Inspired by the genre of “glitching” from the late 1990s and it's credo of the “aesthetic of failure,” “Times Square Glitch” is a distortion of video and audio from the manipulation of hex codes that it comprises. All blurring, pixelation, edits, bleeds, and isolatory manipulation is created randomly from cutting, adding, deleting, and mixing mere rows of 4 digit numbers.
What is a video? What is it made out of? What exactly is a pixel and how do they make up an image?
I never really understood the answers to these questions until I actually broke down the inner-makings of a video. For some reason I was now curious to find out.
Coders use text editors to code and one day I imported a video into the text editor named Sublime. The inner makings of a video are a huge amount of hex codes written in a series with 4 places each.
What would happen if I "messed" with these numbers? Could something cool come as a result? I didn't really know what these numbers stood for, but that was the exciting aspect to it. Create something beautiful/crazy/random by altering this code.
What happened if I entered my name? Any number? A URL?
Here is the result:
The transition from undesirable to desirable through an activity in which a person finds and exploits flaws, small bits of information that are mixed through planned and unplanned patterns contribute to the beauty of an defective outcome.
There is an entire genre of new media that is devoted to this "glitching:" connecting phonographs to old defective Mac's, wiring air conditioners to 1980's Casio keyboards. Most likely inspired from the works of John Cage in some sense, "Times Square Glitch" is my experiment in this genre.