alt Hacker NewsI love how we try to recreate things that are errors to add realism to something too clean. I've spent many hours in front of tape machines from analog to digital, and each format has its peculiarities when glitching. The analog formats had drop outs and other noise from the analog nature as well as things like head switching. There were also the various methods of drop out compensation like BCSP that would repeat the last good line which could lead to some interesting "smearing". Then there are other things that get imitated like when a monitor would lose sync and you'd see the horizontal/vertical blanking rolling through the screen or lose one of or swap the UV channels. The digital tape formats that had DCT blocks started displaying what this glitch art is inspired by (for lack of better phrasing). So for someone this "inside baseball", it would be a problem when these issues happened so it takes a second to get over the initial "oh no that needs to be fixed" to "that looks cool!"
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Composer William Basinski’s deteriorating analog tape loops: disintegration loops
"Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them." -Brian Eno