mind in a jam - Project #2

mind in a jam

Glitch Art

My main intention for mind in a jam is to capture the essence of being stuck in traffic. At times like this, my psychological state is in disarray, a conglomerate of impatience, frustration, anger, regret, apathy, and everything in-between, even the unexpected instances of relief and relaxation of not having to keep my foot to the pedal. Bits of vehicles are visible, even a distinct license plate can be seen, reminiscent of being behind the same car for long periods of time.

Takeshi Murata is my primary source of inspiration for this piece. His videos that are a result of corrupted data is create an ethereal world where one frame blends into the next. At times, some of his works have a "smeared paint" effect from multiple datamoshed frames, reminiscent of Monica Tapp's paintings depicting motion-blurred landscapes.

mind in a jam's process involves taking footage from a dash cam and converting it from .MP4 to uncompressed .AVI using Avidemux. Next, the video is opened in Frhed, a hex editor, where I replaced all occurrences of "no" to "go" and saved the video. Finally, I opened the video in Windows Media Player rather than my usual go-to PotPlayer, where I take a screenshot of a corrupted frame.

The reading GlitchCodecTutorial by Nick Briz mentions the following: "If you take this same file . . . save it on a memory stick and open it on another computer through various media players you'll notice that you often get very different results" (Briz). This is crucial in the process of creating mind in a jam. In this time and age, videos are meant to be universal files that are easily shared and viewed, however some media players have different sets of video codecs - methods of compression using computer algorithms - and so the hex-edited video can look entirely different. This lends to my choice of using Windows Media Player's interpretation over PotPlayer's. As Adrian Mackenzie says in the reading: "Codecs catalyze new relations between people, things, spaces, and times in events and forms" (Briz). The focus of mind in a jam is not how representational is it, but rather how the viewer wants to interpret it; through their unique set of experiences, relationships, and behaviour, new meaning can be instilled into the work - this is the codec of the real world.

I wanted the name of the work to be ambiguous as well. This is a representation of a mind in a traffic jam, but it has the potential to extend to the portrayal of a mind jam if it were to manifest itself.

Reading:

Nick Briz. "GLITCH CODEC TUTORIAL." GLITCH CODEC TUTORIAL. N.p., 2010. Web. 24 Oct. 2016. <http://nickbriz.com/glitchcodectutorial>.