Glitch Art Dot Com

First and foremost, thank you all who have supported in the prior months.  Your support in these trying times has allowed me to keep BPMC sustainable and for that I am ever grateful.  The last couple of months have been a cultural roller coaster ride as you know.  From the BPMC side of things it’s been a matter of shifting priorities and rolling with the punches.  A number of the manufactured projects that I’ve been working on were of a higher cost in both development & in manufacturing.  Ultimately I decided it’s not a good time to hemorrhage money and I put them on hold for the foreseeable future.  The focus now has been to get back to my upcycling roots and to offer ya’ll creative tools in an affordable range.  With that I’ve dusted off my unreleased glitch cam from a few years back affectionately known as the PAUP EYE.

It should be stated that this release is not without trepidation.  I’ve always been on the fence about doing a run of these for a couple reasons.  One, people use and abuse pocket cameras in a way they don’t a Fritz Decontroller thus the modified warranty (drop, smoosh, crack? cannot replace).  Two, these are slow and clunky tech from 2003.  Working with one may be a little less fluid than you’d hope.  There is an unpredictability about them and that’s the fun!  These are real glitch photos.  The magic is occurring at the hardware level and that is something your smart phone can not easily achieve (sorry, broken screens not the same haha).  I want folks to have reasonable expectations going into purchasing these things.  Third, the modifications decrease battery efficiency and I find that when I go out to shoot with it, it’s best to have 2 or more sets of fully charged rechargeable backups as it gobbles them up rather quickly.  DO NOT USE REGULAR AAs.  If you do you might as well find that tiny iceberg with the starving polar bear on it and shoot it in the head.

Despite these factors to keep in mind when making your purchase I’ve had a blast using these things over the years.  The still images are beautiful, roughly 1-2MBs in size and they can easily be upscaled for print in Photoshop. The video files are extremely lo-res, but are great for building up a multi square video collage in Premier.  The inclusion of a power supply and an AV out cable (composite video of course) render it a funny little studio camera furthering it’s usefulness.  While in AV OUT mode with your camera outputting to a CRT, you’ve got the option to cycle through a slideshow of your photos or view LIVE SCREEN mode in real time.  Please note that it is both cropped a little bit (not filling up the entire screen) and the OSD (showing the flash symbol, shots left & power status) cannot be removed.  Another limitation ya just gotta work with here.

The thing that helped me be like “alright, folks should have these” is that my original glitch camera from 2014 was still ticking come 2019.  It only left my life when it was stolen along with my 95 honda accord (for the 4th time mind you).  Miss that camera more than the car.  Knowing the camera in it’s modified form lasted for five years helped ease my mind about this mod being stable or not.

Why modify this camera in particular?  It’s one of very few pocket cameras that you can easily enough access the sensor on.  Most digital cameras are designed in a way that tucks the points I need access to behind another PCB or LCD screen making it very difficult to modify  let alone sew back up.  I’ve got boxes of modified cameras in varying stages of undress and the thing that unites them all is the rubiks cube like challenge of sewing them back up after modification.  It’s at the point of sewing things up that shit just tends to fall apart.  But not with PAUP EYE, it’s like it was meant to be modified.

If you don’t get in on this round of glitch cams worry not, I will be doing a second run next year (Ondes Magnetique style… once a year).  Perhaps even with a different make and model if people find these glitch cams to be worth making more of.

You  may have noticed a number of pre-orders for other things that ship July 20th, like the Premium & Basic Cable replacement known as Video Nasty.  Or perhaps Upcycle 32, the deluxe VHS release that’s also a raffle for my original circuit bent PS1 from 2014 (refurbished for the 2020).  Over the days to come I hope to have all these updates finished and launching in synchronicity so please do ol’ Paup a favor and STTTAYYYYY TUNNNNNNEEEDDDDD!

To see more glitch pics from over the years please check out these previous posts:

Tenebrous Transmissions: Glitch Pics from the Road

La MoDe: New Work by Martha Daghlian

First Glimpse: Glitch Pics with the BPMC Glitch Camera