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For MOME 310 “Alternative Techniques” class at SCAD
Spring 2012

In this class we explored alternative and avant garde film and digital video techniques like handmade film, scratched film, oil wipe, feedback, glitch, interference patterns, windowing, and others. For my final piece I focused mainly on databending, but it also ended up being somewhat of a catalogue of all my experiments over the course of the semester. A lot of the source footage is from handmade and scratched films I created towards the beginning of the class. I also used some After Effects project files from the previous quarter as masks in which to drop my glitched imagery.

“Liminality” is a term I came across often in reading and researching information about glitch provided to us by my professor and online. It basically means “standing on a threshold,” “being between two things,” and “being on the brink of understanding.” I feel like that is how a lot of us relate to digital technology and computers, even those of us in digital graphics fields of study like myself. I always thought of digital files in terms of file types, alpha channels and photoshop layers, but I learned that they are in fact much more fundamental than that. At their core, everything on our computers are made from bits of binary data. Manipulating that data is the closest thing to a physical engagement we can get with our virtual art and information.

This piece is a dialogue between the old and the new, the man and the machine, and my ignorance and understanding of everything that resides inside this aluminum box.