De-Standard

Continuing with the analog video distortion… At work i have this beautiful MultiFormat monitor. It changes formats with some very glitchy and nice images, so I wondered how to make some of those using processing. With a bit of thought i remembered the way that PAL videogames looked on an NTSC tv and understood that the loss of color was caused by the async of the crominance channels and the constant jumps were caused by the asynchrony between the 50hz signal with the 60hz receptor… so I used a processing sketch to offset the horizontal and vertical pixel readings inside the image and re reading to give the weird look keeping the colors.

Like fast fordwarding your betamax? (click for applet)

Another analogue-like project for distorting images… still pretty far from what Nam June Paik did with electronics.

Video Synth

Between thoughts,  I was seriously thinking about video art and the work of people like Nam June Paik (seeing his american flag at the hirshhorn museum at DC changed my life) I was thinking about analogue like-ways to distort video. Far -really far- from my actual habilities, I started by making a simple video synthesizer.

The main idea was to use the 3 analogue video channels (YUV for a version, RGB for the other), assign oscillators to each of them and display the result in a scan-line fashion. With some big errors on the code, the result was actually pretty interesting:

Looking weird (click for applet)

The nice thing about this project, it’s that the result ended up being a very believable TV analogue interference, which me and my comrades have been able to use in several compositing projects (TV/computer screen replacements are a typical compositing task and, there is not any plug in -that i know of- that gives you a texture like that for the interference).