June brings us this summer edition of the Error Logs. I hope you all enjoyed the cake from last month's half birthday issue, and you are all now fully caked up (that's what the kids say, right?)

In this issue I'll be sharing some puurfect cat glitches you can buy as prints, introducing the surreal cross-colour photography of artist Lola Flash, and I'll round it all off with a nice mini tutorial on glitching the world's favourite image format, Webp files.

News & Updates 

This month's artistic adventures have seen me playing around with .HEIC files. You may remember them from last month's newsletter where I did a whole-arse tutorial on them.

Seeing as I wrote about them already, I'll just show the artworks, but if you're interested in learning more about them, make sure to check out Error Logs #6. Or if you just want to look at the images, check out my Instagram profile.

Open Call: GLITCH'N'GAMES

Calling all Glitch Artists (or any other artists that have an interest in gaming and glitches) - there's an open call for a new glitch art exhibition being held later this year.

The focus of the exhibition is on the theme of ‘play’, and how that connects designer and players with glitch artists.

The Open Call closes on July 13. The exhibition date is the first weekend of October.

Here's the link to the website.

I'm not sure if I'll be submitting myself. I've wanted to do some game related stuff for a long time, but the ideas and techniques I want to use is stuff that is way outside of my current workflow. So it would mean a big shift in my focus to get something ready in time. I guess we'll see!

For those of us that used to play (or still do play), games can often be our first introduction to glitch. And the glitches we encounter in games are often memorable. Whether that's because of the hidden lore that we often make up about Pokemon's MissingNo, or entering the mysterious World -1 in Mario Bros, there's an allure that stays with us. Or for some of us, it's because it does something weird and wonderful, or perhaps down right infuriating to our games. 25+ years later, I still hold resentment to the FF7 boss I got stuck on for ages, only for the game to glitch and force me to fight him again after I finally beat him.

So, even if I don't submit, I will definitely be checking out the work that's exhibiting there. I'm sure it'll be a great trip down memory lane, but also show some of these works in a new light.

Open Call: /'fu:bar/ Glitch Art Festival

You wait all year for a Glitch Art exhibition and two come along at once.

The yearly Glitch Art festival /'fu:bar/ has just announced its open call for this year.

You’ve got until September 30 to submit for the online exhibition that’ll be happening in October (exact dates TBD)

This year’s theme is ARCHIVING practices – and particularly their pitfalls and failures in DIY New Media Art and Culture.

Go over the website here:

It’s really funny that this ended up being the theme for this year. Last month’s newsletter inspired a few ideas related to this theme, so I now have a big excuse to actually start working on it.

INPRNT

Looking for some glitch art to decorate your boring room? Hoping to brighten up your desk with some cute yet subversive glitch art?

You can buy high quality prints of my work and, would you believe it, I've just uploaded some new designs to my store.

So recently I was thinking what, of all the animals, is most glitch like? I thought about this for a while, and the only answer I can come up with is, obviously, the cat. They’re nice to look at but they can make your life a misery.

To celebrate our fuzzy friends, I’ve made 13 new prints, which are printed on high quality paper. Not only that, but you can also buy them as cards, stickers, metallic prints, canvas etc. The cheapest prints are $15 (bargain).

Here’s a couple of the Glitch Kitties. Meet Napoleon and Onyx.

Go check out my store and treat yourself.

ARTgrab

Just a quick notice that I've re-uploaded some of my works to ARTgrab. So, you can now license these works for your projects.

If I do say so myself, I think these would look quite nice on:

- your latest Vatican techno album

- design elements for your vaporwave themed website 

- packaging for your "illegal in 27 countries" energy drinks 

Check out my ARTgrab store here:

Spotlight: Lola Flash

In this month’s Error Logs, I’m going to be Spotlighting activist and photographer Lola Flash. Lola Flash has had long and varied career, which they have used to fight against censorship and suppression, as well as share the often-neglected stories of members of queer and black communities.

As this is predominantly a glitch art publication, I want to focus on their work with ACT UP and ART+, and especially their cross-color technique.

Flash became active as a photographer in New York in the late eighties during the height of the AIDS epidemic, and a lot of their early work focuses on advocating for and trying to change public perception and hostile government policies towards sufferers.

One of the first projects that brought Flash to the public’s attention was their featuring on the Kissing Doesn’t Kill poster campaign by Gran Fury designed challenge the public’s perceptions of people living with AIDS by showing that complacency and greed from governments, companies and the public lead to the crisis, rather than same-sex and interracial couples. The posters were designed appropriate and subvert the popular United Colours of Benetton posters that were commonly seen during the 80s.

At the time, Flash was heavily involved with groups such as ACT UP and ART+, that were trying to combat censorship and hostile government legislation from Christian right politicians such as Jesse Helms, who introduced the Helms AIDS Amendments that prohibited the use of federal funding for HIV/AIDS educational materials. Dark Times.

A lot of their work features photographs with inverted colours taken on the streets of New York at ACT UP demonstrations (like the one above), but also photos staged elsewhere or taken in the community itself. According to Flash, using the cross-colour technique also allowed Flash to protect the identities of those featured in the photos.

A lot of the photos depict juxtapositions of queer models set against Christian right motifs such as churches, crucifixes, cowboys and the KKK. The different colours giving a further surrealness to the contrasting themes.

I really enjoy the cross-colour technique. It’s similar to channel switching in glitch art but I think it gives a much cleaner look than channel switching. The gradients are so smooth and there’s no blockiness - it’s almost like we are looking at the world through different eyes, not of this dimension.

The cross-colour technique is achieved by developing the photographs on negative paper which inverts the colours.

There’s a really good Dazed interview with Lola Flash that explains their inspiration for developing this technique. I don’t want to outright steal the content, so you should go read it for yourself. As an ‘outsider’, Flash realized that the way that minorities are viewed is skewed by the way in which the ‘insiders’ are brought up and the falsities that they are fed by the system. These cross colours were an opportunity for Flash to show the world how to view things differently.

So while these works are not glitch in the strict sense, they definitely inhibit the spirit of glitch. Or perhaps the spirit of glitch is shaped by the works of ‘outsider’ artists such as Lola Flash.

Anyway, if you want to read more about Lola Flash, check out their website linked above, as well as the Dazed article I mentioned. I’ve only touched on a small part of their artwork and activism, so go check out more.

Oh, and ACT UP is still active in the LGBTQIA+ scene and is still organizing and mobilizing for causes.

Tool: WebP Glitching 

So this is going to be the last installment of my file editing trilogy. Well, at least until I get bored and decide to make a bunch of prequels about the trade agreements of different file formats (am I doing this right? My knowledge of Star Wars pretty much starts and ends with the SNES game)

WebP, huh? What is it good for? Well, as it turns out, it's pretty bloody good for glitching actually.

The scourge of the image formats. Like that friend that never gets invited to parties (wait, that's me), the WebP file format has seen an increase in prevalence in the last couple of years. Optimized for web browsing, the highly compressed images are meant to take up less space, load web pages faster, and stop you from using so much data. So why are they so hated? No idea, but Jesus was hated, and you should have seen how bloated web pages were before he came along.

Actually, I'm pretty sure the reason WebP files were hated is because when they suddenly started getting popular online, a lot of companies were slow to make the format compatible with their software. So, you'd end up with people downloading images and not being able to do anything with them (you wouldn't steal a WebP, would you?)

But, with one of the main features of a WebP file being that it's highly compressed that, means it's potentially good for glitching. 

So, what do you need to make WebP glitches? Aside from a strong constitution and a steely determination, you just need a WebP file and a hex editor.

"What's a hex editor?", I hear you cry. Well, it just so happens I wrote about them last month in Issue 6, so go read that first. We'll wait here for you.

So now we all know what WebP files and hex editors are, let's take a look at how they glitch.

Same rules apply that I've spoken about for the last 2 issues.

1.  Don't mess about with the data at the top or you'll corrupt the file

2. You can use any of the previous methods to mess with the data that I've talked about in previous issues; find and replace, add bits of data, copy and paste chunks of text to overwrite the data etc.

Honestly, there's not a huge amount of difference between the various methods of data replacement. 

So, for this month's glitching, were going to need a control image. This month we're going to use a bust of Clytie, a water nymph from Greek mythology courtesy of Hiram Powers. The one below is a simple 471×471 WebP file that started off life as a JPEG and I converted to a WebP using GIMP.

So, here's the simplest glitch you can make. All I've done here is replace one character in the hex code about halfway down, so for example, if the hex code was 7A, I changed it to 7B.

So, some initial observations about WebP glitching:

1. It creates this beautiful cascade of colours that blend into each other

2. The glitch occurs roughly where you make the change in your hex file

3. Everything after the first edit becomes glitched 

4. Glitches tend to 'flow' towards the bottom right-hand corner 

You can see in the image above that in the areas of black, there are these squares that look like big fat metallic pixels. I love how uniform the gradients are. I've achieved similar results with GLIC before, but it usually results in this murky colour bleed effect that I'm not a big fan of. Here, I think it comes out looking really nice as the gradient is more uniform 

Anyway, the fact that it seems to break things up into segments got me wondering a couple of things:

1. Would increasing the compression when converting the JPEG into a WebP file make a difference?

2. Would the dimensions of the image make a difference? 

So, in the spirit of glitch science, I put on my trusty science goggles and lab coat, and decided to run some tests.

So, the original 471×471 image posted above was saved at 90% quality (for some reason I kept corrupting the image when I tried saving at 100% quality, but I don’t think that’s common so feel free to try it at 100%). Here you can see some tests with where I converted to lower qualities beforehand. Again, I just changed one hex code to cause the glitch.

So, first of all you’re losing a lot of the detail of the original image because it’s much lower resolution. As for the glitch itself, it’s not quite as dramatic as I thought it might be, but we tried!

So, for my next trick (because I got bored of the scientist metaphor, and magicians are cooler and you definitely can't convince me otherwise), I want to play around with the files sizes to see if it makes much of a difference. Again, just changed one hex code.

Here's a 941×941

You can see that the blocks on the right-hand side are smaller. There's not a huge difference between 500 and 1000 so let's go bigger

Here's 1881×1881

And a 3761×3761

The 3761×3761 image loses the blocky glitch look, but it almost has a painted feel to it, which completely changes the kind of outputs you can make.

So far so good, but I think what this glitch is missing is a bit of colour. You'll notice that the palette of the WebP glitch is pretty similar to the colours that are already there. my control image is pretty bereft of hue.

Let's try it out with some more colourful images

So, as you can see with this flower, the glitch takes the colours from the image. So more colourful base images are going to give you a more colourful glitch.

One final tip I have for WebP glitching is that the glitch tends to flow toward the bottom right corner, so try playing around with the orientation of your image before you start glitching to get the glitch flowing in other directions (as seen below)

Here are a few other older artworks I’ve done using the WebP glitch.

Well, that's about it for Issue 7 of the Error Logs.

With it being Pride Month, let's take a moment to reflect on how we treat others, using the poignant wordsmithery of the Dalai Lama, "can we please just all stop being massive twats to each other. FFS it's not hard."

So let that wisdom guide us in celebrating the differences between us, and treat each other with a bit of civility and respect.