Carolyn L. Kane In a world that esteems technological efficiency, immediacy, and control, the advent of technical noise, glitch, and failure—no matter how colorful or disturbingly beautiful—are avoided at great costs.

Cast: Salon 94

Cast: Salon 94

In our second installment on Glitch Art we’re going to look at a type of glitch that is made using the compression artifacts from digital video called datamoshing. Datamoshing visual effects usually appear like small colorful squares sprinkled across a screen like confetti.

I really like painters that adopt compression artifacts...

Something of an experiment. One frame was chosen from each shot of this excerpt from Cameron's 1984 film 'The Terminator.' The frames were then 'smeared' over the resulting gaps. Audio was left alone.Cast: Morgan

There are film theories, and then there is Deleuze.

Since the beginning of cinema, filmmakers have relied on cutting from one image to another in order to tell a visual story. The human brain naturally fills in the gaps between images, and the narrative proceeds smoothly despite the choppy visuals. Now one neuroscientist’s research may change all that. Sergei Gepshtein wants to eliminate the need for cuts—not with long-takes, but by using his research into human perception to create a brand new cinematic language. If Gepshtein’s work sounds confusing, that’s because we don’t really have the vocabulary to discuss it yet. Jennifer Ouellette, however, has done her best to detail his complex ideas in articles for Scientific American and Pacific Standard. As she explains, the best point of comparison may be optical illusions that allow viewers to see an image in two different ways depending on where they put their focus. Gepshtein hopes to harness the brain’s natural tendency to organize visual information so that directors can seamlessly blend scenes together without the use of cuts. “In effect, one scene may emerge in the middle of the other without cuts, and without the artificial tools of image morphing or dissolves,” he says. Essentially, Gepshtein is arguing that filmmakers have yet to unlock the potential of digital technology, because they are still using old-fashioned cinematic tools (like cuts). He argues that the quick-cutting style that is so popular with today’s blockbusters keeps the audience at a distance, rather than drawing them into the world of the film. He wants to take a ground-up approach and build a whole new cinematic method from “first principles,” not just evolve existing technology through trial and error. That technology wouldn’t just be limited to film; it could be used in all sorts of practical ways. For instance, information boards at airports could be constructed to reveal urgent information to viewers standing far away and more detailed information to those up close. Given that we at The A.V. Club are fans of weird technology, long-tak

Since the dawn of cinema, the cut has been one of the most powerful tools in a director’s kit. If we see a man walk through a door and turn his head to the right, and the scene immediately cuts to an image of an apple on a side table, our brain fills in the gap, and we understand that this man is looking at the apple. That’s because the brain has a natural propensity for smoothing over interruptions of stimuli. Whenever we blink, our eyes close for up to half a second, but we don’t notice the breaks. We also make rapid eye movements called saccades several times a second as we adjust to a constantly shifting environment, and we lose access to visual information until the eye movement settles down. This may why we generally don’t notice cuts in movies—they work like saccades. But neuroscientist Sergei Gepshtein dreams of a new visual vocabulary for cinema—one that relies much less on the cut, or perhaps even eliminates the cut altogether. “The film industry rests on a narrow selection of possibilities that got discovered early on and then got canonized by the force of inertia and entrenched by filmmaking technology and habit,” he says. Gepshtein sees some of the most disagreeable traits of entrenched movie technology in today’s blockbuster action movies. In these films, shots last only seconds, and there are regular barrages of rapid-fire cuts. Think Transformers, Battleship, the Bourne trilogy, or Pacific Rim. As Scott Derrickson, director of recent thrillers like Sinister and The Day the Earth Stood Still, laments, “The story is happening to you, but you are not interacting with the story.” But Gepshtein thinks he can offer an alternative to this trend—and it doesn’t necessarily involve long takes in the style of directors like Alfonso Cuarón, who recently snagged a directing Oscar for Gravity. Instead, it involves harnessing the modern science of vision. In December, I paid a visit to Gepshtein at his workplace, the Systems Neurobiology Laboratories of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, its sleek whi

Astronauts on a routine repair mission for the Hubble Space Telescope find themselves coping with more than they bargained for in the pulse-pounding opening sequence of Alfonso Cuaron’s Oscar-winning film, Gravity. Debris from the destruction of a defunct Russian satellite kills one colleague and detaches Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) from the repair shuttle, sending her tumbling in a freefall through space as veteran astronaut Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) frantically shouts instructions over the comlink. Most astonishing is that Cuaron shot the scene as a seamless whole. The camera zooms in and around the screen, focusing first on one character, and then another, pulling back occasionally to capture the full jaw-dropping panoramic vista of near-earth orbit. “It is visual poetry,” marveled director Scott Derrickson (The Day the Earth Stood Still, Sinister) when we chatted back in December, all the more noteworthy because Cuaron’s technique is in such sharp contrast to the visual style that dominates most blockbuster action movies these days, in which the average shot length is typically less than five seconds. Think Transformers, Battleship, the Bourne trilogy, or Pacific Rim, all of which feature long action sequences comprised of a series of short, rapid cuts – pure sensory stimulus. Yet Gravity’s action sequences run as long as 17 minutes without a single cut, giving the film a very different feel for audiences accustomed to a more frenetic visual pace. Small wonder the Director’s Guild of America awarded Cuaron its top prize for a feature film, and he just snagged the Oscar for Best Director this year. For instance, here’s the opening sequence from Quantum of Solace: Now compare the look and feel of that scene with this extended three-minute sequence from Gravity, without a single cut: Cuaron has flirted with this approach before: he used a method called stitching to create the illusion of seamless shots in key battle scenes in his 2006 film Children of Men; Gravity takes it to the next level, thanks to

Combining French New Wave and social media, 'The Villains' - a pseudo-remake of Jean-Luc Godard's "La Chinoise" (itself a pseudo-remake of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Possessed). In this case, the film takes the group of young revolutionaries as a jumping off point but changes Mao with Marshall McLuhan, and when watched online, is collaged with other algorithmically-selected videos. View the full film for free at thevillains.org Read about it at ANIMAL New York here: animalnewyork.com/2014/artists-notebook-rhett-jones/Cast: rhett jonesTags: The Villains, Trailer, net art, experimental film, Godard, La Chinoise, data moshing, Marshall McLuhan (Author), digressionism, Appropriation (Exhibition Subjec, mashup, fair use, post internet, Remix, independent film, DIY, Do It Yourself, pixel shifting, Pixel Art and Glitch Art

Watch the MAN OF STEEL ALIEN INVASION: http://goo.gl/7458e Watch our Trailer Review: http://goo.gl/y78FW Subscribe to TRAILERS: http://bit.ly/sxaw6h Subscribe to COMING SOON: http://bit.ly/H2vZUn Like us on FACEBOOK: http://goo.gl/dHs73 Man of Steel Viral Video

From the official Man of Steel facebook page.

A child sent to Earth from a dying planet is adopted by a couple in rural Kansas. Posing as a journalist, he uses his extraordinary powers to protect his new home from an insidious evil.

The Movieclips Trailers channel is your destination for hot new trailers the second they drop. Whether they are blockbusters, indie films, or that new comedy you've been waiting for, the Movieclips Trailers team is there day and night to make sure all the hottest new movie trailers are available whenever you need them, as soon as you can get them. All the summer blockbusters, Man of Steel, Oblivion, Pacific Rim, After Earth, The Lone Ranger, Star Trek Into Darkness and more! They are all available on Movieclips Trailers.

In addition to hot new trailers, the Movieclips Trailers page gives you original content like Ultimate Trailers, Instant Trailer Reviews, Monthly Mashups, and Meg's Movie News and more to keep you up-to-date on what's out this week and what you should be watching. "Zack Snyder" "Henry Cavill" "Russell Crowe" "Amy Adams" "David S. Goyer" "Kevin Costner" "Diane Lane" "Michael Shannon" "Christopher Meloni" "Laurence Fishburne" "Ayelet Zurer" "Christopher nolan" "superman movie" superman "man of steel movie" "man of steel trailer" "man of steel teaser" "man of steel HD" HD 2013 "DC comics" Metropolis Movieclips movie clips movieclipstrailers movieclipscomingsoon ahegele viral "general zod"

The Phantom Zone

Screenshot of work in progress, David OReilly, "A Glitch is a Glitch" (2013). Episode of the television series Adventure Time. David OReilly is a 3D animator’s 3D animator. Embracing a stripped-back aesthetic that foregrounds the very processes of animation, OReilly—whose past short films include award-winning titles "The External World" (2011) and "Please Say Something" (2009)—is recognized as much for his astute grasp of dark, abstract comedy as for his unique approach to visual design. Drawing on glitch aesthetics, underground Japanese Manga and the most parasitic of Internet memes, OReilly forges original compositions from the debris of contemporary culture. On April 1, Cartoon Network aired an episode of primetime television series Adventure Time that was written and directed by OReilly. Entitled “A Glitch is a Glitch,”[1] the episode tells the story of a villain who creates a computer virus to delete all of the other characters in the show, with the exception of his love interest. The other characters must weed out and destroy this glitch in the system. “A Glitch is a Glitch” arrived a couple of weeks before a new ‘viral’ trailer for Superman reboot Man of Steel, which also used glitchy datamoshing techniques to deliver its message. It seems significant that as glitch aesthetics take root in the Hollywood mainstream, a young animator, who has creatively embraced glitches for years, would make a television cartoon devoted to weeding them out.

Screenshot of work in progress, David OReilly, "A Glitch is a Glitch" (2013). Episode of the television series Adventure Time. DR: How did you become involved with Adventure Time? DO: Pen (the creator of the show) was a fan of my short films and got in touch in early 2010. At the time I was making The External World and wasn't able to jump ship, so it was put on hold. About a year later I had moved to LA and we ran into each other a few times and started talking about it again. DR: At what stage did the music producer Flying Lotus (Steven Ellison) become involved with the project?  DO: Steve is a friend and knew I was doing this early on. We were originally planning on doing a completely different intro that he would score, so he sent over some tracks during production. In the end we didn’t have time or money to do that intro, so the end credits sequence was born. DR: Were there any restrictions and/or stipulations on what you could do with the show? DO: Creatively, Pen really wanted me to do my own thing. The writers on the show are really good, and I would have been happy to animate one of their storyboards—but he really wanted me to do all that stuff myself. I can't think of a precedent for that. It may be the only animated show in history to let a total outsider write and direct an episode. As far as restrictions, there were a few because ultimately it's for children's TV. A few jokes were cut or toned down, which was frustrating at the time, but I'm proud of what made it to air.  

In-progress footage from David OReilly, "A Glitch is a Glitch" (2013). Episode of the television series Adventure Time. DR: A Glitch is a Glitch features a clip from another work of yours where a grey, doll-like woman swallows her own hair. In Adventure Time, the clip arrives through the window on a floppy disc taped to a brick. Jake and Finn watch the clip, which then seems to bring the glitch into being. There’s a couple of references here to the Japanese film, Ring (1998), in which a VHS tape must be watched, copied and passed on in order that the "original" viewer not die. Your doll woman in particular echoes and subverts a memorable motif from the Ring franchise, having the long-haired spectral figure literally eat herself like an ouroboros. DO: I think that was misinterpreted by the fans. That clip isn't an earlier work—I made it alongside the episode and released it a week before. For that scene I was kind of thinking about those shock sites you see when you're younger. Back in my day it was tubgirl or goatse; they were passed around and became these enigmatic things you had to see. Kids now are way more exposed to that stuff—and probably at a far younger age. A lot of people complained that scene was too extreme for kids' TV, but I think people don't give them credit for what they can tolerate. If they have the Internet they're pretty much exposed to the open mouth of hell at all times. 

Process images, David OReilly, "A Glitch is a Glitch" (2013). Episode of the television series Adventure Time. DR: The shock value of your work is often emphasised by your allegiance to cute—kawaii—figures. Adventure Time feels like a good fit for that contradiction to play out. Do you have any major influences when it comes to addressing this balance? Other than Goatse, of course.  DO: I should say the scene of the girl eating her hair wasn't about shocking the audience, it was about getting Finn & Jake to feel sick. Only a few seconds of it appears in the actual episode. In general I never think about shock value in any project because it implies there’s no meaning behind the images. Surprise might be a better word; I'm interested in using animation for ideas that it isn't typically used for. Of course, some people were shocked, but that’s mainly because they expected a regular 2D episode—and the story existed outside of the show's canon. DR: In your essay Basic Animation Aesthetics, you talk about bringing consistency and coherence to the 3D worlds you create. At a few points in the Adventure Time episode, as the glitch tears through the Land of Ooo, things get stripped back to their elements, which in this case appears to be the software interface itself . I wondered whether you could talk about restrictions in relation to 3D animation. How did you force yourself to “think outside the box” with this project?  DO: In general I try to find ideas which justify being in 3D animation. On this project, I wanted to focus on glitch as a narrative device. I had been doing that stuff a fairly long time ago, but my interests shifted to story, so I abandoned it for a while. This was a chance to really use both these interests in one project. It’s a back and forth between what works for the story and what's interesting visually; you can't structure a narrative around a bunch of interesting visual ideas and vice versa. The world being deleted allowed for a lot of visual corruption of things so that seemed to fit.

Still image from "Treehouse of Horror VI" (1995), segment entitled "Homer3. Episode of The Simpsons. DR: I was reminded of the 1995 episode of The Simpsons, "Treehouse of Horror VI," which featured a segment titled "Homer3." I couldn’t resist this reference I found on Wikipedia: "One of the key shots in Homer3 was where Homer steps into the 3D world and his design transitions into 3D. Bill Oakley considers the shot the 'money shot' and had a difficult time communicating his idea to the animators." I wondered whether you could think of an equivalent, troublesome "money shot" in your AT episode?  DO: There were a lot of technical hurdles. In general, doing stylistic glitch is easy compared to doing good character animation. Mixing the two gets very tricky though. One of the hardest things was corrupting the scene near the end of the entire broadcast so that the earlier clip is superimposed over Finn & Jake to give them an idea (i.e., using glitch as a kind of thought bubble). It was easy to storyboard that idea, but making it work properly took a lot of grind. DR: How much of the "stylistic" glitching came directly from "real" glitches? In other words, what processes did you use to introduce random, glitchy elements into the design process? Did you have to cheat to get the "stylistic" results you wanted? DO: It was all generated from "real" glitches—but since everything is run through compositing software and sort of controlled you could also say it was all fake. The glitches needed to begin locally—inside objects—then spread out until they became part of the scene itself. The local stuff was done by generating a ton of sprites that had random pixels move outwardly to create the colorful flourishes we associate with video compression. These had a decent amount of control—a blob of glitchy stuff could move around a scene, for example. Once the scenes were fully animated and rendered the global full-frame glitches were done. There was some jpeg corruption added on top of the battle scene at the end.

Screenshot from design process, "A Glitch is a Glitch" (2013). Episode of the television series Adventure Time.

Screenshot of work in progress, David OReilly, "A Glitch is a Glitch" (2013). Episode of the television series Adventure Time. DR: Some of the behind-the-scenes images you sent me are overlaid with interface elements that appear as part of the glitches that engulf Jake and Finn. This made me think again about the hand-drawn corrections made at the design stage (the scribbles repositioning Jake’s thumb, for instance). Your work merges and disguises the layers that exist between design, interface, 3D environment, characters and story. All of them are blurred via post-produced digital effects that seem to mimic the story itself (with characters having to literally swallow themselves in order reboot the glitchy world of Ooo). I wondered if you could say something about all these story arcs, design self-references and post-produced "mistakes"? DO: In every case with design, it has to be intentional. Even if there are chaotic elements, it still has to be intentional or controlled in some way—otherwise you're just showing off the tools and probably not communicating an idea. Some people might disagree but that's my feeling about it. There's a kind of back and forth between software and idea that goes on when I work in 3D, because to me it’s weird NOT to acknowledge that everything is fake and animation is basically an optical illusion - but it’s still ultimately a medium to get ideas across. I don't want style or design to be center stage—it’s just something that happens in the translation process from brain to screen. DR: To my eye some of these effects look painterly, like video codecs corrupted on purpose, or what is commonly referred to as "datamoshing." Could you let us into some of the processes you used to make that painterly aesthetic?  DO: There was a few layers of stuff going on. Some effects were applied as part of the 3D scene and others as a post-process. The painterly aspect of compression comes from the codec trying and use motion data over a static image, so that image is pushed and smudged around leaving these colorful trails and blotches. I also generated a lot of moiré patterns for the "time tunnel" sequence. I’ve wanted to use moiré effects for a while, they’re another example of the computer generating seemingly organic results from limited input. They're also really damn pretty. DR: You’ve talked in the past about viewers becoming used to 3D aesthetics over time, meaning that a technical approach "that once would stun an audience with its realism now barely has any effect." [2] I wonder whether you think glitch can become more than just another addition to the "rapidly expanding aesthetic library"? [3] DO: Glitch in its current incarnation will date like everything else. It’s a motif associated with jpeg and DivX compression, and we won’t be using those formats forever. In the 80s & 90s, there were a lot of analog errors being explored, and the errors in the 2020s will probably look a lot different.

Screenshot of work in progress, David OReilly, "A Glitch is a Glitch" (2013). Episode of the television series Adventure Time. DR: A lot of your distinctive visual style stems from the way you strip back the clutter of 3D design. Was there ever a chance you might have stuck with the 2D look of Adventure Time?  DO: I don't think so. As much as I loved getting to know those characters and trying to write for them, I also really love 3D. I still feel it's at its earliest stage and I get excited about doing ideas that only work in that medium.  DR: I'd like to move on to the question of how your work circulates on the Internet and feeds into a culture of artistic re-use. You recently released all 65 character rigs from your project The External World, allowing anyone to modify and re-use them in their own (non-commercial) projects. Have there been any surprising results from doing this?  DO: It's still early days with those, I haven't seen more than a few tests done with them. One animator has decided to use them for 51 animation exercises. I’d like to see them do interactive stuff, but that may take a while. DR: A few months ago you collated some of your creative influences for a Russian design magazine. Who inspires you at the moment? DO: The Adventure Time storyboard writers are awesome (literally all of them). In 3D I like the work of Andrew Benson and Robert Seidel. In comics I can’t get enough of Chris Ware and Jason. About 100 other people. I can't list them all off because I'd think of another 100. 

David OReilly, "Mindsploitation Timelapse" (2013). Single-channel video with sound. DR: You recently shared a video showing the design process behind your cover for Mindsploitation, a book by Vernon Chatman. What are you working on next? DO: I had been working on that book for about a year. As with every project, I never talk about it. As much as possible I try to maintain the lowest expectations from people.  DR: And finally, do you have any advice for young, aspiring visual designers? The next generation of glitchers and creators! DO: It's hard to not use clichés for questions about advice. Most people say the same thing over and over, which 99% of the time is a way to dodge it. Here is some random crap I would tell my 15 year old self: get off social networks, finish every project even if you think it's bad, be happy to have free time and use the hell out of it, do more drugs, keep a diary. This conversation between Daniel Rourke and David OReilly took place between April 10 and 24, 2013, on Google Drive.    References:

[1] The Glitch is a Glitch is not available on YouTube or Vimeo – here instead is an unofficial, unendorsed link to the episode from the darkest recesses of the web [2] David OReilly, “Basic Animation Aesthetics,” 2009, 7. 

[3] Ibid.  

Letting microchips make a few mistakes here and there could make them much faster and more energy-efficient.

Managing the probability of errors and limiting where they occur can ensure that the errors do not cause any problems. The result of a mathematical calculation, for example, need not always be calculated precisely—an accuracy of two or three decimal places is often enough. Dr Palem offers the analogy of a person about to cross a big room. Rather than wasting time and energy calculating the shortest path, it’s better just to start walking in roughly the right direction.

Every day an incomprehensible number of new digital media files are uploaded to hosting sites across the internet. Far too many for any one person to consume. Infinite Glitch is a stream-of-conciousness representation of this overwhelming flood of media, its fractured and degraded sounds and images reflecting how little we as an audience are able to retain from this daily barrage.

Infinite Glitch is an automated system that generates an ever-changing audio/video stream from the constantly increasing mass of media files freely available on the web. Source audio and video files are ripped from a variety of popular media hosting sites, torn apart, and recombined using collage and glitch techniques to create an organic, chaotic flood of sensory input.

by Takeshi Murata

by Takeshi Murata

What are some techniques you use to make glitch art?

The Creators Project: Much of your work centers on the appropriation and distorting of things to the point that they’re entirely something else. I was wondering how you feel about this on a larger scale with something like the internet, where everything is just floating out there in an open space without regulation. Do you feel that, overall, it’s beneficial to art or does it make it easier for people to claim other people’s ideas as their own? Takeshi Murata: It’s great. I see a lot of things online that inspire me greatly. One of the things I’ve learned as my work has become more public is that knowledge can go in any direction. It could be selling dog food or something, and you have to be open to that and see where it goes. It’s a cool thing. But I love sharing techniques and ideas and whatever else I’m doing. The people I talk with are really open and have taught me a lot. The internet is great for technical things.

(A Glitch Lecture by ∆¥∆)