I'm pleased to be part of this year's Make Art conference in Poitiers, France.

My Yeep!Eep!Eep!Program will be included among some fantastic open source art projects from Nov 4 to 7. Unfortunately I won't be able to attend this year, but I'll be following the conference closely online. I'm thankful to Make Art for taking an interest in YEEP -- and making the effort to buy a C64 on eBay and type in my program by hand -- and I'm thankful for their support for open source projects in general.

The source code for YEEP is offered under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license. It was written in BASIC with comments included, to make it easier for other programmers to experiment with and build on it. These comments have become part of the aesthetic of the program itself as they often appear onscreen as YEEP runs.

Here's a photo by Rosa Menkman of Roxaboxen, during the installation today. You can see four of my six pieces in the show behind a snoozing Glitch artist (hey, it beats paying for a hotel room). I'm still in NYC, am heading out to Chicago tomorrow morning for the festival.

EDIT: That's @hellocatfood in the photo

Hey, Chicago people! I'll be in town this Thursday on for gli.tc/h.There's tons of great work at this festival, they got a lot of the best Glitch artists to come out. Should be amazing!

You can see five peices from my Sector series at Roxaboxen. And I'll be speaking Sunday morning (Oct 3rd) at School of the Art Institute of Chicago about Sector, Yeep!, and Entropy.

Hey, Boston people -- this Saturday is the Basement Media Festival in Somerville, featuring work that "focuses on the act of mediation". It will include work from my Sector series. Come on by (but be sure to RSVP, the space is small).

I'll be speaking tomorrow night at the first of the artists' panels at this weekend's Hackers on Planet Earth conference. Drop by if you'd like to hear me discuss the connection between hacking and databending, it'll be starting at 6pm.

You can also see five prints from my Sector series on display at the conference today through Sunday.

EDIT: The tutorials I compiled for the talk can be found here.

Benjamin Baker-Smith posted the entire text of his interview with me to his blog. The interview was conducted for his article on Flickr Glitch Artists, posted a few weeks back on Vague Terrain.

Ben Baker-Smith posted an article to Vague Terrain this week, describing the Glitch Art pool on Flickr, and interviewing me and some of the other regularly contributing artists.

There were a few surprises for me among the answers. First, the prevalence of Pop Art as an influence. I say this as someone for whom Pop Art has been an enormous influence. In fact, I describe it as a natural companion to databending and go into some of the reasons in my answer to the influence question (just after glitch-irion's image, halfway through the article). However, I wasn't expecting it to be so consistently invoked by the other artists as well, and so high up in their lists of influences. For some of their work, I have noticed the connection: in glitch-irion's audio-bent work for instance. Like in this piece, where you can see the silk-screen look that comes from bending CMYK layers individually. Some Pop Art work explores what makes an image iconic, and the frequent repetition of images in databending provides a way to address this. My first databending series, Sector, explicitly references Warhol and his take on automation in art. But I'm curious about how the other artists see the influence of Pop Art on their work, which concepts from Pop Art are exciting to them -- it would be interesting to hear more of their take on it.

The influence I was expecting to see referenced was hardly mentioned at all: cyberpunk. It, after all, helped popularize the look of digital degradation -- on book covers, in films (and TV in the case of Max Headroom) in the late 80's and early 90's. Apart from a mention of William Gibson (from Max Capacity), there were no references to it. Is it passé now? Or just too obvious to mention?

I was also surprised by references to the dwindling of entries in the pool, and the sense that Glitch art is waning. I mentioned to Ben after the article was published; that perhaps Glitch has become enough of an established style that it no longer has quite the same level of interest and sense of innovation that it had earlier. It's becoming more common for photographers in other styles to have one databent series, or a few images in that style. But from the entries that have appeared in the pool recently, and what I saw at the Bent Festival this year, databending is continuing to evolve in new directions, even if the pace is slower or the style becoming more diluted.

After the article was published, Rosa Menkman posted to the group on another idea of why the pool has slowed lately:

I wonder if there is only a decrease of activity in the pool, or if this decrease is also at least partially the result of the changing / leaving of admins. In this pool i think a lot changed when Stephanie left. She used to moderate or kickstart a lot of questions that inspired me to think more. for some history look at this threat: www.flickr.com/groups/glitches/discuss/72157616135729354/ ... The stop in posting (the silent times) was i think due to admins stopping to accept photos to the pool, and not because people stopping posting (i know my photos were queued for a long time). This is due to the ever tricky "does this count?"-glitch question that asks for time consuming moderation of photos

DoDD242 has been the only active admin for a while, and I think he's done a great job considering how difficult the group is to manage. It's high-profile, and, as Rosa points out, the majority of submissions are from people who are clearly lost and don't know what databending or the Glitch style are. Any single person, even if they check the group several times a day, will occasionally have crises or commitments that will take them away for days at a time or longer -- and this can seem like an eternity to the people who have images sitting in the queue, and stifle discussion when nothing new appears for a while. This encoraged me to take on a moderator role myself -- so hopefully with two people moderating, the posting of images may become more consistent, and perhaps the conversations more lively.

In addition to inspiring me to take a different role in the group, the article and discussions around it introduced me to the work of some Glitch artists I was only vaguely familiar with. It also gave me a chance to hear ideas articulated by some of the Glitch artists whose work I've been following for a while. I expect there will be more discussion / debate about issues raised in the article over the next few weeks.

Yeep!Eep!Eep!Program (or YEEP) is my new glitch art app for the C64.

YEEP draws data to the screen, using whatever happens to be sitting in RAM at the moment, interpreted through character sets controlled by the user.

Since YEEP switches video banks when it starts up, it will function differently depending on what is sitting in memory. Using it right after a large program was loaded can create a different set of graphics. It will also look different depending on what was written to the screen when the program began. One way to alter the look of the final image is to draw characters to the screen manually before launching the program.

Once you've launched YEEP, here are the controls:

Controls

">" (or right arrow key) : cycle to next character set
"<" (or left arrow key) : cycle to previous character set

"c" : change background color (cycles through each of the 16 options)
"x" : add random characters

Changing Color

When YEEP first opens, it is in multi-color mode. The first time the "+" key is used, it takes it out of multi-color mode, into black & white.

WARNING: These color controlsare significantly slower than the others. They poke each of the control registers individually to recolor each character across the screen.

"+" : Add color. The first time this is used, it sets it to black and white. On each successive click, it adds an additional color, distributed randomly across the characters
"-" : Subtract color. Removes one color.
"b" : Reset. Clears color changes and goes back to multi-color mode.

My artist's feature for the Bent Festival is now on their site; you can find it here. Here's a reposting of the interview:

Bent: Before you got into circuit bending, what type of music or art were you into?

DT: I'm very interested in photography that deals with the psychological and social effects of commercialism. Hans Aarsman and Matt Siber are two photographers whose work I admire. I'm also drawn to photographers with great sensitivity to place: Walker Evans, Eggleston, Shore, Jeff Brouws, etc. These are themes I address in my own work.

Bent: How did you get into circuit bending?

DT: Photography has been my primary artistic focus for the last decade. Meanwhile, I've been working as a programmer. Databending was how I first united these interests in one project. Since then, I've expanded into forms of new media that also combine programming and visual art, but it was the discovery of databending that first encouraged me to write software as part of an art project.

Much of my databent work is concerned with exploring and exploiting the limitations and visual artifacts of tools: in this case, the image file formats themselves. I was inspired in part by the early abstract expressionists, who broke the illusion of the image to expose the qualities of paint and canvas. JPEGs look very different from BMP files when you insert random data strings into them; each can be broken in a different way, and reveal something unique about that file format. This interested me because we usually treat them as interchangeable, and don't think of them as having any real personality. It was a way to look at the data, instead of through it.

This is a continuation of the sensibility I brought to much of my film work before I started working digitally: adding light leaks, staining and scratching film, doing long exposures that revealed unusual color unique to the film stock, etc. But with film, it was more of a struggle to maintain enough control over the outcome to create work that interested me aesthetically. Databending has just the right balance of control and chaos. Many effects are repeatable, but always somewhat different with each image.

It's that experimentation that makes this style fun to work in. I'm sure that, if this style becomes popular enough, someone will release a set of Photoshop filters to allow the databent "look" to be created on the spot, and take the thrill away from doing this type of work. But until then, I will happily continue misusing software to get the effects I like.

Bent: Where do you find inspiration for your work?

DT: The project I'm showing, Sector, focuses in part on readdressing Pop Art, so I've collected iconic images in tune with that movement: a Heinz bottle, a garbage truck, a film leader. Some are referencing particular pieces, such as my cow images. One great thing about using iconic images is that they remain highly recognizable after being scrambled or broken.

Bent: What is your take on the bending community at large? Where are you in it?

DT: The bending community is surprisingly open. When I was starting out, I had artists reach out to me, providing early encouragement to work that, at the time, was very rough. It's even better for people getting started now, with the great tutorials available online, the five or six databending groups on Flickr, and of course the workshops at The Bent Festival.

Bent: Who are you most excited to see at Bent? Why?

DT: I'm thrilled to see such a variety of work in different media this year. Many of the artists at this year's festival are new to me, and I'm excited to see their work in person.

I'm excited to have five pieces from my Sector series included in this year's Bent Festival. The festival has been an essential meeting ground for artists and musicians working with circuit-bending and data-bending (circuit-bending's software equivalent, the form I work in). I first attended a circuit-bending workshop years ago, when the festival at the Tank's old old old space on 42nd St, where I learned to rewire a teletubby to sound vaguely Satanic. It was a humble but important first venture into the bent method for me. Since then, the festival has not only grown much larger in participation, but offers far more variety of work, in terms of media used, aesthetics, and sensibilities.

This also gives me an excuse to link to this great article on 8-bit art as digital materialism on Vague Terrain, which applies equally well to databent art.

My page on the Bent Festival site

The complete list of installations

A few of my pieces that will be exhibited: