#vectorpunk

[rosa-menkman]

Water in heaven is a video I made for the Wrong digital arts Biennale Dashboard show. The show is now closed but took place in Milan, Italy. It was organized by Kamillia Kard and David Quiles Guilló. 

The video is a screenshot from the Xilitla environment I build and which I hope to release this month.  

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[rosa-menkman]

Digital ate the cassette tape

 ∆  Gli.tc/h ∆ 

Daniel Wilsons asked me to help him with the practical part of his master thesis graduation. The final work was Digital Ate The Cassette tape, an VHS commission for the practical part of his master thesis graduation. The work was exhibited as a VHS, playing in a video recorder. It also came with an typewriter label. The Final video shows signs of digital and analog compressions, to show that both realms possess noise artifacts. The video also has a piece of glitch studies manifesto. 

Sound mix by Daniel Wilson (he sampled the sound of a test tape/card, the eurosignal \\which I used to wake up with many mornings when I was young// and generation loss). Video is by me. 

[rosa-menkman]

//Vanishing Lines

By Doung Jahangeer and Rosa Menkman. Site specific projection for the Stadsdeelkantoor, Westerpark, Amsterdam. Made during The Media City workshop at NIMK. Projected on the 2nd of April. During The workshop, I met Doung Jahangeer who lives and works in South Africa. His work is based on the cracks within (social) architectures, that allow the explorer to define and create new, other space. In his presentation on Tuesday (23th of March) Doung presented his manifesto on architecturewithoutwalls (to be published), which had a lot of similarities with both my glitch studies manifesto and in-between manifesto. We explored these connections within the small text we wrote that formed the basis of our collaborative projected "Vanishing Lines". Vanishing Lines // Vanishing Points The creation of space as a concept as well as a practice, cannot be defined within entities, but is defined between different entities, and their perspectives. The architecture of space is in-between, and always multi-layered. In Vanishing Lines, the building is locked into a grid of its surrounding; the space of operating templates, the grid of the Westerpark. These structures are highlighted and then collapsed onto the building, the canvas. The lines on the building resonate visual perception; different perspectives are being aligned. Sometimes they create a coalition, and sometimes they create collision. A construction created out of multiple perspectives that evolve into a hypertrophic resonance. The architecture can be freed by repositioning the membranes of perspectives. In this instance, the subtext of architectural language is set free. What comes to existence is an architecture without walls. In this architecture without walls, the multiple perspectives in space create place. These space-makers provide the potential to alter perception. Architects must learn to loose control and recognize that creativity exists everywhere: because the ability of space-making exists in everybody. In Vanishing Lines, for a moment, the building has become a landscape with multiple horizons, in which orientation between top and bottom does not exist. The landscape is artificial. It exists in-between the dichotomy of the real but totally constructed horizon and a digital fantasy horizon. The architecture does not automatically give the viewer the confidence to position himself, but instead, the viewer has to reterritorialize his environment and in so doing, he is forced to choose his own vanishing lines. ░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ After writing the basic text we went to the site to make photos and draw up the grid (virtual and real) that exist around the building. We drew lines on the grid, that formed a new architectural shape, and placed parts of the text on top of this shape. With the help of some digital glitches, we collapsed this shape, which formed a new space construction. The first movie I made was high contrasted red and black, but it did not print nicely on the brick building :: the red light did not reflect at all, and the text was not readable because of the 3d surface. In fact in further testing it became clear that only few colors reflected and only hard shaped edges and abstract images were recognizable - the photos were unfortunately unusable. This is why I changed the pace and build up of the video - more basic, simple with contrasts in colors and speed. the result is a very basic video, that did work well on the building. the soundtrack based on Goto80s MCMCMC made it perfect. The video is centered around the idea that we can choose and create our own vanishing lines. Video documentation will be added soon. (Music by Goto80: parts of MCMCMC) ░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░

[rosa-menkman]

How to create compression artifacts [ Datamoshing ]

by mr datamosher Vectorpunk [is also over according to mr O'Reilly] [rest of this post is written with info I got from George Gardiner] Although I just learned that Datamoshing is over, I want to quickly describe how you can make it happen, to late. So here we go, When a video is encoded, each frame is stored as an I frame or a P/B frame. An I frame [Sven Konig calls them ∆-frames] is like a JPEG image, it holds the still image (that frame) in its entirety. P and B frames are the smart frames that allow videos to be compressed. They store only the differences between the current frame and the last frame. The effect you see in the datamosh videos is what happens when you store only the differences between frames, ie. when there are no I-Frame references. Here is how you can do it the hardcore way: 1. Get your video in MPEG4 format, XViD or DIVX is fine. 2. Save it as an AVI file 3. Download a HEX editor and open the AVI file with it. (http://www.chmaas.handshake.de/delphi/freeware/xvi32/xvi32.htm is good, and free) You'll see a lot of numbers and symbols. This is the raw video data. Each video frame in the AVI file will start with the code 00dc, you can search for these in the file (there will be a lot!). About 1 in 25 of these will be an I-Frame (though this depends on things like what quality you saved it at, etc). An I-Frame can be identified by the HEX string 00 01 B0 01 that will appear about 5 bytes after the 00dc frame start marker. 4. These are the frames you need to nuke. I think you can just hold delete until all the data is gone, and the next 00dc, or 00wb moves into its place. Some notes: 1. NOT ALL VIDEO PLAYERS WILL LIKE YOU DOING THIS! It is a hack afterall, what you're really doing is breaking the video. After removing the I-Frames with this technique, the first thing you should do is use something like VLC to convert it back into an un-broken format. When you do this the visual effect you created by removing the I-Frames will be preserved, but VLC will insert new I-Frames so that all video players understand how to play it back (some throw a fit when they do not find the data they expect, others like VLC will carry on regardless). This is very important if you want to then upload to YouTube as it will probably not accept a broken video. 2. Should go without saying, but keep a backup of your original video before you start. 3. As you are removing video frames, you'll also loose audio sync over time. Best thing to do is probably put the audio on after you've finished. 4. You may get some interesting effects by keeping some I-Frames, eg. syncing the frames you keep to a beat or something? [[edit"" this following method does no longer seem to work, probably because of a new version -> the youtube way does still work so try this instead!]] Here is how you can do it the less hardcore way: Use the program called VirtualDub. You need to use MPEG4, (DivX or XViD). VirtualDub allows frame-by-frame direct editing, which allows you to delete the I-Frames (note: VirtualDub calls them Key Frames). As long as keyframe reconstruction is turned off you will produce the same effect with no nasty hex editing required. [[edit"" this method does no longer seem to work, probably because of a new version -> the youtube way does still work so try this instead!]] There should be other ways that are even more easy (or hard), but these are the cool ways! Oh no, its over. We need something NEW !

[prostheticknowledge]

The External World by David OReilly

A boy learns to play the piano.

This is much more than the description above ... It is fantastic. His work has been described as 'vector punk', and if you've seen any of his stuff, like Please Say Something, then that description should be familiar.

It is 17 minutes of incredibly dark, twisted, non-sequitur humour, and looks like a Nintendo DS game. Definitely not for kids ...

Enjoy :D