Glitch as Super Perspective

Using phone-based apps Glitch Lab and Lomo to edit my photographs.

Glitching creates opportunities to explore accidental errors and subvert the apps use, to explore place and time. Imagining the scene through the portal of a parallel universe, existing very differently from a human time based perspective.

Glitch Lab is a phone based app, free for most of the facilities, easy to use, save and share. It comes with animation but I have yet to explore this module.

I discovered Lomography and the quirky story of this cheap little Russian camera’s renaissance, along with 10 rules of use, such as ‘don’t think, just shoot’ and ‘take it with you wherever you go’, sound familiar?

By switching between the apps I have altered images from my own work and photographs taken locally in Wardle, Rochdale, where I have recently moved to. This extracts elements that I can work with in 3d or reproduce in 2d to create a new narrative.

These images appealed to me for the wonderful heavy snow shades in the sky , the glitch software separated and celebrated them beautifully. An abstract sculptural element emerged. Depth and fractured lines seem to bring the image to its pixilated self, as if preparing it to move, to be seen in another time and dimension.

The blocks of ordered colour that are produced by Binary Tree are useful, breaking down a scene to its many subtle shades and presenting a challenge to replicate them in Tilt Brush VR (below) it demonstrated the vast number of shades that can pick picked with the colour picker in TB although lemon failed to replicate.

Angels on stilts in Manchester 2021 – The icy temperature and movement of the angels was captured, Troubled Waves became painterly, each can be altered and enhanced directly on the screen, abstracting and questioning the subject. Vectors seemed to reduce the image to stiches and Square Sort to icicles.

Sketches can be altered to progress ideas, texture and detail that emerge form new ideas for making off-line.

Photographs from a local walk at Green Booth Reservoir – the architecture and cold clear weather provided some interesting starting points for both apps.

Watergrove Reservoir Rochdale – abstraction could be replicated in paint.

A view from my window forms the starting point for so many different ideas.

This process raises questions about the photograph and how the phone or camera altered the scene, what I saw in the photograph that I took for granted or missed IRL, how the glitching software and Lomo app re see and replicate with and without alterations and finally what I choose to keep and take further and why.

Using both apps in a sequence of changes gives me a totally new perspective and inspection of these perspectives creates new ideas for moving forward. After reflecting on this process I am now using higher resolution images with a view to presenting them in both 2d and 3d in VR.

https://www.lomography.com/about/the-ten-golden-rules https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ilixa.glitch&hl=en_GB&gl=US