glitch | Jimmy Smutek

Inspired by Jamie Boulton’s post on his blog, Question Something, I tried my hand at data bending yesterday.

Bill Carlile at Waldorf Skatepark

John Bernie at Laurel Skatepark

As far as process goes, I used two photographs that I took with my Nikon D-5100. I did initial edits in Lightroom a good while ago and that was about it, until I ran across Jamie Boulton’s article.

After reading a few more articles on data bending and glitch art I revisited these two images. Each image was opened and edited in Audacity, an audio editor, where I applied various effects and saved the results out. I ended up with about 5 glitched versions of each image, which I then composited in Photoshop to get the end results.

Technically these aren’t pure glitch art (I guess?) since I used an image editing program to create the final composites, in addition to data bending with Audacity.

This was a really cool, fun process that I definitely plan to explore further.

This is a DJ set that I mixed way back in 2005, live on Mike Bell’s DJ Herbal Tea Show, on UMBC Radio.

I “grew up”, so to speak, DJ-ing with turntables but at the time of this show I had just started experimenting with Traktor and all digital systems. In fact, I think this was my first all digital DJ gig.

This would have been mixed with Traktor 1.5, or 2, running on a G4 Powerbook, with an M-Audio Quattro USB sound card feeding from Traktor to my Pioneer DJM 500 mixer.

Just for nostalgias sake, there’s a throwback photo of my old mobile set up, circa 2004, packed up and ready to roll.

Some tracks are mixed and some are just played back to back, radio style. It’s not the most technical set but the tunes are good if you’re into the glitchy, techy, and minimal stuff from the early part of the millennium.

Mike Bell was a great host, and I had a really great time on the show.

I would need to do some digging to put a full track listing together, but there’s tracks from Akufen, Plastikman, Autechre, Sutekh, Aphex Twin, Pantytec, Matthew Dear, Swayzak, Taylor Dupree, Matmos, Vladislav Delay, and other similar artists.

The featured image is a rendering that I did, based off of a photograph that I took at a peace rally in DC, just prior to Iraq Part 2.

Part 1 –

Download Pt 1 MP3 – Right Click / Save As