The key to creating gorgeous, glitchy YouTube images: anticipation and deletion | Hacker News Reader

The key to creating gorgeous, glitchy YouTube images: anticipation and deletion

theverge.com

68 pointsadrian_mrd27 comments

Wow. This article is killing me with its Gell-Mann Amnesia effects. It's like reading a history from an alternate timeline.

And why doesn't the included Twitter bot link work?

https://twitter.com/youtubeartifacts?

And of, course, the linked youtube video is some obvious corporate pop famous-for-being-famous drivel, almost immediately after stating the following:

  Two years later, the artist Takeshi Murata 
  created “Monster Movie,” which blended footage 
  from a 1981 B-movie and a heavy soundtrack and 
  which is now in the permanent collection at the 
  Smithsonian as perhaps the most influential 
  piece in the datamosh canon.

And yet a better Youtube link is avoided:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1f3St51S9I

But why?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

The Verge article should have linked to https://twitter.com/youtubeartifact (with no 's' at the end)

Ah, nice!

Please don't use spaces to quote blocks of text.

Please do anything but that. Most people put a single > at the start of each paragraph of quoted text.

You can also surround the text block in asterisks to put it in italics:

> Two years later, the artist Takeshi Murata created “Monster Movie,” which blended footage from a 1981 B-movie and a heavy soundtrack and which is now in the permanent collection at the Smithsonian as perhaps the most influential piece in the datamosh canon.

Until HN adds first-class support for blockquotes, there is no "right way to do it".

Not to be too pedantic, but that doesn't mean that there aren't wrong ways to do it.

(Such as code blocks which are a pain on mobile.)

Why, what does it do on mobile? Block line reflow?

Yes. Many people prepend >, use italics, and/or quote long quotes on HN.

In a thread about glitches, you're seriously asking people to respect formatting so that it feels less glitchy?

I use ">" because most people on HN can read raw markdown. Other people use HN code-blocks because they more closely resemble the indentation that ">" produces in markdown. I can't fathom why one method would be vastly preferred over another, or why it needs to be policed like this.

Code blocks tend to be a pain to read on mobile. I would guess that is where the poster is coming from.

Fair point, you must be talking about the annoying sideways scrolling.

It can be fixed in CSS. Add scrollbars to <pre> on small viewports, or have it wrap on small viewports.

Opera Mini could do magic with forcing text to wrap on small displays, why are mobile browsers shit today? If you don't want this to be usable on an actual computer, why not make HN an app and be done with it? Comments could become even shorter and more inane than they generally are already.

Glitch art makers are a fairly well-established subculture.[0] [1]. My direct familiarity with Glitch art is a commercial app by same name of Glitché. [2] (Note, that site is a disaster even on a fairly modern desktop which may in fact be on-brand, even though it might give HN-types conniption fits.)

While the Glitch art subculture seems to have faded from the zeitgeist a bit, Glitch art generates aesthetically satisfying works from "unintentional" data processing errors and in some ways is analogous to what software programmers do when building non-glitchy works.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch_art

[1] http://www.theperipherymag.com/on-the-arts-glitch-it-good/

[2] http://glitche.com

EDIT: Remove duplicate citation glyph. Reorder citation references. Grammar.

I don't find the resulting glitched video very interesting ... it just looks and sounds like an MPEG streaming having trouble in a glitchy low-bandwidth environment.

One glitched audio example I found quite beautiful is the audio art piece overlaid on John Adam's "Christian Zeal and Activity" from "The Chairman Dances" album ( https://youtu.be/59ceORsBT0A?t=204 ). The URL starting at 3:24 provides about a minute music intro to the glitched, cut, re-ordered audio of an Oral Roberts (?) sermon excerpt where he talks about Jesus healing a man with a disabled hand. (Not all performances of this piece use the same audio sample.)

>I don't find the resulting glitched video very interesting ... it just looks and sounds like an MPEG streaming having trouble in a glitchy low-bandwidth environment.

"I don't find the resulting distorted audio very interesting ... it sounds like a overdriven amplifier having trouble with a broken low-quality speaker"

Often the kind of malfunctioning or low-quality processing that plagues engineers is embraced by creative types. There are countless examples in the audio world over the last half-century - look at the popularity of overdrive pedals and bitcrushers and analog delay effects in a world where pristine amplification and effects processing is possible on affordable consumer-grade equipment. There's a similarity to many of the changes that audio editing and processing underwent in the early 2000s, as tools of the trade become more widely available.

Somebody else posted this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1f3St51S9I - this actually evokes something.

There just isn't something creative about the video, which is an unremarkable transformation of an unremarkable video.

That video is also 13 years old. Data moshing by itself can be about as exciting as listening to a guitar feeding back into an amp. But using it as part of a larger visual palette, and it's like a new kind of seasoning.

e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMYIWSGlT54

The Verge article links to an incorrect Twitter handle, it should be @youtubeartifact (and not youtubeartifacts with an 's'). [0]

There's a great tutorial/article here [1] on datamoshing / I- and P-frame hacking. Searching for 'datamosh' or 'datamoshing' on YouTube will return many good results.

Finally, I also recommend checking out a great glitching iOS app (which does photo & video), Glitch Wizard [2].

[0] https://twitter.com/youtubeartifact

[1] http://forum.glitchet.com/t/tutorial-make-video-glitch-art-h...

[2] http://glitchwizard.com/

When I was young you could open a video file in a text editor and try to delete random sections then play the video until you got similar effects.

There's a similar YouTube video style, where random bits of the video are sped up, slowed down, zoomed in, blurred/distorted, etc. Does anyone have an idea what this style is called? [0] is the closest i can find right now as an example, but there's no special effects here it's just splicing/mashup of various clips.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsB7u6wVMpM

edit: Here is a better example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GR_p9EVsUNE

Isn't this style called YouTube Poop or YTP? A little different style, but my favorite [0] is the clip Mr. Banks Has a Mental Breakdown.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-FaceFJYCk

edit: fixed zero-based reference index.

Yes! Thank you - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_Poop

I first saw this effect in https://youtu.be/XEvSTQKO7i4 and always wondered how it was done.

Here's another one

https://youtu.be/tt7gP_IW-1w

And another that mimics the effect

https://youtu.be/FQlhQ-GrzLk

And another that appears to be a mixture of both

https://youtu.be/b4Bj7Zb-YD4

Another... https://vimeo.com/3139412

Reply on news.ycombinator.com