For our final Glitch class, our assignment was to employ the flip-flop technique, as described by Robin Sloan. Technically, our job was to glitch something by flipping it between the analog and digital x times, or as Sloan says, “the process of pushing a work of art or craft from the physical world to the digital world and back again—maybe more than once”.
I decided to make a puzzle of it, to see if my idea would work. First I had to put a file online, shorten it via bit.ly (to reduce encoding complexity in the QR code), and then generate a QR code for it. Here’s the summation of that:
In order to do my flip-flop, one would need to graph out the x,y grid coordinates from a txt file onto graph paper. (ANALOG) Check out the text file here. 0,0 is the top-left of the 25×25 grid.
You can see it’s a 25×25 grid. Once you draw out the pixel coordinates, you’ll get what appears to be a QR code. Here’s my work, partially through it:
I wasn’t sure if this part would work, though in theory it should have. When I first filled in the QR code on my graphing paper, neither Google Goggles nor QR Droid could detect the QR code. Google Goggles found the closest match to be photo images of bathroom tile patterns.
Then, figuring my drawn QR code wasn’t precise enough, or perhaps dark enough, I erased my axis labels and filled in the square pixels with a black pen. To my amazement, the QR code then worked in QR Droid! (DIGITAL)
I was surprised that it could pick up the code, because I started getting sloppy while filling in the squares, figuring I could just use the final product as some artistic hand-drawn rendering of a QR code. Apparently though, QR codes, depending on encoding, can handle quite a lot of error, and correct for it. Here’s some information about how its error correction works (thanks Neil).
One interesting project handling data error and error correction was our professor Kyle McDonald’s Future Fragments project, where he had other classmates encode messages into colored grid squares, then keep the printouts in their wallets for a summer, then decoding the blocks back into a message after the pieces of paper had been worn down a bit.
The QR code takes you to a bit.ly link, which forwards you to an image on my site, a reproduction of Caravaggio’s The Card Sharps, one of my favorite paintings. (DIGITAL)
- bitly link: http://bit.ly/R5smVW
- Caravaggio’s “The Card Sharps”, benturner.com
The next task would then be to hand-draw the painting. (ANALOG)
Then you take a photo of it to auto-save to Google+ or upload to the cloud. (DIGITAL)
Then the final task would be to color in the drawing using Photoshop or another digital tool. (DIGITAL)
Here was my final product:
As a final test, I thought I’d see if I could run the drawings through glassgiant.com’s ASCII converter. The results for my drawing were not too good, probably mainly because I did not make bold enough lines and outlines to make the ASCII conversion stark enough. I also ASCII’d up the QR code (ink) and the original Caravaggio. (DIGITAL)
Note: along the way, I found this awesome site that has a QR code stencil generator, for making stencils in hobo code!
Anyway, that concludes my work for Glitch class. Thank you Kyle McDonald and Jeremiah Johnson! This ITP class was fucking kickass.