Glitch Art

figa writes "Tony Scott at beflix has come up with a novel technique for creating art: load emulators with corrupt binaries and capture the output. The results are fantastic."

Comments

Great stuff.. .but:

[Anonymous Coward]

I have an inherent dislike for glitch art. It instantly brings about feelings of failure and hopelessness (probably due to my NES being old and busted).

Perhaps if he used the glitch art to make something more meaningful, then it would not seem so depressing to me.

Windows

[baywulf]

Hmm there must be some way to make a Microsoft Windows joke in this article.

Reminds me...

[Disposable Rob]

It reminds me of some really bad Trapper Keeper designs from the 80s.

NO WAY!!! I'm gettin' all nostalgic/misty-eyed.

[Ayanami Rei]

I fondly remember back in the day when I first got my GAME GENIE at Christmas. I was trying all these codes on my new Super Mario 3. I figured out pretty quick that there was a pattern to the codes (warp to level X, where X changed the last digit in a code, with the letter sequence scrambled to make it less obvious).

I wrote down the letter->hex digit conversion map, and I was hacking away.

So I was playing with the warp-to-world codes and once you got beyond 8, you could get some CRAZY shit to come up.

They were like (what I later found to be) palette-swapped tile-happy acid trips of maps. Things that resembled dungeons, impossibly linked paths between pipes and levels. And of course you couldn't move anywhere. Things were flashing, colored in garish reds, purples and other such nonsense. Holy crap, it was like looking into the mind of a clown on speed.

I spent the rest of my vacation seeing how royally fucked up I could make my games by torturing them with Game Genie codes.

This is just a more refined and controlled version of this (the Game Genie could only rewrite 5 bytes in the program ROM, this type of art is not limited to this).

im all for abstract art

[beeglebug]

and I like the theory behind it, but that stuff is not even that visualy interesting. Especially seeing as the auther freely admits to heavily photoshopping it before posting.

mismunch!

[lysander]

Also check out mismunch from xscreensaver. This is an intentionally buggy implementation of munch, a classic square-filling screensaver you've probably seen before.

When I first saw it, I though it was printing out pictures of processor cores or something...

Museum

[jmole]

Indiana Jones: "They belong in a museum!"
Panama Hat Man: "So do you!"

Reminds me of 'thrashing' the Atari 2600

[wikthemighty]

Remember the odd results you could get thrashing the reset game switch on the Atari 2600? Also by partially removing the cartridge while playing, or just when you turned the system on with the cart not contacting well (happens with most systems, especially when the contacts get worn/dirty) There's an interesting example of this on Tree Wave's Cabana EP one of the videos on the CD has music put to someone/something hitting the game select switch faster and faster with interesting animated results.

More info at www.treewave.com

Re:Reminds me of 'thrashing' the Atari 2600

[Paul Slocum]

I don't think it's possible to hit the Game Select button that fast. ;o) That video was produced by hacking Combat and adding a music driver that runs in the background, and then programming the music driver to transform and drop music data into the game's RAM space and the Atari's graphic registers in a somewhat controlled manner.

Re:Reminds me of 'thrashing' the Atari 2600

[embobo]

I recall there was some way, using the techniques you describe, where one could get Space Invaders to give the player a double shot.

Googling a bit I see the technique is simply to turn on the system while holding reset. We didn't figure that out.

Gaming sure has come a long way..

[JavaLord]

This is the Video Game equvilant of abstract art. It's all downhill from here folks!

Another way to get similar results...

[vasqzr]

Overclock your video card. You get all kinds of neat artifacts on the screen. Or, use a bad video driver.

What are you talking about?

[metalhed77]

I looked over your statement for an explanation of why it isn't art and the only thing I found was the word "useless".

I'm not going to pull any punches because you don't seem to be, but you have no idea what the hell you are talking about. If your argument is that art should be "useful" then you have a lot of explaining to do about the entire corpus of western art.

Something similar.

[vitaflo]

I did a similar thing many years ago, and created a sort of collage of glitch art with game ROMs. Instead of taking pictures of corrupt ROMs I took pictures of arcade games boot up sequences, usually during the ROM flush. A lot of old arcade games had this and it gave the weirdest looking garbage on screen before the game would load the title screen. I went through hundreds of games in MAME to find some good ones. Most of the backgrounds were black, so I made black transparent in all of them an then layered them on top of each other randomly. You can see the results here:

http://ax.assembler.org

Just click the page to get a new ROM boot collage. I also have a version that annimates randomly and alternating intervals which gives a nice psychodelic effect, but is a bit slow to do online.

Re:been there, done that

[Hormonal]

That's to be expected when you've got what appears to be a monkey at the keyboard.

Way to go, Chim-Chim!

Hard Boiled

[aminorex]

Emulator glitch works I've seen are a pale foreshadowing of the real meat of glitch art: Mpeg-4 artifacts. I've got an AVI of the Hong Kong classic movie, Hard Boiled, with just over 3 minutes of continuous multimedia glitchtasia that feels like a 500 ug LSD trip played back at 200x.
It's the visual equivalent of the brilliant remix of Space Oddity that resulted from my first buggy fixed-point implementation of MPEG-2 Layer 3 audio for PPC 1.0 a few years ago.

There's Glitch Music and now there's Glitch Art

[thrash242]

I find stuff like this very cool. There's been a genre of music called "glitch" for well over a decade now that's made with the sounds of failing electronics and other things. It's more listenable than some of you may think. Most is arranged into interesting patterns, although some is very abstract. If you like IDM or similar stuff (Aphex Twin, Autechre, etc), you just might like it.

Here is a link. It includes some bands and a description.

Now it makes sense that there's glitch art. Cool stuff. I find stuff like this very interesting, as I find electronics and their output very interesting from an aesthetic perspective. I'm surprised more geeks don't like this sort of thing.

I wouldn't exactly call this "novel"

[Pluvius]

People have been doing stuff like this for quite some time. For just one recent example, Dave Kelly opened up his Flash Tub column at Something Awful with a few Flashes exploiting the weird sounds that an NES Game Genie makes. Not exactly the same thing, but very close.

Rob