jiu jitsu Gi and shitty gold chain, desperately trying to escape the stench of his uncoolness and the barely concealed desire to suck up all your data with his big data vacuum.

Glitch.Art.Br

However, one piece of exciting news. The annual Glitch.Art.Br online glitch art festival started on December 1.

In the words of the festival organizers themselves:

Feast your eyes on all the glitchy delights from some awesome artists. 

Images

Videos

Audio

I'm a big fan of the Vincent Pasquier work, #2. There's so many textures in the way the face glitches. It's kind of like looking at the details in painted brush strokes. Nam June Paik would be proud.

I also really like the videos for Myyyraa’s Glitched Flowers and Morbo by Jonas Sanson

You may even recognize some of my own art hidden away in there.

This was one of my favourite pieces to make from this year. It's a composite of different glitches all made with GLIC. If you're a glitch artist and you don't know what GLIC is, you should definitely check out my workshop for Fubar 2023 (skip to about 45 mins if you want to skip me waffling on about the art I made in GLIC and just wanna see how to use it)

But before you do that, make sure you’re checking out everything in the exhibition!

2024 Review

I can’t really send out the final newsletter of the year without doing a quick review. 2024 has been a different kind of year artistically than usual. Late last year I finally sorted out my visa situation, which allowed me to start trying to earn some money from my art practice.

Highlights:

• Made some great new friends and strengthened friendships with other artists

• I was able to do a lot of cool community stuff

• Through writing this newsletter, I really found my voice this year

• I got my first commissions and was able to get my art featured on music

• My art featured in Fubar, Glitch.Art.Br and NIANGI’s Error in Control (the final one being an invited artist)

• I discovered a lot of new programs and software

Things that could have been better:

• I didn’t have much time for art towards the end of the year

• I had to put some art series on the backburner that I wanted to start

• I wasn’t able to do some community things I wanted to do such as work more closely with other artists and doing some published media

• I didn’t have as much success with art prints or apparel

Now, as for 2025, as much as I’d like to take that momentum and continue expanding and fix all the things I want to fix, I have to be realistic and admit that 2025 is probably going to be a busy year IRL. There are probably going to be some big changes in my life that will need adapting to.

So, what does that mean for my art life? Hopefully I can sustain my current workload but probably won’t be able to do any huge things in 2025. I hope to start making and posting again more regularly soon once some projects are finished. I also hope to continue writing these newsletters and doing weekly art challenges on social media. I also hope to continue making more art that can be licensed for album artwork, as well as continue working on commissions.

Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ll be able to do some of the bigger community things that I wanted to do in 2024. But either way, I’m ready for whatever 2025 throws at me.

Video glitch - The Soft Moon - Give Something

I've been wanting to write about this video for ages. I love the song and I love the video.

Before we get onto the video, let me introduce the music. The Soft Moon was a post-punk, Darkwave, industrial band led by Luis Vasquez. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say that The Soft Moon was Luis Vasquez. If you enjoy darkwave and industrial music made by someone trying to exorcise their ghosts and documenting those attempts through their music, then I can’t recommend them enough.

This particular song is about someone who feels sorrow for not being able to reciprocate love due to their own acts of self-sabotage, and the guilt of feeling undeserving of that love.

So, onto the video, which was directed by frequent The Soft Moon collaborator Kelsey Henderson and with visual effects by Victoria Keddie. Kelsey Henderson directed the videos for all the songs released from the album Criminal, and they all have this kind of VHS, home video feel that makes the videos feel intensely personal - like we’re voyeurs watching the memories of a man’s darkest hours. So it’s well worth checking out the videos for Burn, It Kills, Choke, and Like a Father too (as well as Deeper, which is from the previous album).

I’m not going to show too many screenshots from the video, because the glitchy effects are quite subtle and don’t translate well to screenshots. It’s better to watch with the music, but it basically shows two figures who appear to be embracing each other.

The VHS footage tends to glitch out and leaves these cool effects, especially with the woman’s hands as she scratches and carves out his back. They leave these ghostly trails, but they can also be kind of disturbing in how they twitch and writhe as the videos glitch out.

I kinda like how you can look at this video in two different ways. Is he the one ‘giving something’ by taking on the emotional burdens in the relationship and she ‘gives nothing’ except pain and abuse? Or is she ‘giving something’ as she passionately embraces him, but she’s left alone in her footage? He gives nothing as he’s caught up in his own problems?

Tool - Slitscan (GenerateMe)

We continue our Processing series of glitch tools for another month. Usual intro, if you don't know what Processing is and you want to use this tool, please check my Primer tutorial in issue #8 for details on how to set up Processing.

This month, we’re going to be looking at another script from GenerateMe. This one is called Slitscan. Those of you who have read this newsletter before might remember that I’ve covered Slitscanning before in Error Logs #9 when I covered the video library scripts.

You may remember this abomination

In that issue we were doing live webcam glitches, but this time we’re going to be looking at applying Slitcscan to image files

So just a quick reminder, what is slitcscan? It’s basically where the camera takes the photo line by line, so if you move you the subject of the photo along with the camera as it takes the photo, you get these weird effects. Just imagine you’re at the office Christmas party and you decide to drag your face (or other body part) across the copy machine glass as the scan head moves across the glass plate. What’s that? HR is calling? Good luck with that.

For this Processing script, we’re going to be simulating the slitscan effect, so you don’t need a camera installed to do it.

Here’s a couple of works I’ve made in the past with it

Usually, with these tutorials, I’ll kind of show what happens when you mess around with the parameters in the code, but I won’t be doing that this time; mostly because you need a degree in quantum calculus to even understand it

v=0;
    if(doy) for(int i=0;i<fy.length;i++)
       if(!skipfy[i]) v+=sy[i]*getValue(fy[i],iy,i,phy[i]); 
    
    float ry = 2*iy+v;
    float y2 = (3*img.height+ry * img.height/2)%img.height;  
     
    float ix = map(x,0,img.width,0,1);
    v=0;
    if(dox) for(int i=0;i<fx.length;i++)
       if(!skipfx[i]) v+=sx[i]*getValue(fx[i],ix,i,phx[i]); 

So, we’re just going to kind of hit the left mouse button a lot, which updates the image with random parameters, but I will show you some neat little tricks you can do to get the most out of the script.

So to start out with, you’re going to need to download the relevant files from here. If you’re not sure what to do with them, check that Primer tutorial in Issue 8.

Now that’s done, let’s choose a base image to test with the script. There’s a thousand different images I could use, so I’m going to choose one completely at random.

Yes it’s Hiram Powers’ Clytie, courtesy of the Smithsonian Art Museum (great place for lots of CC0 images)

After a few times of clicking, I managed to get something fairly cool looking

Because of the way it squishes and compresses parts of the image, sometimes it can look better if you stretch out the image again afterwards, like this.

One thing you can do so you’re not just relying on the chance of hitting some random parameters is prepping your images in advance in certain ways that will allow cool things to happen.

One thing that looks pretty cool is adding a chromatic aberration with blur, like with this

So, here’s what happens when you run it through the Slitscan script. Just note that I have cropped or stretched some of these results a bit so that they look more presentable.

Something else that I really enjoy doing with the slitscan is taking old paintings and running them through the script. There’s something about the way the textures of the paint look through the slitscans that looks really cool.

One thing that I like to do is run them through Glitch Lab first and apply some of the Repeating effects like Quartz.

The tall ones also remind of the Disney Haunted Mansion ride where the lights go out and the room moves downwards, and when the lights come back on, the paintings have gotten bigger to reveal the spooky image. So Disney, if you’re reading this, I’m available for commissions and ready to accept some of your sweet sweet Disney Dollars. Oh, boy!

So, if you find some cool stuff to do with slit scan, let me know and I’ll be happy to share your work.

Anyway, that’s it for another month. Wishing you all the best for 2025. Truth is, there’ll probably be some good bits and some not so good bits. I hope the good bits make it worth it.