Glitch art: created purposefully through databending and corruption
"Data glitches are unavoidable. As technology gets more complex, it's easier and easier for a small bug to creep in and ruin your perfect data. But a growing number of artists in different fields are coming to value these glitches, and have begun attempting to insert them purposefully into their work using a technique called 'databending'.
'Glitch art' is a term that there's some debate over: Many argue that it can only apply when a glitch is unintentional -- when it occurs naturally due to an error in hardware or software that leads to the corruption of whatever it is the artist was trying to create.
But there are ways of intentionally inducing some of these glitches, a process called 'databending'. Databending draws its name from the practice of circuit bending -- a practice where childrens' toys, cheap keyboards and effects pedals are deliberately short-circuited by bending the circuit board to generate spontaneous and unpredictable sounds."
(Duncan Geere, 17 August 2010, Wired UK)
Fig.1 Don Relyea, "glitched out video".
Fig.2 David Szauder, "supra glitch".
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Film Fading to Black: ARRI, Panavision and Aaton have quietly ceased production of film cameras
"While the debate has raged over whether or not film is dead, ARRI, Panavision and Aaton have quietly ceased production of film cameras within the last year to focus exclusively on design and manufacture of digital cameras. ...
'The demand for film cameras on a global basis has all but disappeared,' says ARRI VP of Cameras, Bill Russell, who notes that the company has only built film cameras on demand since 2009. 'There are still some markets--not in the U.S.--where film cameras are still sold, but those numbers are far fewer than they used to be. If you talk to the people in camera rentals, the amount of film camera utilization in the overall schedule is probably between 30 to 40 percent.'
At New York City rental house AbelCine, Director of Business Development/Strategic Relationships Moe Shore says the company rents mostly digital cameras at this point. 'Film isn't dead, but it's becoming less of a choice,' he says. 'It's a number of factors all moving in one direction, an inexorable march of digital progress that may be driven more by cell phones and consumer cameras than the motion picture industry.'
Aaton founder Jean-Pierre Beauviala notes why. 'Almost nobody is buying new film cameras. Why buy a new one when there are so many used cameras around the world?' he says. 'We wouldn't survive in the film industry if we were not designing a digital camera.'
Beauviala believes that that stereoscopic 3D has 'accelerated the demise of film.' He says, 'It's a nightmare to synchronize two film cameras.' Three years ago, Aaton introduced a new 35mm film camera, Penelope, but sold only 50 to 60 of them. As a result, Beauviala turned to creating a digital Penelope, which will be on the market by NAB 2012. 'It's a 4K camera and very, very quiet,' he tells us. 'We tried to give a digital camera the same ease of handling as the film camera.'
Panavision is also hard at work on a new digital camera, says Phil Radin, Executive VP, Worldwide Marketing, who notes that Panavision built its last 35mm Millennium XL camera in the winter of 2009, although the company continues an 'active program of upgrading and retrofitting of our 35mm camera fleet on a ongoing basis.'
'I would have to say that the pulse [of film] was weakened and it's an appropriate time,' Radin remarks. 'We are not making film cameras.' He notes that the creative industry is reveling in the choices available. 'I believe people in the industry love the idea of having all these various formats available to them,' he says. 'We have shows shooting with RED Epics, ARRI Alexas, Panavision Genesis and even the older Sony F-900 cameras. We also have shows shooting 35mm and a combination of 35mm and 65mm. It's a potpourri of imaging tools now available that have never existed before, and an exciting time for cinematographers who like the idea of having a lot of tools at their disposal to create different tools and looks.'"
(Debra Kaufman, 2011, Creative COW)
Fig.1 The Xterà by Aaton (Super16 camera with film magazine).
Fig.2 The Penelope-Delta by Aaton (digital camera with internal full resolution recorder).
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Digital Negative: Adobe's publicly available archival photo format
"Raw file formats are becoming extremely popular in digital photography workflows because they offer creative professionals greater creative control. However, cameras can use many different raw formats - the specifications for which are not publicly available - which means that not every raw file can be read by a variety of software applications. As a result, the use of these proprietary raw files as a long-term archival solution carries risk, and sharing these files across complex workflows is even more challenging.
The solution to this growing problem is Digital Negative (DNG), a publicly available archival format for the raw files generated by digital cameras. By addressing the lack of an open standard for the raw files created by individual camera models, DNG helps ensure that photographers will be able to access their files in the future.
Within a year of its introduction, several dozen software manufacturers such as Extensis, Canto, Apple, and iView developed support for DNG. And respected camera manufacturers such as Hasselblad, Leica, Casio, Ricoh, and Samsung have introduced cameras that provide direct DNG support."
(Adobe Systems Incorporated.)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
The Digital Preservation Coalition: securing the preservation of digital resources in the UK
"The Digital Preservation Coalition was established in 2001 to foster joint action to address the urgent challenges of securing the preservation of digital resources in the UK and to work with others internationally to secure our global digital memory and knowledge base. Established as a not-for-profit membership organisation the coalition provides a mechanism by which members can work together to realise the opportunities of long term access."
(Digital Preservation Coalition)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
The invention of Film-less Photography: Kodak, 1975
"In December of 1975, after a year of piecing together a bunch of new technology in a back lab at the Elmgrove Plant in Rochester, we were ready to try it. 'It' being a rather odd-looking collection of digital circuits that we desperately tried to convince ourselves was a portable camera. It had a lens that we took from a used parts bin from the Super 8 movie camera production line downstairs from our little lab on the second floor in Bldg 4. On the side of our portable contraption, we shoehorned in a portable digital cassette instrumentation recorder. Add to that 16 nickel cadmium batteries, a highly temperamental new type of CCD imaging area array, an a/d converter implementation stolen from a digital voltmeter application, several dozen digital and analog circuits all wired together on approximately half a dozen circuit boards, and you have our interpretation of what a portable all electronic still camera might look like.
It was a camera that didn't use any film to capture still images - a camera that would capture images using a CCD imager and digitize the captured scene and store the digital info on a standard cassette. It took 23 seconds to record the digitized image to the cassette. The image was viewed by removing the cassette from the camera and placing it in a custom playback device. This playback device incorporated a cassette reader and a specially built frame store. This custom frame store received the data from the tape, interpolated the 100 captured lines to 400 lines, and generated a standard NTSC video signal, which was then sent to a television set.
There you have it. No film required to capture and no printing required to view your snapshots. That's what we demonstrated to many internal Kodak audiences throughout 1976. In what has got to be one of the most insensitive choices of demonstration titles ever, we called it 'Film-less Photography'. Talk about warming up your audience!"
(Steve Sasson, 16 October 2007)
Fig.1 Vintage 1975 portable all electronic still camera
Fig.2 The playback device and TV
Fig.3 Side-by-side comparison – Hardcopy vs. Film-less Photography
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
