Glitch Glitch Glitch

Here are a number of explorations reprocessing a Forest Goddess image with successive glitch filters and processes.

Forest Goddess Glitch Animation Tests

While obscuring reality of the Goddess's spirit realm literally and metaphorically thru a screen of shifting leaves, I wanted to continue with my glitch investigations. Glitching data to create a noisy transmission channel seems appropriate to me for someone working in a digital art medium. The noise obscures a clear vision of the world represented. Much like our inculcated cultural mindset makes it so difficult for each one of us to release the 'signal noise' of expectations, judgements, memes, and so forth. Meditation and shamanic practice provide pathways beyond the inherent limitations of our minds. How else can we move toward what Terrance McKenna called the 'felt nature of direct experience?'

IF you are interested, here is the original glitch test that I created for this Forest Goddess. See more at this previous posting.

Forest Goddess Animation Tests

Last year I started to play around with animation of the obscuring leaves which hide the goddess,  (Based upon one image from the Forest Goddess 03 series below). 

Forest Goddess 03

Hidden Nature

After working on the Forest Goddess series, I began to think about visibility / invisibility and it occurred to me that the jungle environment could provide another impenetrable screen, helping to conceal hidden things not quite obvious, dream-like, perhaps secret. And of course, the jungle is a realm of shamanic practice - the realm of ancestors, plant and animal spirits, ayahuasca visions.

I set about creating a leaf 'screen' based upon iconic jungle foliage. I wanted to make this leaf pattern repeating so I could tile a number of such blocks together into a larger  panoramic aspect ratio. In this process, the adjacent and overlapping leaves began to form symmetrical totemic / figurative forms. The impact was similar to Rorschach inkblots.

If you look carefully (in the enlarged images) you may begin to resolve images of figures and animals concealed in the jungle.

Jungle Panorama 01

Jungle Panorama 02

Like any Rorschach image, your interpretation of what you see represents a shifting understanding / vision based upon a mix of cultural indoctrination, personal dreams, phobias, emotions, etc. 

As a viewer embodying a more traditional 20th Century Western mindset, the jungle is dark, all-encompassing, unknown, unspeakable: it is the "Heart of Darkness" to be avoided, symbolizing a potentially life-threatening path into danger, loss of self, even madness.

For other viewers who embrace the 21st Century "archaic revival," this Western view of the jungle as something to be feared and avoided is 're-coded' with an indigenous world view full of respect, awe, and mystery. It can be a place of healing, self-discovery, and revelation.

Hidden Nature #3

The most current jungle landscape in this series is built up from panels of two sizes with various background leaf patterns that can be re-arranged (like lines in poetry stanza: ABBAABBA) to allow reconfiguration of the work. It would also allow the piece to "wrap around" corners in an exhibition space. Reminds me of James Rosenquist's F-111 wall painting.

Jungle Panorama 03

CU: left side

CU: right side

More Glitch Tests

I wanted to play around with a larger, more complex image to apply the various glitch processing upon. I chose a Jewel Tree image as the base with the following results:

This is the original unmodified image:

Forest Goddess Redux

Some more plays on the Forest Goddess / Forest Spirit theme - the hidden, sensed, almost seen:

Vajrayogini Glitches

Been playing around with some glitch FX techniques in Photoshop. Here are samples applied to a Vajrayogini image from my library of composited Buddhist figures.

The original composit image:

Bill Tavis has performed his fractal halftone mapping on my Tara / Dakini diptych resulting in a wonderful GIF animation. Thanks again!

You can read about the source artwork here: Tara Variations.

See more of Bill Tavis's stuff on his Tumblr.

Trippy Tara

Bill Tavis has performed his fractal halftone mapping on my COSM Tara piece resulting in a wonderful GIF animation. Thanks!

See more of Bill Tavis's stuff on his Tumblr.

Rite of Spring - Medicine Offering

Gif by Bill Tavis - tumbler site: http://billtavis.tumblr.com

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Wanted to give a 'shout out' to Bill Tavis's new project - a Kickstarter project for his Mandelmap poster.

From his tumblr: Now live! Go there now to receive a poster as a reward for pledging. Meticulously researched and compiled, this poster functions as a thought-provoking guide to the astonishingly complex Mandelbrot set. - http://kck.st/23HsEZW

Hand Trembling Way

So can you tell me how this image was made? It's a little bit analog low-tech for sure, making use of a "rescan" technique I learned from my Experimental TV Center lab days with the wobulator: The original image of hands in an "offering to the Earth" mudra is from a number of years ago,  and I've used this as an element in a number of finished pieces... A few years ago I processed the healing hands image thru the fun and fantastic Percolator iPhone app to create a range of visual processed output frames. These were combined into a GIF recently and then run thru a glitch app or two .(I forgot which ones, sorry!)  Finally, the resulting video was played back in a loop on an iPad and re-captured as a standard video with my phone. (Hence, playing with the angles allow me to get a foreshortened trapezoidal perspective...) I then reduced the HD video footage to a smaller frame size and GIF'd it - results below:

More Glitch Experiments - Glitched Forest Goddess

This is an experiment in creating a glitched forest goddess loop to be positioned 'under' (camouflaged by) leaves, flowers and other offering elements. See the accompanying static image (below anim) for an example of my Forest Goddess series from last year... Now imagine a more layered effect with the leaves (etc.) as the top layer, and one or more glitched figures as background layers. (I'll update this post with an example as soon as I have taken this to the next step...)

Media Totem

Been playing around with various glitch apps on my iPad. This experiment  using a found photo of Marilyn Monroe is a rather Pop Art in nature, eh? WWMMS? (What would Marshall McLuhan say?)

Springtime!

The energy is really starting to flow now! Everything is waking up. Spring bulbs blooming, trees leafing out, birds singing.

Gif by Bill Tavis - tumbler site: http://billtavis.tumblr.com