Welcome to the first 2025 edition of the Error Logs.

In this issue, we're going to be looking at a cool glitch art music video from The KVB, as well as looking at a cool databending tool, which you can use from mobile browsers, called Image Glitch Tool

This is technically the January issue, but I’m posting it a couple of days late just because I’ve got a lot on my plate right now IRL and I haven’t really had much time to sit down and write this. I write bits and pieces whenever I’m able to steal a moment away from work and personal obligations. I'm not even sure if they're real, complete thoughts, but I made them just for you. 

News

Nothing much new to report on for January; I'm still working on some projects that haven't been published yet. So nothing to report on that front.

For those who read last month’s Error Logs, and are invested in my continued flirtation with getting banned from Threads for the silliest reason, you’ll be disappointed to know that it hasn’t (officially) happened yet. Despite my baiting of the algorithms with not so flattering of depictions of Mark Zuckerberg, repeated mentions of the benefits of rival platforms, as well as last month’s suggestive meats, I’m still standing (Feelin’ like a true survivor).

On a more exciting note, this month marks the celebration of my 40th year on this planet. To mark this momentous milestone, I decided to make some art of my various body parts (but don’t worry, this isn’t an ad for my new OnlyFans).

40, eh? How did that happen? I don't feel 40. Sometimes I see photos of people in their early 30s and they look old as fuck, and I can’t reconcile that I’m older than them.

It’s weird to think that I’m older than all of these famous people who died younger than 40

36 Princess Diana

36 Marilyn Monroe

36 Bob Marley  

35 Mozart

37 Van Gogh

39 Martin Luther King

39 The British Bulldog

I'm now at John Lennon (40). Only a couple of years and I'll be at Elvis (42).

Maybe it was the fashion. Maybe it was that they achieved so much more in their short lives and I feel like I'm only just getting going. Or maybe it's the mustaches. 

So why am I publishing all this depressing stuff? Well, it's not meant to actually be depressing. It's meant to be Inspiring. With a capital i. For INSPIRING.

Like I said, I just feel like I'm getting started. I didn't start making glitch art until my mid 30s. I'd never even thought about making art up until that point. And in that time, I've met so many cool people, learnt so many new things, and even achieved some pretty cool goals. And I've had a lot of fun on the way.

Here are some corny life lessons I've learned in my 30s:

• Time goes faster and faster as you age. Slow it down by experiencing new things. Big and small.

• Pursue opportunities even if you're scared or don't feel like you'd be successful. You might surprise yourself

• Don't tie your sense of self-worth to things you can't control like a career or a relationship. And especially not likes or reach on social media platforms

• Take things seriously, not personally

• Words are important. Make them count

• Knobheads aren't worth arguing with. And definitely don't allow them to affect you in any way

 Oh, and all your childhood heroes are bastards 

Glitch Video - The KVB - Pictures of Matchstick Men

Hope you all enjoyed last month's The Soft Moon glitch music video as it’s one of my favorite glitch art music videos, and the song is even better. No doubt I’ll be revisiting The Soft Moon again in this series.

For this month, we're going to be sticking with post-punk, but jetting 5000 miles East and exchanging the nihilistic apathy of LA for the moody, foggy moorlands of England.

The KVB are a psychedelic post-punk duo from London, consisting of Nicholas Wood and Kat Day. They blend the musical and visual identity (created by Day) of the band really well, and they’ve ventured into the world of glitch art a few times for their work

You might remember that I've mentioned The KVB before in my list of favourite glitch art album covers, for their 2023 covers album Artefacts. The cover had a really cool slitscan effect (hey, would you believe that; I wrote about slitscan art in last month’s Error Logs). This song features on that album

The original song is by UK Dad Rock band Status Quo. If you don't know who Status Quo are, they were well into Dad Rock territory when I was a kid, so they’re almost certainly Fossil Rock now. Think AC/DC but way less cool. And cool is not really an adjective I'd associate with AC/DC. But, before the Quo were slamming out hard rock classics in the 70s, they spent the 60s making psychedelia, with Pictures of Matchstick Men being their first big hit. Strangely enough, for a band so ubiquitous in the UK, this track was their only US hit. But for UK audiences not well up on their Quo lore, it's a song probably largely forgotten in favour of their 70s 'bangers'.

The song title immediately puts me in mind of the paintings of L.S. Lowry, Manchester's (and more specifically Trafford’s) most famous artist until Frank Sidebottom came along (seen in this video actually looking at some Lowry paintings)

If you’re not familiar with Lowry’s paintings, they have little that’s directly in common with glitch art, but his industrial scenes, of factories, mills and chimneys billowing smoke, can be said to have had an impact on how industrialism has been portrayed in contemporary art, and especially glitch artists that focus on urbanism and architecture. There’s this feeling of decay that permeates through everything, as well a feeling of loneliness and isolation. But there’s also this feeling of determination and resilience of human will to survive all the adversity.

Also, like glitch art, there was a lot of snobbiness directed at Lowry from the mainstream art establishment, as his work was very different from what was accepted by the critics and galleries of the time, as well as what was being made by the darlings of the art industry.

However, I can't seem to find any direct mention that the song is a reference to Lowry’s paintings, and my research trail seems to end with a website that states it matter-of-factly without providing any specific quotes from the band.

The song theme seems to lean more towards it being about a failing marriage. Or according to Status Quo songwriter, Francis Rossi;

Charmin' (budum tish)

Anyway, let’s get back to looking at the KVB’s version of this song. The song itself is a lot more interesting than the Status Quo version and has a kind of melancholic dreaminess to it that I can 100 percent picture soundtracking the crowds of matchstick men walking through Lowry’s paintings.

The video has the duo walking around the moorlands of the UK with old analog video recording equipment.

They pause to record each other play, as well as observe us, the viewer.

The resulting videos are then glitched, I’m assuming with video synthesizers

Often this kind of glitch is associated with the 1980s onward, but the video has an almost 1970s quality about it that I find unique in this day and age, but is reminiscent of some of the early video art pioneers in the NY scene in the 70s.

On the meaning of the video, the band explained:

You can see in the first frame of the video, one of the chalk figures they talk about. Nobody really seems to know where they came from, or even how the old they are, but the South of England has quite a few of these giants carved into the hillsides watching over us.

I also thought the link between Gormely and this idea of us being watched interesting too. For those unfamiliar with his work, he most known for his human sculptures that are displayed in public spaces.

What if these statues are not just here to be viewed by us, but are watching back at us too?

With this in mind, as well as The KVB’s phrasing of “a feedback loop of looking”, I immediately think of Nam June Paik’s TV Buddha.

The idea of observing others is an act of observing ourselves. Probably not unlike LS Lowry silently observing the anonymous matchstick crowds of Manchester.

Tool Time - Image Glitch Tool

For this month's Tool Time we're going to be taking a month off from Processing scripts. I can appreciate that not everyone wants to faff around with Processing, and some people just want something easy to use. 

As someone who is often on the move (it's literally in my name), I've always felt like there's a massive gap when it comes to glitch tools you can use on the go. Sure, there's tons of great apps you can use, especially the Lab apps, but sometimes you want to corrupt a file for real, not just simulate it. It's like, sure, sometimes it's nice to play Super Smash Bros, but sometimes you really want to just punch a monkey in the face for real.

You may remember I did a tutorial on Notepad++ databending way back in Error Logs #5, where you open up a JPEG in Notepad++ and fiddle around with the data, creating stuff that looks like this.

Well, what if I told you somebody made a browser-based UI for doing this kind of glitch? You'd probably slap me and tell me to stop talking nonsense, and I don't blame you. But it's true. You can't argue with facts.

Anyway, Image Glitch Tool is precisely that; a UI for making broken JPEGS. Load it up on your phone or on a PC, upload an image, and BOOSH, instant glitch.

The app was made by Georg, AKA Snorpey, a creative dev who makes creative apps.

Here's a description of the app straight from the Dev’s mouth: 

"This app corrupts some bytes in an image. Because of the way JPEG encoding works, the corrupted file still shows a corrupted image."

I was actually kind of curious whether all the effects being applied in the app is actually made by databending the image, because the level of control you’re getting over the output is pretty insane to me. I had a look at the code but it’s a bit too dense for an idiot like me to make sense of it.

However, it is based on another creative coder’s script (smack my glitch up js by Mutaphysis) and in that code it says that it inputs a JPEG, which is then converted to a dataURI, which is then converted to a byteArray, and then the data is modified and converted back into the DataURI. So it’s a pretty similar process to what we do manually, with an extra step of it being converted to a DataURI (which I’m not sure how that makes a difference to when we were doing the Hex glitching)  

Anyway, on to the tool. There's a toolbar with sliders for changing various parameters. There's a separate toolbar for uploading, saving, doing live webcam glitches. It's pretty bare bones but I'm not sure what else you'd want from this. The important thing is you can see the changes being applied immediately.

Here’s what it looks like

The only difference I noticed is that in the settings you get a ‘random’ parameters button with the PC browser version. Also, from a user experience perspective, the phone browser version can be a bit of a pain when adjusting the sliders, but I suppose that’s the trade off in being able to glitch on the go.

So, let's take a look at the four sliders. You've got Amount, Seed, Iterations and Quality.

We'll start with Seed because I like to do things chaotically with little semblance of order. It’s a good job nobody puts me in charge of anything important.

In a practical sense, Seed works like it would do in any kind of art app, it completely changes the effects that are being applied to the image, so each seed is a radically different starting point. What I’m assuming is happening with the code and input image is that it’s just targeting random bytes to change in the byte array, and changing the seed slider just changes the target bytes. Here are some examples with everything else being equal (Amount is fixed to 1, Iterations to 1, and Quality to 99)

There’s not a huge difference here so let’s move the iterations up to 10 and quality down to 90

It’s a little easier to notice here, but it’s basically just changing the composition of the glitch; where the horizontal shifts occur, the amount and location of the artifacting and the colours.

Next up is Iterations. This setting affects how many horizontal shifts you get in the output. For these demos, I’m going to shift the Quality back to 99 and keep the amount as 1. It doesn’t really matter where I have the Seed parameter for this test

So the more iterations you have, the more you get that nice Broken JPEG look. With the quality set at 99, you’re generally able to still make out the original image, and any colour changes tend to look like they’re overlayed on top.

However, mess with the Quality setting, and it’s going to make some pretty drastic changes to the final output, so let’s take a look at that. First, let’s move our other parameters back to their original positions (Amount 1, Iterations 1, Seed 1)

OK, that pretty much looks like the original image because we’ve hardly applied any glitching to it

Moving the slider downwards is going to apply compression to the output. If you move the Quality slider down to 1, it’s going to become extremely compressed and look like a pixelated image.

Here are some more examples

If you look closely, you’ll see the blocky compression.

However, the real difference happens when you start increasing the amount of iterations. Here’s an example where Iterations is set as 99 and Quality 1

Here are a few more examples

Finally, we have the Amount slider. I left this one for last because honestly speaking, I have no idea what it does.

According to the dev, depending on the size of the image, the glitches caused by Seed and Amount might be minor (if even noticeable at all). I’ve found there to be some logic in the Seed, but not so much in the Amount, and the Dev doesn’t even tell you the difference is more noticeable with bigger or smaller images

As we know from the Notepad++ glitches, smaller images glitch like a mothertrucker, so I wonder if the amount slider has a bigger difference on smaller images. I tested this theory out but I didn’t really seem to notice anything.

The one thing I did notice is that if you have the iterations slider set low, it doesn’t change the image much.

Here are some examples with Iteration set as 1 and Quality 99

The glitches all seem to be in roughly the same place. There are some differences in color and staggering, but it’s not like the colours get darker or the staggering gets bigger. It’s all over the shop.

At first, I thought the amount seemed to shift things around if you have a high number of iterations set. So if you set the amount high, it still seems to resemble the original image, but if you set it low it shifts everything so that each iteration staggers more. But actually, the more I’ve tested it out the less I’m sure about that.

There are definite changes, but I just can’t detect any changes in patterns as you increase the sliders.

So you can see why I thought it increased the amount of staggering, but then suddenly for 75 it becomes less distorted. It’s a mystery. If anyone know, please let me know!

One final thing that you can play about with is that if you reduce the dimensions of the image, you can get these nice big, fat artifacts

Once you know what everything does, you can get a nice steady workflow going. Personally, I like to play around with the Iteration and Quality first and decide on those glitches, mostly because they have the biggest effect on glitch. Once I’m happy with those, I’ll play around with the Seed until I find one I like. Once I’ve got one, I play around with the Amount slider, as it seems to have the smallest effect on the output, so you can somewhat fine-tune things.

Here’s some stuff that I’ve made recently specifically with this tool. I have used other software in my workflow, so they’re not just raw Image Glicth Tool outputs:

That brings us to the end of another edition of the Error Logs. Please feel free to tag me if you make anything with the Image Glitch Tool.

And if you liked it and are not yet subscribed, please think about doing so. I might have heavy tariffs imposed on next month’s edition.

Stay glitchy!