A lot of glitch art is abrasive, hard-edged, and jittery. With this piece, I wanted to display glitched images in a way that was much more organic and fluid. 

 

In its original state, this is a video of an alleyway. The footage had to go through the following process to achieve the result above:

 

1. Export footage as a series of sequential jpeg frames.
2. "Satromize" those images via the Mac OS Terminal using the pearl script found here:
jonsatrom.com/satromizer/
This part of the process is an automated way of data bending the jpegs - essentially, fiddling with their source code so the computer will read and display images in a scrambled series of bits and bytes.
3. Re-sequence those jpegs as a new 24fps movie. 
4. Import this 24fps movie into After Effects and slow down the footage to around 300x its normal speed using a specialized plugin. Its job is to interpolate the movement of pixels between two points and create new pixels to give the illusion that the footage was acquired at a high frame rate.

 

With this project, each frame was completely dissimilar to the frame that preceded and followed it. The AE plugin tries its best to find relationships between pixels and morph them into each other even though there is no actual connection between frame 1 and frame 2, frame 2 and frame 3, etc. As a result, we are left with an organically flowing image that was created by very digital means.

 

A dowloadable screensaver of the video is available HERE (for Mac OSX 10.4 Tiger or later)