Welcome to Issue 8 of the Nomad Error Logs; the number one (at least in my house) resource for all things glitch art related. 

Things have been really busy this month, so in order to get this month’s issue out on time, I’ve decided to enlist the help of an intern. Fresh off his stint as Prime Minister of the UK, Rishi Sunak has agreed to help for a few weeks until he gets back on his feet again. I can’t afford to pay him for this, but the exposure is worth more than money anyway. It’s fairly well-documented that he would spend his weekends datamoshing videos of parliamentary debates under the pseudonym Glitchi Sunak, so this is probably a pretty sweet gig for him.

In this issue I'll be reporting on some open calls, taking a look some IRL glitches and how they’ve influenced contemporary glitch art, as well taking a quick look at using programming to make generative and glitch art.

News & Updates 

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So, why have I been so busy this month? Actually, I've been working on a commission. That means I haven't had a ton of time to experiment with new things.

I'm now done with the project so I'll be reopening my commission slots from August. So if you're interested in having some cool artwork for your music project, cyber petshop website or tequila packaging, hit me up. Take advantage of that weak ¥¥¥¥ to get an awesome, bespoke tokyo_nomad_ work. But don't dilly dally, make sure you get on it before the Japanese economy eventually fixes itself (which is definitely going to happen, right? Right?)

As for the commission itself, it’s a little early to be posting the work yet, but I’m sure I’ll be talking all about it next issue as it’s a really exciting project and I had a lot of fun working on it.

One thing that I did start during July has been my weekly (weekendly?) ✳️art challenges✳️ that I’ve been holding over on Instagram and Threads. I think we’re all tired of trying to appease a temperamental algorithm, so I started this to give artists an opportunity to make some art just for fun. No pressure.

I’ll be holding these every weekend for the foreseeable, and it’s open to anyone that wants to participate, So far, I’ve done an ugly selfie challenge, a 3 colour palette challenge, a cardinal remix challenge, and a glitch your favourite musician challenge.

I’ll repost any of the works on my IG stories. Keep an eye on my Threads or IG stories on Fridays for more details.

Here’s a few of my entries over the last month:

Open Calls

Looks like we’re in for a busy summer this year. Not only do we have the two open calls that I wrote about last month (Fubar and Glitch’N’Games), but now we have two more glitch art exhibition open calls.

Glitch.Art.Br

Glitch.Art.Br is an annual online glitch art festival that is held on Instagram, YouTube and Bandcamp. It’s now going into its 5th year and will be accepting artworks from August 1st to October 1st. I don’t know the exact dates of the exhibition but in previous years it has gone live on December 1.

In previous years there hasn’t been a specific theme to the festival, although I’m not sure if it’ll be the same this year.

Here’s the blurb from last year’s festival direct from the website:

“In terms of artistic production, we will focus on those artworks that clearly represent or dialogue with Glitch Art. These are artworks that feature glitches, errors, failures, noise, deformations, malfunctions, defects, imperfections, strangeness, randomness, accidents, chaos, (dis)programming, deconstructions, interventions, interference, subjectivities and disruption of appearances, power structures, narratives, orders and functionality of data, files, software, hardware, and other technical devices. This includes ways of creating (un)automated, incorrect, incoherent, collaborative constructions, marginal knowledge production, and actions; in short, the possibilities of creating artworks that do not participate or rarely participate in the “recognized” circuit of the current international art market.”

The website goes live from August 1st, so I guess we’ll know more tomorrow.

Keep an eye on their Instagram account for more updates.

I’m sure I’ll submit something for this Open Call as I have done in previous years. One thing that I like about this exhibition is that I often find artists that I hadn’t come across before, and there’s a wide variety of different works on display.

The only thing I’d like to see a little more of from this festival is a forum to discuss the works a little more. It’s not really the fault of the organizers, but more so the limitations in the platform and culture of Instagram, which doesn’t really promote long-form discussion.

NIANGI - Error in Control

A new entry into the Glitch Art exhibition space is NIANGI’s Error In Control. NIANGI is a new media art platform that is based in Georgia that aims to bring new media and digital artwork from online spaces into physical spaces, where attendees can enjoy the works without distractions.

The exhibition will be taking place around September and will be held in the Holoseum AudioVisual Museum in Tbilisi.

For those wishing to submit to the open call, you better get your skates on because the open call closes on August 11.

To submit, check out their IG that I linked in the header and use the link in the bio.

Fauxbar

Fauxbar is the online arm of Fubar Festival, and they often have online workshops and events held through the summer. They kicked off last week with a really interesting talk from Michael Betancourt about glitching AI.

There are no other talks scheduled for now but keep an eye out for their announcements over the summer. It’s free to join and they’re very educational.

They’re also accepting applications for artists that would like to hold a workshop, so if you have an idea that you want to share the glitch art community, think about submitting a proposal.

I held a workshop there last year on how to use the tool GLIC, which you can watch here if you want to watch me waffle on for 2 hours (you can skip to about the 45 minute mark if you don’t want full waffle and just want the tutorial)

GLITCH List: IRL Glitches

Let's all imagine it's 2010 again, back before Reddit had a stranglehold on how pop culture was disseminated. What did we do back then for fun? That's right, we looked at lists. Or listicles as they were more commonly known. No really. We spent our Friday evenings as a family, gathered round the open fireplace reading cracked.com.

So, in the spirit of 2010, and because we should all be recycling (even if it is ideas), I thought it might be fun to make my own listicle.

Now, I'm not going to make this a regular feature, as I'd be scraping the barrel pretty quickly (top 10 glitch inspired pasta shapes, anyone?), but I think they could be pretty funducational every once in a while (in before any mentions the list I made a couple of months ago for the Greatest Glitch Art Album Covers).

Anyway, I humbly bring to you, the Top 10 glitch inspired pasta shapes. Wait, no. Let's try that again. I humbly bring to you, the best IRL glitches.

So I think we can all agree that everyone reading this likes glitch art, right? A pretty fundamental part of glitch art is 'glitch’. Without it, you just have art. And nobody wants that.

In glitch art, we aim to mimic those glitches and bugs found within computer or other electronic systems. So this list is a tribute to those IRL glitches that inspire us in our art.

Anyway, this is meant to be a fairly light-hearted list. So no stories about the time that an incorrectly placed decimal point indirectly led to the violent, bloody smushing of a family of rabbits. I'll save that for another day.

Harvard Mark II Moth

When it comes to the origin of the word "computer bug", the popular story goes that a million (not really) years ago when computers were the size of rooms and were made of oak and brass and looking like something out of a low budget steampunk TV show for kids, a bug got squished between the moving parts of the machine. So the word comes from the fact it was an actual bug.

Well, ackshully, using bug to mean a fault or defect has been around since at least the 1870s, as Thomas Edison was throwing the word around like there was no tomorrow (So you don't need to email me to fact check me. Nerds.) But, that doesn’t mean the story itself isn’t true. The serendipitous bug actually did exist.

Often (erroneously) billed as the World’s first computer bug, a curious moth found its way into the Harvard Mark II calculator, which was a giant computer built at Harvard University used for difficult calculations (like the x8 table.)

The story goes that one day the computer was throwing up errors in its calculations (and kept coming out with 80086). When the team opened up the computer, they found the moth had been crushed inside (OK, I know I promised no violent bloody smushings, but it’s well-known that the moth was actually a bit of a dick)

A computer scientist by the name of Grace Hopper took our mothy friend out and taped him to a book so that he would quite literally live on in the history books.

Without doing a PhD, it’s probably hard to say how much influence this particular glitch has had on contemporary glitch art. There was no artistic, visual output to this bug, so in an aesthetic sense, there’s no style to copy (although I would imagine it did have a huge influence on Y2K imagery).

Having said that, I do think that you can draw a very direct line from this kind of glitch, where an external agent affects the output of a machine, to circuitbending electronic devices (such as video cameras, cameras, kids toys). Even Jamie Fenton’s Digital TV Dinner was achieved through hitting a computer system with a fist while the game loads in order to produce a visual glitch.

Some might say that this unassuming little moth birthed the concept of glitch. And others (read no-one) might say, that curious, insatiable paper muncher has led directly to this point; Error Logs Issue 8. Thanks Mothy!

Max Headroom Signal Hijacking

OK, well, not a glitch in the traditional sense, and more of a broadcast hijacking, but I guess we could say that flaws in the security of broadcasting networks led to the event (that’s kind of a glitch, right?). Not only that, the original Max Headroom has also left a definite legacy that has influenced contemporary art and design. And on top of that, the Max Headroom incident has created this mythology that embodies the spirit of glitch - the disruption of traditional and accepted institutional systems.

So, for those that don’t know, the original Max Headroom was a fictional TV presenter created for British TV by Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton (of Super Mario Bros. Movie directing fame). He was meant as a satirical take on 1980s TV presenters trying to appeal to kids, a bit like a 1980s version of that Steve Buscemi “How do you do, fellow kids” meme.

One fateful night in Chicago (November 22 1987 to be precise), as locals sat down to watch the local news, the broadcast was interrupted by an outside broadcast showing someone wearing a Max Headroom mask standing in front of a rotating background while the footage buzzes. The footage lasts for about 15 seconds and then is switched back to the news broadcast.

A couple of hours later, it happens again during an episode of Doctor Who. This time the interruption lasts for about 90 seconds, and our masked friend can be heard speaking to the camera until eventually he removes his pants and is spanked by a woman brandishing a fly swatter.

The perpetrators were never found, so we may never know the motives for the hijacking. Was it an attack by foreign agents? Anarchists? Or just a bunch of young adults pissing around?

I already mentioned that the original Max Headroom, in his law-abiding citizen incarnation, influenced contemporary aesthetics, from synthwave to cyberpunk. But what about the Broadcast Hijacker version of Mr. Headroom? While it can be hard to know which version of Max influenced what, I’d say that the hijacking event has had a definite impact. Of course, video art and circuitbending had already been around for a while before this (and can be tracked back to Nam June Paik in the 1960s), but the Max Headroom hijacking gave Gen X a reason to be interested in video art. The incident also more closely aligned this type of glitching with counter culture movements, giving it an ironic, anti-consumerist stance (fake Max can be seen satirizing the real Max Headroom’s Coca Cola advertising).

The masked broadcast hijacker has become something of a trope in media since then too, with recent examples such as Mr Robot, which in turns influences peoples’ taste in art.

Millenium Bug (Y2K bug)

Probably the most famous of the bugs/glitches on this list for those of a certain age in the 90s.

The millennium bug, or the Y2K bug, was that pesky nuisance that was going to cause mass power outages, planes to fall out of the sky, and Clippy the Office Assistant to go on a mass rampage.

Why was all this chaos going to happen? Because nobody thought to account for the first two digits of the year, so your computer didn't distinguish between the years 1900 and 2000.

Luckily for the Spice Girls-loving, flannel-wearing, pogs-playing citizens of the 1990s, we were saved from such doomsdays scenarios all thanks to this guy and his cool-looking sign.

In terms of how the millennium bug has influenced art. A lot of the themes of societal collapse caused by a failure of computer systems has definitely influenced and bled over into cyberpunk tropes and aesthetics. Of course, a lot of those themes already existed, but they’ve definitely been shaped by how things played out in 1999. Looking more recently, it’s also spawned a lot of nostalgia based art that can be seen in genres such as Y2K Futurism, Cybercore, Webcore. As Millennials start to hit middle age, I expect we’ll continue seeing more Y2K influenced art.

As for the millennium bug itself, expect the same thing to happen again in the year 9999; make sure you back up your favorite Something Awful pages, Hampster Dance videos, and photos of Anna Kournikova

MissingNo 

Flashback to 1998. Kids around the world are addicted to Pokémon Red and Blue for the Gameboy. If they're lucky, they didnt get a knock-off copy from a dodgy shop in Tenerife with no battery backup cartridge leaving you no option to save. Meaning you had to either finish the game before your AAs ran out of juice, or keep playing the same first opening few hours again and again; your dreams of having an elite squad of Pokémen (and Pokéwomen and PokéNBs) replaced by the crushing reality of having a ragtag bunch of losers consisting of a moderately decent Wartortle, an angry Beedrill, and a level 13 Pidgey. No I’m not still angry.

Kids invested hours upon hours into the game. If you were good, you probably beat the Elite 4 and got a Mewtwo. If you were really lucky, you might have even bagged yourself a Mew.

But there was one Pokémon more elusive than even Mew. Your friend's older brother heard on a message board on the dark web that there was a Pokémon so obscure that even Miyamoto himself didn't know about it. Was it put there by disgruntled Nintendo employees? An act of subterfuge by Sega saboteurs? Perhaps the cursed offspring resulting from a steamy night of passion between Professor Oak and a Jinx?

Well, no. It turns out MissingNo. was a glitch that can be encountered by following a series of steps that causes some issues with the data buffers that causes a Pokémon with an invalid identifier to be generated when a random battle occurs (more of that nerdy stuff).

You can still continue to play the game after encountering MissingNo., but weird things will start to happen such as graphical glitches and items multiplying. What’s even cooler is that you can actually capture a MissingNo. and it’s listed as a Bird type Pokémon (which isn’t even a type in the game)

One of the cool things about MissingNo was that fans started trying to unofficially include the Pokémon into the lore of the game, and some fan theories believing that it was a supposed to be a Pokémon that was eventually cut from the game.

I remember when I was a kid, hearing a quote from Satoshi Tajiri, the creator of Pokémon, describing the game’s appeal; “When you’re a kid and you get your first bike, you want to go somewhere you’ve never been before. That’s like Pokémon. Everybody shares the same experience, but everybody wants to take it some place else”

I think that quote also applies to MissingNo, but also more broadly to glitch art. It’s this spirit of adventure that some of us have to try and find something outside of the bounds of the rules or sandbox that we’re given. To push it to its limit and then to break outside and go somewhere new or make something unique.

Honestly, I think that Missingo has had quite a huge influence on people interested in glitch. First of all, to keep it in the realm of gaming, because of the lore surrounding the glitch and the fun to be had in finding it, I’m sure it inspired a whole new generation of glitch hunters; those interested in being the first to find game breaking or intriguing glitches - and I’m sure some of these people may have also been inspired by the artistic potential of these things too. Which then brings us on to ROM corruption. ROM corruption is a type of glitch art where retro games are played on an emulator, but then a corruptor is used to mess about with the games’ data to give a glitched effect. It’s a very unique form of glitch art that allows artist to play with the stories, worlds and characters from our past, and corrupt their pixelated lives into something more subversive. I highly recommend checking out the work of Sabato Visconti, who has some excellent ROM corruptions here

World -1

World -1, or the Minus World as it’s also known, is a glitched out level in the original version of Super Mario Bros.

It’s an underwater level that looks exactly like World 7-2, but when you go through the warp pipe at the end of the level, it cycles you back to the beginning until you game over or turn the game off.

Players can reach the mysterious level by using the secret warp pipes at the end of World 1-2. Rather than accessing those pipes by jumping over the top of the level like you usually would, the player needs to clip through the wall by jumping at it in a certain way. If the player enters one of the warp pipes this way before the text over the pipe loads (meaning the correct data for the warp pipe is loaded), Mario is magically transported to this endless underwater loop.

I love this glitch because, like MissingNo, it allows you to use your imagination to conjure up endless reasons or backstory for the existence of the Minus World. I love the symbolism of imagining Mario in some kind of purgatory. Has he been sent there to cleanse him of the sins of all those Yoshis he dropped down a hole? Or all the goombas senselessly murdered? Why are there bloopers there? Are they not of this world? Are they the guardians of the Minus World?

First of all, I think this particular glitch has had a big influence on a lot of the glitch based indie games that have become popular in recent years, such as The Backrooms, Sonic.exe, Crow 64 and No Players Online.

As for glitch art itself, there’s a subset of video game glitchers who I don’t think are necessarily ROM Corruptors, but work in a similar field. Artists such as Sub Net and rileyflutterbug, who are world and character builders using glitches in games to create stories told through the symbolism of glitch. These artists are also pushing the boundaries of glitch by corrupting these 3D worlds and creating this whole new frontier of glitching in these virtual worlds. This a is a very underrepresented form of glitching that I think is going to see a lot more prevalence as some artists move away from the nostalgia of ROM corrupting retro video games and start to look forward to contemporary technology.

Nuclear Ghandi

The urban legend goes that in the Original version of the game Civilization, the turn-based strategy game where you lead a civilization through the millenia, and make peace or war with rival nations lead by famous world leaders in history (such as Caeser, Alexander, Genghis Khan, and Britney Spears), that there was a bug in the game that turned Ghandi from the compassionate, inspirational pacifist from the real world, to an aggressive warmonger flinging nukes around like it’s confetti at a wedding.

In a huge twist that nobody saw coming, it came out a few years later that none of this was actually true and there never was an overly aggressive Ghandi in the original game. So how is it that people remember nuclear Ghandi? Seems like an example of the Mandela effect. So the true glitch in the system was in our heads all along

Did Nuclear Ghandi influence any artistic movements? Probably not. But I did make this!

Tool Time: Processing

In this month's Tool Time, I want to do something slightly different. Each month I usually introduce some specific tool or method, but this time I want to talk about a specific program/language; Processing.

And the reason for doing a whole feature on it is because I have a ton of different scripts I use, and I figure it's better to explain this in it's own article and use it as a springboard into separate articles about different scripts in later newsletters. 

I have actually introduced a tool using Processing before (Error Logs #4, Glitch FX) but I didn't spend so much time explaining what Processing was. It can be quite intimidating for people to use for the first time, especially if they're more familiar with using programs or apps with easy-to-use user interfaces. Or GIMP. (Disclaimer: I love GIMP).

Then, what is Processing? According to their website, it's "a flexible software sketchbook and a language for learning how to code". Who's the nerd now, Nomad?

So what does that mean in real terms? How does it relate to art? What kind of art can you make?

Basically, you can pretty much do whatever you want. You input some code that tells your computer what to do, and it does it. So, for a lot of glitch artists, that could mean inputting an image and manipulating it in some way (e.g. pixelsorting).

Another thing is generative art. Way back in Issue 2, during Generative January, I wrote a little about a lot of the cool generative art that I like. Basically, where you write a bunch of math and Processing outputs something cool-looking.  The kind of stuff that some of these talented artists do julian_hespenheide, tim_rodenbroeker, kimasendorf

There are a lot of great tutorials on the Processing website to help you get started.

There are also a bunch of blogs online to aid you on your Processing journey. One of the ones I used quite a bit (and you’ll probably hear me talk quite a lot about in future Issues) is the GenerateMe blog, which can be found here:

But, the important question is can you use Processing if you can’t code? The answer is an emphatic yes. I can’t code for toffee, yet I got a whole lot of fudge from Processing (wait, what?). Actually, I’d go on to say that Processing is probably my most used tool.

So the two ways I usually use Processing is like this;

1 - find blogs where people share their experiments in Processing and play around with their code  (like GenerateMe)

2. Find scripts that people have uploaded to Github

Most scripts are dead simple to use and for a lot of them, all you really need to do is input the file name and file type into the code, hit play, and follow the instructions (which will you usually be to press a key or wiggle your mouse around). Some slightly more involved scripts may call for you to change some of the parameters in the code before you hit play (e.g. changing some numbers, colour channels etc.). And if you’re really lucky, the script might even have a built-in UI.

For this month, I’m just going to share some fun things I did back in 2023.

So, as I mentioned, I can’t code. So one thing I had a lot of fun with doing last year (besides making all that fudge) was having Chat GPT come up with some scripts for me, just like this

After recalibrating ChatGPT a bit, it’ll give you something like this that can you just copy and paste into the Processing window

It doesn’t always work, and sometimes Processing will throw up an error message like this

But you can just copy and paste the error message into Chat GPT and ask it to fix it. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but that’s part of the fun.

If you don’t like the script, you can ask it to come up with something different.

Here are some of the things I generated back in 2023.

Thanks for all your help ChatGPT and I’m sorry I implied you went to Clown College. 

I’m going to wrap things up there. Think of this month’s Tool Time as kind of like a Primer. Now that we have this smooth, versatile undercoat, I can start giving you the true glitchy goodness from next month.

That brings us to the end of another Issue of the Error Logs. Thanks for sticking around and reading the haphazard musings of an unsound mind. If you thought this was useful or a welcome distraction to your cold, bleak existence, consider subscribing.

Oh, and one last thing: