Glitch Art Dot Com

Pauper’s always on the grind over here.  Just been a little slow with sharing and posting as usual.  While it’s been a little delayed (won’t be ready for an early fall pre-order) I’m ready to start letting the cat out of the bag over here.  The Televandalist is the next release in the NEW BREED roster here at BPMC.  Woo!

The Televandalist follows in the analog glitch video footsteps of the Fluxus Duo yet aesthetically it’s something all together different.  The Televandalist caters to a  luscious number of vivid looks not yet in the BPMC catalog (well, minimal overlap) and was designed to work well in tandem with the DUO.  It’s also been designed with audio reactivity in mind with both a dedicated audio input, band selection and a built in condenser mic.  It’s been my dream to walk into a room full of TVs, scream really loud and have them all go on the fritz.  One day, one day……

The aesthetic emphasis here is a little less on the sync corruption and more on the possibilities of dreamy ringing artifacts and heavy edge feedback.  Where as the last jammer was big on horizontal ringing artifacts this one is big on vertical ringing artifacts!  You’ll notice a lot of lovely rainbow ringing artifacts interspersed with pink and yellow bands n all sorts of lovely shit.

I’ll be doing the same thing with this one I’ve done with the Duo.  Eurorack and standalone releases.  The enclosure for the Duo wound up being a little challenging (and expensive) to do in such a small quantity so I’ll have to wait until the Televandalist is ready to do anymore standlone Duos…….. but alas, I digress.

How about some sneak peaks for ya?  Fluid motion video coming at you shortly….. STAY T-U-N-E-D!

With the immortal WJ-AVE5 two channel mixer from Panasonic being so plentiful on ebay right now I thought it might be a good time to highlight the unique Time Base Correction flavor making it popular amongst live glitch folk (the price tag and extreme mod-ability helps as well).  Time base correction creates a stable signal (in moments of desired instability) by digitally buffering the signal and releasing it at a steady rate.  For those seeking stable use of circuit bent glitch video gear a mixer with a TBC (or a stand-alone TBC) is imperative to prevent projector or capture card dropout.  In the process of buffering your signal those analog glitch video FX that may have looked one way on your CRT may now look another way when passing through a mixer.  This is not true with all mixers as I find some to buffer video with minimal digital impact.  The Sima SFX-9 for instance creates little to no variation or artifacts.  The WJ-AVE5 is another story however.  It’s buffer does pleasantly AWFUL things to video.  Like a full episode of MTV’s Amp crawled into your TV and died, in a good way.  Or like you rented the Lawnmower Man 2 on VHS and Jobe gave your eyes AIDS or whatever he does, I forget.  It’s been a while since I’ve seen Lawnmower Man 2 thankfully.

With instances of working with really broken video the WJ-AVE5 tends to artfully stutter and pause segments of your image coating whatever sweet sweet analog signals you may have had cooking with a thick layer of cold digital soot.  Personally I really like it’s flavor.  I think that while the WJ-AVE5 has a tendency to stray away from the original look of some FX (namely heavy sync corruption and edge feedback) it in no way produces whack-ness.  Often times you’ll be surprised by how it re-interprets your favorite (or least favorite…. rendering them your favorite) effects.  Combine all of the above with a corrupted FX buffer as found on the BPMC Touch 2xCH CV edition and you got yourself somethin’ extra tasty.  Possibly deserving of a whole other video.

In the video above I highlight a couple of things.  I’ve got a great new Burton video for source going in clean to channel 1 on the WJ-AVE5.  I’m taking the monitor out of that channel in to the Lil’ Wizard glitch video FX processor and back into channel two.  This way I can easily mix the clean and the dirty.  Somewhere at about a fifty percent channel mix you get a cool glitch shadow effect.  For the most part I am just using two sync corruption fx from the Wizz-Wizz.  The L-Wizzy?  L Wizz Hubbard?  Anyways…… while not shown, quite a few glitch FX seem to produce an infinite horizontal scroll.   I also find that exploring heavy sync corruption with the WJ-AVE5 is terrific for producing interesting stills being that you have the strobe and lag factor to work with.  Peep the captures below and grab yourself an WJ-AVE5 before it’s back down to 2 month waits for a decent one under two hundred bucks.

This is the premier edition of “Two Channels.”  Time to put down the soldering iron, chug some jolt cola & plug in a bunch of freshly-modified electronics for a little impromptu low-pressure summer visual collabo session of sorts (damn right i refuse to say jam).  Just dusting off the cobwebs and seeing what can be conjured forth from the video ether.  Regardless of what materializes, summer fun is top priority.

On channel one we have Jason Grlicky, of Paracosm, creating complex shape/color generation with the amazing software video synthesizer, Lumen.  A webcam is also piped into Lumen as an occasional processable source.  On channel two we have Big Pauper on an assortment of BPMC glitch video fx processors.  The bulk of the post Lumen processing highlighted in the video is from the Basic Cable & the Fluxus.  Also in the mix were the Fritz Decontroller & the Touch CV.

This was a great way to bid a fond farewell to the ol’ BPMC HQ in the Cully (Portland, OR).  Already missing that place.  This was also an awesome chance to see how Lumen performed in conjunction with analog glitch video processing (which creates an overwhelming amount of possibilities might I add).

Stay tuned on the BPMC Vimeo Channel for an extra 5 minutes of content from this session.

I take great pleasure in seeing what people do with the mutant machines and how they choose to incorporate them into their realm of self expression.  For the first volume of user content I’ve got a lot of recent rad videos works from a diverse group of talented folks the globe over.  Attic Video comes correct with some nice light Fluxus (the master of subtle degradation) de-enhancement.  Barn Owl’s Evan Caminiti gets puréed and tossed into a nice dream soup by Sabrina Ratté for “Arc” on Thrill Jockey.  Jason Akira Somma offers up some excellent footage of the live component to an Armory residency in NYC.  Lofi Freq gets downright foul nasty good on the pyramid tip for a brief 2xCH demonstration.  Rob Feulner artfully destroys a Lifetime drama with the power of the Basic Cable.  Michael Brown freaks a small series of trailers for the Eaux Claires Festival.  Robin White demonstrates the possibilities of computer generated shapes and analog blood sex magik.

Oh and hey, BPMC users, don’t forget to send me your stills & video for future balls.  Users, if you’d like your links to head elsewhere please contact me.

Volage – Loner by Attic Video  (Utilizing the Fluxus).

Evan Caminiti – “Arc” by Sabrina Ratté (Utilizing the Touch 2xCH).

“Under Construction Series” by Jason Akira Somma (Utilizing the Touch 2xCH).

Illuminati Feedback by Lofi Freq (Utilizing the Touch 2xCH)

Event Cloak – False Positive by Rob Feulner (Utilizing the Basic Cable)

Eaux Claires Festival Trailer by Michael Brown Design (Utilizing Touch 2xCH & Fritz Decontroller)

Robin White.  (Utilizing Pure Data & BPMC Basic Cable).

The BPMC Touch CV has an amazing knack for venturing outside of the realm of conventional video fx processing into a unique mode of pure visual synthesis loosely based on your source input’s color information.  These stills were extracted from a larger video capture I’ll toss up on the Glitch Art Dot Com Vimeo shortly.  They were achieved by patching a modular function generator into the CV input section of the Touch and honing in on an interesting combination of glitch grid sizing.  The source input was the vibrant high-saturation video for Tame Impala’s “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards.”  Man, great album! Lonerisms was easily my favorite album of the last five years.  The Touch CV/AVE3 reminds me in spirit of the Folktek Time Machine.  The Time Machine is an incredible chaos-audio loop-quantization device with powerful instant remix capabilities.  You almost feel guilty working with these machines because it is so easy to create jaw-dropping results.

I’m just a couple of days away from pulling the trigger on the pre-order uzi & I thought I’d do a little Fluxus preamble.
Where are we thus far?  What the fuck-us is this Fluxus?

I wanted to make a tiny little analog video processor that is simple on the surface yet deep n’ soulful the further you dig.  A creative tool with a lot of different options for a lot of different users.  Options in application & aesthetics.  A device that could coat everything with a gossamer layer of tranquil unicorn soot or blow it all to fucking smithereens.  The Fluxus is all this and more.  Most importantly it is a lot of fun.

The Fluxus can produce a diverse set of analog glitch video FX through the utilization of 6 knobs, 2 modes, 6 CV control inputs & an audio visualization feature.  The six knobs work with one another under two modes; feedback & powered.  Feedback mode produces an assortment of… well, what else?  Internal feedback effects!  Varying degrees of lysergic edge feedback, shimmering rainbow feedback & rich globules of hovering artifact feedback (as seen above).  But it does not stop there.  There are a couple of corruption sweet spots, a subtle blur effect & various color skews.

In powered mode you have the ability to really obliterate your signal.  At times there are some aesthetic similarities between the two modes, however Powered mode tends to get much nastier.  This is where rich destabilization & horizontal tearing looks are crafted.  The trick is to utilize the top knob of the pyramid; the power starve.  After you hone in on an interesting look starve the voltage a little to see said look wither and die…. giving birth to something tasty and new.  It’s not all de Sade in Powered mode however.  Knobs 2 & 3 combine together to create varying degrees of black fill edge feedback.  The blur knob, when used in combination with various looks, often unlocks a soft & blobby stable horizontal tearing effect.

What I like about the Fluxus is that it takes time to unravel.  Really wild looks are lurking but you have to find them first.  You have to spend some time wrapping your head around the relationships between knobs before you can really dive in.  But I like that.  I’m still amazed how absorbed I can find myself in 6 knobs.

…and don’t even get me started on the audio visualization & CV features, that’s some whole other shit, best reserved for their own posts.  In due time.