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ADAD1002 Assessment 2 Concept Statement

Over the course of my experimentation I tried to build a comprehensive “error aesthetic” that didn’t use the more conventional elements of glitch art like pixelation or discolouration. I wanted to explore sound-based computer aesthetics as well as visual, and for me that meant the obvious place to start was text-to-speech. Though understandable as human speech it sounds robotic and arrhythmic as the algorithm makes mistakes in its attempts to mimic a natural cadence.

Though it was effective in capturing the glitch theme I felt I should make alternate attempts to render error into an artistic form. I wondered if I could find this idea of a glitch outside of the software space and explore those. Can mathematics contain errors? As a system we trust to be so universally true and consistent, can we identify areas where it can fail, not by human error but by it’s own lack of capacity? To explore this I looked to the Collatz Conjecture, also known as the “simplest impossible problem”. The basic idea is that you take any positive whole number, and check if it is odd or even. If it is even, divide it by two. If it is odd, multiply it by three and add one. Repeat the process on the resulting number. For any number that any mathematician on earth has ever tried, this process eventually results in the number one. Despite years and years of searching, no counterexample can be found. However, it is currently mathematically impossible to prove that this holds true for every number. Mathematics appears flawed in that it cannot address something so simple.

One of the most interesting aspects of the conjecture is that the number of iterations required for a number to reach one is very inconsistent. Patterns emerge but disappear quickly when compared to surrounding output. To create a visual analogue for the pattern I designed a c program to print out an asterisk for each iteration it took a number to reach 1. When the number reached 1, it started on a new line. I was initially frustrated when the output started clipping around the sides of the terminal because there wasn’t enough space, but over a longer screen capture I like the variety it introduced into the pattern. In addition, it introduced, another idea of “error” in the user interface of the computer not being able to effectively display or contain accurate output.

This idea of software crumbling under the weight of its own output was a springboard for the next experiment. I used the “Grey Goo” hypothesis to demonstrate that even tiny files, when cloned iteratively and continuously, can take up massive amounts of storage place, causing the program and then eventually the operating system itself to stall and force the file explorer to be shut down. While the software performing the action works as intended that intention is to break and interrupt the work of other software, exploring the idea of glitch as malware.

Synthesising these ideas resulted in the final work. Number Stations are supposed radio frequencies that carry sequences of numbers broadcast continuously. There’s lots of speculation as to what the numbers mean, but for all we know they could be entirely random. I wanted to capture the audio aesthetic of the number station using defined patterns. I initially just used the text-to-speech software because I thought that it would add a superficial robotic tone to make the “broadcast” feel cold and automated.

I was delighted to discover that it adds a lot more to the piece, generating extra layers of error. The male voice reads out a Collatz sequence, while the female voice reads out the number one doubling. They are both flawed and inaccurate compared to the software process they are being accompanied by visually: the male voice speaks far to slowly to keep up with the Collatz sequence while the female voice rapidly overtakes the file generation.

The male voice explores the strange rhythm of the sequence, saying the word “done” at seemingly random intervals that match the length of the iterations. This compounds with the normal cadence of the text to speech software to create an interesting effect. The file-explorer-wrecking capacity of the grey goo sequence is reflected in the female voice: after reaching a certain size, the software can no longer pronounce a number as a single integer but as a series of digits. The number has grown too large for the software to handle.

These concepts and ideas of glitch merge in the final piece to create an uncomfortable work designed to demonstrate flaws in the mathematics and software that we trust to be so correct.

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FINAL WORK

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Experiment 5: Polygons

Exploration of a visual aesthetic comprised of a fragmented outline mapped from point to point using vectors. The points were joined mostly for effect, to create patterns in some places and uncomfortable jumbles of lines in others.

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Experiment 4: Grey Goo

The “Grey Goo” hypothesis is the idea that a perfectly self-replicating mass is a force too powerful to stop and would consume the world if created. Given that I do not have access to nano-machines I decided to use text files instead, but there are a few similarities.

The individual text files are tiny in storage space and harmless. But after a certain amount of time, each existing text file creates another text file. Continuously. Not very threatening initially, but eventually the load of concurrent file operations crashes the explorer, as indicated by the grey screen. This, I suppose, represents our doomsday, or point at which the replication proves to destroy the planet.

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Experiment 3: Collatz Patterns

This is a concept I’ve played around with before, but presented in a different way. The sequence presented on screen are a series of very large numbers being passed through a function that reduces them to 1 over a number of iterations. Each iteration taken prints out an asterisk on that line.

Though the number of iterations does generally increase as the numbers get larger there is no consistent pattern despite the use of a consistent process, creating a sensation of randomness.

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Experiment 2: Poor Housekeeping

Ever since early high school I’ve had a bad habit of saving files on my desktop when I need a place to put them temporarily before they go somewhere else. Screenshots, images from the web, text files with passwords in them, that kind of thing. I often don’t bother deleting them and just leave them lying about. My desktop becomes a sort of visual history of my activity, containing pieces of my work and projects. I scrambled the files about and changed my desktop background to a photograph I took of the inside of a hard drive. By doing this I overlaid a software and hardware approach to exposing how ugly and chaotic computer storage can be.

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Experiment 1: Word Vomit

Went digital dumpster-diving for old stories I had left uncompleted sitting on one of my hard drives. I really enjoy how terrible freeware text-to-speech programs sound, as they have a really strange rhythm to the way that they read out longer pieces of writing. Overlaid two text-to-speech voices reading extracts from dead stories.

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Final Work Concept Statement

Given the expenses of printing in A2 I decided to compose my poster out of printed photographs on black card. The final product is mostly a merging of the experiments in typography and the lo-fi photographs. The aim was to encode the word “glitch” into the piece using a variety of methods, using cut outs, picture arrangement and layered white paper. The different methods are designed to create a sense of irregularity across the poster, emulating the nature of a glitch as an irregularity within a system.

Not all of the letters are easily visible, which is intentional: glitches are often defined by their subtlety, only appearing when they cause larger problems or on closer inspection. The overall visual aesthetic of the piece is dominated by the images of technological decay, made even more washed out by the saturation-draining printing process.

The images selected focused mainly on conventional circuitry and wiring with some concrete and metallic textures thrown in. I decided to omit the photographs with orange incandescent lighting to preference those taken with camera flash: I felt it kept the color palette more consistent and the flash contributed the the grungier look of some of the photographs.

As an overall concept, the poster looks at the decay of physical hardware in combination with the encoding of the word glitch to try and convey the idea of something that exists in a digital space into the real world.

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Experiment 4: Error Overlay

I played around with layering the famous blue screen of death over broken RAM and tangled wires to try and merge images of software and hardware fault.

I also put a shell script grabbed from my library and put it over some more broken parts. I feel that software has an aesthetic all of its own caused by the syntax highlighting and indentation, and I wanted to see how the neat code would compare with wires tangled and strewn across the floor. It should be noted that the code used in this image contains no errors.

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Experiment 3: Poster skeletons

Basic design concepts exploring glitch in typography. A few variations on a theme of spelling out the word “glitch” using common categories of software error, and a cleaner, less busy variation where the “I” has been turned into a dividing line.

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Experiment 2: Image corrupted

I wanted to build on the photographs through some rough editing, playing around with image splicing and the magic wand tool to create a more thoroughly “glitched” image.

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Experiment 1: Autopsy

In my basement sits a whole bunch bunch of broken electronics: headphones, cables, chargers and an entire set of defunct computer parts. When we think of glitches we are put in mind of software, but I wanted to examine decay and malfunctioning in the space of physical hardware.

These photos were an attempt to play with lighting and focus to create a low-fi aesthetic, focusing on the exposing the ugly insides of the machines that we spend so much time with.

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