Video, Toasted - Video synthesis & glitch art

[opossum]

This is a thread for all things related to video synthesis, glitch art, and more: Screencaps, discussion, tools, techniques, whatever! If you also do this kinda stuff, feel free to join in and post your work! Or if you just want to know more about the tech & process involved, ask away!

I primarily work in video synthesis with a touch of audio synthesizers & general weird electronic DIY stuff, but it all ties together in one way or another. My current videosynth setup is a mishmash of: A 3TrinsRGB+1c, an old camcorder, and various bits of audio equipment including an optical theremin & the Grimoire, my personal experimental synthesizer.

Some examples of general abstract goodness:

And processed video:

[EXWeis]

I love glitch art (if you couldn’t tell from my avatar). I don’t know a ton about the process though so I’m looking forward to following this thread.

[Jonny_Anonymous]

I don’t know what this is but I like all of it.

[bronson]

Yeah, I didn’t either. Guess I found a new rabbit hole…

Edit: Since I literally just found out this existed, do you know of any good resources for information about different glitch art scenes? Since I’m new, my searches are giving me a lot of older articles that are like “Hey, here’s this new thing!” and other articles that are like “I’m SO over it!” So any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

[opossum]

Glitch art, datamoshing, and weird visual stuff in general was a reasonably-big thing before they evolved into the general ａｅｓｔｈｅｔｉｃ style (or ａｅｓｔｈｅｔｉｃｓ took over, whatever your point of view is), and yeah, it seems like there aren’t many big names left when it comes to this stuff. This is like three layers of niche interests deep.

If you want to try something relatively easy, corrupting an image with a text editor is where I’d start. The results aren’t as immediate and hands-on as video synthesis or the links a bit farther down, but all it requires is an image and some time. It’s fickle, though. Sometimes it will just outright refuse to produce anything usable, sometimes it requires you to posterize your image or lower its resolution.

The previously-linked Datamoshing site is a good resource in general. There isn’t a whole lot on it, but the thing about these effects is that they can all build upon each other. Get some pixel-sorting going, cut out chunks of the information as text, take the resulting image and channel-shift it, and you have yourself an absolute mess. Whether it’s a beautiful mess is up to you.

Andi McClure has made a few programs for Ludum Dare challenges that I use pretty often for making weird shapes and color combinations that are then used as background images for processing:

Scrunch

BECOME A GREAT ARTIST IN JUST 10 SECONDS

Like I mentioned, video synthesis is my primary focus as it’s a bit more hands-on and easier to explain to folks, but I think the definition of “glitch art” is nebulous enough that they’re related. Most of the glitch art you see involving image corruption, mixing, blanking, etc. can be performed in some way with a video synthesizer system.

[opossum]

'sbeen a busy week, had next to no free time, so I set aside an hour tonight to do some modulation testing with audio sources and my theremin. No structure, just messing around:

[Cathadan]

Nice, the synth thread is here! I’m glad you reminded me of Andi’s stuff because I had completely forgotten about it, and there’s a bunch of really cool stuff there. Something else tangentially related to video synth and glitch art I came across recently: MOBD is still out there somewhere! (and development is still being live-streamed occasionally: twitch.tv/xra_)

[opossum]

Oh thread, my child, I’m sorry for abandoning you. I have a “good” reason, though.

I’ve built some new gear over the past couple of weeks and have created what I think might be the worst workflow on earth:

My life is a nightmare of editing tapes and trying to hammer out sync bugs without a time base corrector, but that workflow has produced some hot, fresh, crispy gifs!

The first two are from a black & white VHS cassette with anaglyph 3D. The first is as crunchy and distorted I could make the signal without it cutting out altogether on my capture cable (you can see where it blanks out with a blue frame for a split-second). On a CRT display it could get so much worse, but it’s a huge pain to record. In the second, mixing the 3TrinsRGB’s signal into the VHS’ signal added some sick rainbow effects.

The next few are the result of heavily messing with gain & contrast, crispifying the first, giving the second a strange soft rippling water-like effect on brighter areas, and creating a drop-shadow effect with weird rays of light on the third.

EDIT: The gifs show up fine in preview, but not in the actual post. Clickthroughs work.

This is all part of a larger project that I had hoped to have done by Halloween, but between work and scope creep it kinda got away from me. It’ll be done soon

@Cathadan
YES, THANK YOU, I couldn’t remember the name of that. I remember seeing it years ago and it looked incredible then, gonna have to check out what’s been changed.

EDIT 2: LZX, makers of fine video synth equipment, announced the Vidiot last night after a month of teasers.

They’re taking preorders on their site, $670, first run is shipping in December. If you’re interested in this kind of stuff, this would be a good, semi-affordable way to get in on it!

[Cathadan]

I played a build of MOAB at IndieCade 2016 but I think that was an old build even at the time. It’s really hard to tell what the game is going to be from the dev streams and twitter which are mostly just talking about programming various rendering shaders. What I played then was like a more visually crazy version of NaissanceE where you just soak in a lot of atmosphere while traversing simple puzzles.

But wow, the Vidiot looks sooo cool!

[anon91240540]

I don’t work with video, just still images (and it’s been awhile since I’ve been so busy and unmotivated lately) but it’s very fun to mess around with glitch art. I prefer using Audacity over textual methods because the effects do give you a limited amount of control.

I don’t have much finished work to show but this is prob still my favorite

EDIT: To bring the topic back to video I do wanna share a bit. Specifically, this Pigmhall video (which is a bit atypical for him since he usually does all the drawing himself or uses a MMD character instead of live footage) but it’s very good and a personal favorite.

(Giving a warning for epilepsy because there are some flashes and changing patterns that could cause issue)

[opossum]

https://i.imgur.com/NsdBh9D.gif(image larger than 3072KB)

performs an arcane ritual on this thread

[MynameisMichaelKern]

!

I mostly stick to filetype conversion and hexedit for my glitches. I’ve always been interested in gif editing. Not too big into pixelsorting, but usually once I’m done, I do a pass through with photoshop to add some elements I want or to fuse two products.

10660269_10208204790575717_9147772848654892486_n|465x465

I’m finding it hard to find some of my old, but really digging this thread so far.

[opossum]

Some stuff from the Discord:

[arifmaulana]

Hi. I’m Newosqie. Actually I’m not a video artist. I’m a doll player, but I was collaborating with an experimental video artist. I’m record myself playing dolls, and she did video synthesis, then we made a fun music video.

I don’t understand what she did, because we lack of communication due to the different country that we lives on. But, I think she record her own persona then glitching it in PC.
I need your opinions…

[Shivoa]

This is some top-tier glitch art (taking a ray tracer and breaking the random functions with an amazing result as it slowly iterates on the rays until it stabilises on amazing almost-painted final images).

Roman Smirnov (_romansmirnov)

[SeriuzBiznus]

This thread is fucking rad. It’s like the visual equivalent of a Trent Reznor track. You folks have some serious talent.

[Echas-Brentum]

Only just discovered this thread. I may come around asking if anyone would be up for making a little music video at some point in the future. Love this sort of stuff.