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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."
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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.
Hmm there must be some way to make a Microsoft Windows joke in this article.
It reminds me of some really bad Trapper Keeper designs from the 80s.
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).
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
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.
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.
Photos.
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.
Way to go, Chim-Chim!
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.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
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