FFglitch, FFmpeg fork for glitch art
ffglitch.org135 points by captain_bender 8 hours ago
135 points by captain_bender 8 hours ago
cool art! seeing datamoshing like this always impresses me at how much motion is encoded in modern video codecs
I 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!"
Not a lot of info on the page about the process, etc, but this is also called "datamoshing." If you're curious, there's a great talk from Demuxed '21 on some of the details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qtia43DGSrY
Awesome! I remember seeing Datamosh 2 plugin for After Effects, but didn't know it used this open source project. Turns out there is a whole bunch of GUIs for ffglitch: https://ffglitch.org/frontends/
there used to be a running joke in the AfterEffects subreddit that 95% of “What’s this effect called?” questions the answer was datamoshing. I think they even had a bot that would auto answer with datamoshing since it was asked so frequently.
This page doesn't explain what FFglitch does, or how it's different to ffmpeg. For instance, what's Glitch? I'm guessing it's an architecture, but the post doesn't explain what it is or contextualize the term "architecture."
From what i understand "glitch art" is using compression artifacts and encoding errors as art.
Presumably ffglitch is ffmpeg with code to fudge the file checksums so that encoding errors are allowed to accumulate instead of triggering an error.
The clearly labeled "What?" button at the top of the page explains everything.
The what button doesn't explain much.
As far as I know, "glitching" is opening a jpeg file with a text editor then deleting random ranges of characters, saving it again and then letting image viewers try to open the file, resulting in artifacts being added to the image.
This project seems to do the same for video files, but generating a valid video at the end.
That is “data bending” (borrowed from “circuit bending”; e.g. opening a toy that makes sound and using ‘a moist finger’ probing the pcb for changes in sound). Glitching is the intentional act of introducing errors in hardware or software, to expose the inner workings (in the case of Glitch art, this was the original aim, to expose ‘the ghost in the machine’). Rosa Menkman wrote extensively about Glitch Art here: https://beyondresolution.info/Glitch-Studies-Manifesto
The best way I've come to describe glitch art in my papers or talks with peers is that a "glitch" in the context of glitch art is the deliberate abuse of a format of media, taking advantage of either noise, compression schemes, or undefined behavior to produce media that would otherwise not exist (due to contraints of, say, a compression algorithm and a binary format like JPEG), or to reproduce media that is discarded by these (and other) mechanisms of the format (The Ghost in the MP3[0] is a fantastic, and arguably the pioneering work in this regard).
Formats such as circuitbending are alien to me, as I primarily work with digital and occasionally analog photos and videos, but generally follow the same principles of breaking away from intended use of some set of rules to express illegal states.
At university we implemented a DCT+quantization encoder/decoder for audio, and had a buggy version produce these super alien, beautiful sounds. I've often wished I had saved that version.
You know, i was all ready to be dismissive of this, using encoder errors for art sounds silly.
But i watched the video and it really was cool and artistic.
Plenty of incredible works of art and story telling use glitch art to evoke feelings and notions of "brokenness" or surreality. Some pieces that come to mind are Adventure Time S5E15: A Glitch is a Glitch, created by artist David OReilly[0] and the music video for A$AP Mob - Yamborghini High made by editor Uncle Luc[1].
This of course doesnt even begin to touch on the influences glitch art has had on music and audio - it's arguable that glitch art has its origins in printing, photography/film, and in electronic music, but most deliberate uses of "glitches" as artistic vehicles tended to arise during the early eras of electronic music production. Rosa Menkman speaks in depth about the origins of glitch art in the music scene in her paper The Glitch Moment(um)[2].
0. https://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/apr/25/datamoshing-land-o...
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tt7gP_IW-1w
2. https://mediarep.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/b16c898a-c6b...
The quintessential example of glitch art, imo, is Adult Swim's Off the Air, which compiles various short animations and music cut together with various datamoshed transitions. While the glitch stuff isn't always the central focus it definitely goes a long way towards setting the trippy vibe they're going for.
There are too many excellent episodes to list but Animals is a great one to get a feel: https://youtu.be/59QBOO6m210
And the Dan Deacon USA special episode might be peak Off The Air:
this is beautiful, the video with the two guys in the urban landscape was especially inspiring, looking forward to experimenting with this someday
Glitch art, not glitch arch. The main page https://ffglitch.org/ is a slightly better introduction to the project.