//        ___       ___       ___       ___       ___       ___   
//       /\  \     /\__\     /\  \     /\  \     /\  \     /\__\  
//      /::\  \   /:/  /    _\:\  \    \:\  \   /::\  \   /:/__/_ 
//     /:/\:\__\ /:/__/    /\/::\__\   /::\__\ /:/\:\__\ /::\/\__\
//     \:\:\/__/ \:\  \    \::/\/__/  /:/\/__/ \:\ \/__/ \/\::/  /
//      \::/  /   \:\__\    \:\__\    \/__/     \:\__\     /:/  / 
//       \/__/     \/__/     \/__/               \/__/     \/__/  

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

//Glitch art is the aestheticization of digital or analog errors, such as 
//artifacts and other “bugs”, by either corrupting digital code/data or by 
//physically manipulating electronic devices (for example by circuit bending).
//
//Glitch
//
//In a technical sense a glitch is the unexpected result of a malfunction. The 
//term is thought to derive from the German glitschig, meaning 'slippery.’ It was 
//first recorded in English in 1962 during the American space program by John
//Glenn when describing problems they were having, Glenn explained, “Literally, a
//glitch is a spike or change in voltage in an electrical current.”
//
//Glitch is used to describe these kinds of bugs as they occur in software, video
//games, images, videos, audio, and any other forms of data. The term glitch came
//to be associated with music in the mid 90s to describe a genre of experimental
//noise/electronica (see Glitch (music). Shortly after, as VJs and other visual 
//artist like Tony (Ant) Scott began to embrace the glitch as an aesthetic of the
//digital age, glitch art came to refer to a whole assembly of visual arts.
//
//In January 2002, Motherboard, a tech-art collective held a glitch symposium in
//Oslo, Norway, to “bring together international artists, academics and other
//Glitch practitioners for a short space of time to share their work and ideas 
//with the public and with each other.”
//
//Iman Moradi, perhaps the first official glitch theorist, has written exten-
//sively on the subject of glitch art and released the book Glitch: Designing 
//Imperfections in September 2009.
//
//Glitch as art
//
//Glitches are mostly a result of miscommunication or mistranslation when trans-
//ferring data from one environment to another. They occur in computers due to 
//bugs in software or hardware. In Iman Moradi’s dissertation, Glitch Aesthetics,
//he divides the glitch into two categories. The first is the pure glitch which 
//is the result of a Malfunction or Error, an unpremeditated digital artifact, 
//which may or may not have its own aesthetic merits. The second is the glitch-
//alike which is the result of an intentional decision on the user side. Glitch 
//artists either synthesize glitches in non-digital mediums, or produce and create
//the environment that is required to invoke a glitch and anticipate one. A glitch
//alike then is a collection of digital artifacts that resemble visual aspects of
//real glitches found in their original habitat.
//
//In his dissertation Moradi lists some common glitch characteristics: fragmen-
//tation (shifted parts or elements of the original image as well as tonal 
//changes), replication/repetition (the visual cloning or repetition of any 
//given part of an image), linearity (as a result of digital’s interlacing and
//pixel structures), complexity, (manifestation of the immense series of code 
//beneath any piece of digital media).
//
//Whether naturally occurring (pure glitch) or instigated (glitch-alike) there 
//are numerous situations that may result in glitches. They can occur as a result
//of a scratched DVD, a corrupted stream of video on the internet or digital 
//television, a software crash due to insufficient memory, a malfunctioning 
//digital camera or other device. These glitches sometimes cause garbled patterns
//to appear on the screen. In these ways the glitch can be a found object similar
//to the ready-made. An artist/user/hacker can cause these situations to happen
//deliberately, he/she can corrupt the code of a particular digital file or even
//physically manipulate (intentionally malfunction) the circuits of a digital 
//devise forcing it to glitch its output, the same way a circuit bender would
//with a child’s toy to create unique sounds (see circuit bending). After the 
//occurrence of a glitch (intentionally or not) it can be presented purely, as 
//a corrupt file to be interpreted by a computer or other digital device. Or they
//can be manipulated (colors can be changed [as in Tony (Ant) Scott’s work] clips
//can be edited) and then saved as stable files which can then be printed or 
//burned to a DVD or other media. “The glitch aesthetic seeks to select regions 
//of interest from this often very rich raw material input, digitally manipulate
//it, and produce images which are pleasing to the artist.” 
//
//The genre of the glitch and its role in a conceptual framework can be consid-
//ered as an art form. In its visual and practical manifestations though, glitches
//and glitch-alikes have a distinct medium like quality. They exist within other
//media but their often out of place characteristics have the capacity to convey 
//a message and that is what makes them an effective medium, sub-medium or accom-
//panying medium. The Glitch imagery may be unrecognizable from its source data,
//but the source is usually implied or can be perceived in an obvious manner in
//order for the glitch process to fulfill its objective existence, in particular 
//when it comes to conveying meaning. The creation of Glitch-alike artwork doesn’t
//have to result in the conveyance of meaning, it can be fulfilling and satisfying
//as a process in itself. ... In the world of perfect telecommunication, glitches
//are undesirables for which countless error checking protocols exist with the 
//sole purpose of eliminating them. In terms of representation, the ones that 
//don’t make it into modes of audio or visual communication are merely represented
//as a trace log of error occurrences that could be used to eliminate further 
//instances before they happen. This symptomatic lack of function or unwanted 
//function in society, gives the glitch its unique status in art.
//
//Glitch history, context, and appreciation
//
//As a signifier of data, glitch art is often so obtuse that most casual viewers 
//would not have the technical savvy to fully understand the processes and sources
//of the information they are seeing. Thus, the viewer's experience with a glitch
//art piece involves a personal awareness of computing and technology. Some of the
//work requires just menial technological experience -- any child of the 80's 
//would recognize the familiar blips and digital warps that might arise from an
//incorrectly-loaded Nintendo cartridge. But the aesthetic and conceptual beauty
//of a visualized Unix core dump (a copy of the contents of memory used by a 
//computing process) is thrown to those who would understand it.
//
//Many comparisons can be made between the glitch’s formal aesthetics and those 
//of the art that preceded it. At first glance, the work’s blocky, low-res aesthe-
//tics appear formally reminiscent of the most geometric of modernist abstract 
//art, particularly the rectangular forms of de Stijl works like Mondrian’s 
//earlier Composition pieces and some Bauhaus or Expressionist works of Klee, 
//Rothko, and Kandinsky. These artists avoided direct visual representations of
//figurative reality, in favor of experiments in spontaneity, absolutes, or 
//studies in form, color, or shape. Another similar connection can be made to 
//the cubist works of Picasso and Braque. The incorporation of chance operations
//experiments by John Cage and others in their work is a philosophy shared by 
//many glitch artists who manipulate digital files and devices sometimes at 
//random in anticipation of the results. This tendency to experiment with the 
//physical medium is also very similar to the approach taken by many avant-garde
//filmmakers like Stan Brahkage who would paint, scratch, and manipulate in 
//countless ways the actual celluloid addressing the medium by exploiting its 
//imperfections. A history for appreciation of imperfections can also be seen in
//the works of artist like Gerhard Richter, who recreates the flaws found in 
//photographs in his paintings, as well as in Mondrian’s work which, though 
//seemingly perfect, is marked by varying elements which disrupt this perfection.
//These connections to more traditional artistic mediums may account for glitch’s
//appreciation today.
//
//Today’s trend of ‘perfection’ in communication reminds us less of our past when
//communications were ‘imperfect’ and anything that glitches brings us closer to 
//experiencing that past. This is partly why glitches are sometimes coupled with
//retro aesthetics, and it may be part of the reason for their appreciation. 
//Glitch artists who were children of the eighties and nineties may comment on 
//this especially.
//
//Glitch artists
//
//Conventionally when we think of digital artists one might first imagine high-
//end 3-D computer graphics in video games or seamlessly composited within the 
//latest effects-heavy blockbuster. These are artists who aim to produce with 
//this technology the hyper-realistic life-forms found in Jurassic Park, for 
//example. The glitch artist, however, uses the computer as a tool for exploring
//the digital medium and its natural aesthetics as well as a tool for instigating 
//and manipulating it. “The glitch artist assumes a role akin to that of a photo-
//grapher, exploring the environment, waiting for interesting events to happen, 
//and capturing the image before it disappears.” For these artists, glitch art 
//is an involved process that stems from an understanding of their tools: computer
//hardware, software, display adapters, storage media, etc.
//
//Glitching is a process of creating work that raises awareness of the means by
//which we communicate and ultimately exteriorize thought. It is an attempt to 
//integrate the nebula of video with a concrete process of interpretation and 
//injunction, thereby incorporating the properties of a medium into the narrative 
//of its content. At very least, glitch-art functions as a reminder that the 
//technology of digital production and information theory remains as an inexo-
//rable collaborator in all works of digital propagation and therefore should 
//be treated as significant.
//
//Glitches and popular culture
//
//Though glitching may often involve a complicated systemized process of file 
//corruption or hardware manipulation there are also very simple and commonly 
//known methods for glitching such as the “word pad glitch.” This is as simple as
//opening an uncompressed image file (bmp, tif) in Microsoft WordPad and clicking
//save. When you open the file as an image again after having saved it on WordPad
//the result is a glitched version of the original. One form of glitching which 
//has recently become very popular is called “Datamoshing.” Datamoshing occurs 
//when the I-frames or key-frames of a temporally compressed video are removed,
//causing frames from different video sequences to bleed together. The popularity
//of datamoshing can be attributed to the creator of a Chairlift music video and 
//his on-line tutorials on his particular method.
//
//These kinds of tutorials as well as interactive works like the glitch browser 
//(by Lima, Moradi and Scott) and Corrupt (by Recyclism) in addition to online 
//groups/communities like the Flickr Glitch Art group have all been contributing
//factors to the democratization of glitch as a digital art form. There are also
//devices (hardware) that have been known to have common glitches. The iPhone for
//example has a very particular glitch that occurs often when taking pictures.
//
//The use of the glitch aesthetic has recently begun to appear in commercial media
//such as advertising/television commercials (e.g., Absolut Vodka), Hollywood 
//films (e.g., Cloverfield), and music videos such as the Kanye West video 
//“Welcome to Heartbreak.” This particular use of the glitch has been met with
//some criticism. Angela Lorenz, suggests in the case of the visual glitch, 
//marketing executives are exploiting styles they see without considering or 
//promoting any experimentation, according to Lorenz, they “try to make them-
//selves appear more interesting / appealing to a 'young' audience by hopping
//onto a certain ‘trend’”.
//
//The aesthetics of the glitch have also recently been mimicked and re-created
//by other means (using traditional design tools/software) and used in a more 
//traditional art sense. Artists and designers like metaphsk and ratsi have all
//adopted the glitch’s look and begun to apply it to their work. There exist web
//tutorials that explain how to re-create the glitch aesthetic using programs 
//like Jitter. It is important to note that there is a distinction between a work
//which is actually corrupted (where there occurs a kind of collaboration between
//the computer and the glitch practitioner) and a work which adopts some of the 
//glitch’s characteristics and achieves similar results by secondary means.


int max_height = 40;
int min_height = 20;
int letter_height = max_height;
int letter_width = 20;

int x = -letter_width;
int y = 0; 

boolean newletter;              

int numChars = 26;
color[] colors = new color[numChars];

void setup()
{
  size(600, 400);
  noStroke();
  colorMode(RGB, numChars);
  background(int(random(0,numChars)),int(random(0,numChars)),int(random(0,numChars)));
  for(int i=0; i<numChars; i++) {
    colors[i] = color(int(random(0,i)), int(random(0,i)), int(random(0,i)));    
  }
}

void draw()
{
  if(newletter == true) {
    int y_pos;
    if (letter_height == max_height) {
      y_pos = y;
      rect( x, y_pos, letter_width, letter_height );
    } else {
      y_pos = y + min_height;
      rect( x, y_pos, letter_width, letter_height );
      fill(int(random(0,numChars)),int(random(0,numChars)),int(random(0,numChars)));
      rect( x, y_pos-min_height, letter_width, letter_height );
    }
    newletter = false;
  }
}

void keyPressed()
{
  if( key >= 'A' && key <= 'z') {
    int keyIndex;
    if(key <= 'Z') {
      keyIndex = key-'A';
      letter_height = max_height;
      fill(colors[key-'A']);
    } else {
      keyIndex = key-'a';
      letter_height = min_height;
      fill(colors[key-'a']);
    }
  } else {
    fill(0);
    letter_height = 10;
  }

  newletter = true;

  x = ( x + letter_width ); 

  if (x > width - letter_width) {
    x = 0;
    y+= max_height;
  }

  if( y > height - letter_height) {
    y = 0;
  }
}