The lengths I go to just to respond to a meme.

So I had Zalgo start following me on Tumblr. Big internet following of this running joke/theme. Very Lovecraftian, which of course appeals to me. All about horror, and insanity, and creepypasta.

Zalgo has a very SCP feel to it. Some phenomenon that is too horrifying to comprehend, and if we do understand it then it drives us insane. These kinds of things appeal to me so of course I had to respond in the appropriate manner.

No sooner had I seen the message was I in Tesco buying red food dye and bandages saying “This will be brilliant!” And it WAS brilliant. The fake blood I made was DELICIOUS; though it was about 70% Golden Syrup…

I was surprised that I didn’t have any red ink on my shelf. I’ll have to note that down as something to pick up.

But there I was in the kitchen, blindfolded and sticky from Golden Syrup based ‘blood’, attempting to push the button on my camera so that the timer would start when my sister walks in the room.

“…going well?”

I suspect that my family have finally stopped being shocked when they catch me in the middle of doing something like this. Either that, or they’ve simply stopped asking me why I’m doing it.

Which I don’t mind so much. I don’t like directly explaining what something means. I like hearing about the conclusions that people have come to and seeing how closely it matches with how I intended it to be.

I do wonder what people think of glitch art.

Which I’m still working on.

I’ve made a couple more contextual pieces, a piece based on the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and another based on System Shock 2. The latter is only slightly glitched, the base image I produced ended up being a pretty good representation of what I wanted to get across with the image on it’s own. In some ways I like it better, but the glitched version helps to emphasise the cyberpunk elements better.

For the Eternal Sunshine piece I photoshopped a door on to a brain. Same brain I’d used for my A-Z piece “Artist’s Block”. When I glitched that it made all sorts of pretty colours, something psychadaelic that matches the film nicely. Both pieces look like they could be book covers better than anything else. I, personally, would gladly use them as video game and dvd covers respectively but for the most part they’re not like that. They’re all photos of the characters in whatever pose fits the theme. Something recognisable that people can easily identify with the content. Strange that, how simple many covers can be these days. I would much prefer interpretive pieces on my covers, but maybe that’s just me.

And then I’ve been doing a lot of abstract work lately too. Glitch work, still, but things that are less recognisable when glitched. I’m seeing what patterns and styles emerge when different file types are glitched in different ways. I was surprised to find myself having trouble to substantially corrupt a .jpeg file using a hex editor. It was being corrupted but only in short pieces at a time. If the file was a high quality file, straight from the camera say, then a large amount of glitching would yield only the smallest dark line of static on the image; barely visible unless you were looking for it. The colours that appear are certainly interesting, especially when I started with a black and white image.