Comment by tentacleuno 6 hours ago
This page doesn't explain what FFglitch does, or how it's different to ffmpeg. For instance, what's Glitch? I'm guessing it's an architecture, but the post doesn't explain what it is or contextualize the term "architecture."
The clearly labeled "What?" button at the top of the page explains everything.
The what button doesn't explain much.
As far as I know, "glitching" is opening a jpeg file with a text editor then deleting random ranges of characters, saving it again and then letting image viewers try to open the file, resulting in artifacts being added to the image.
This project seems to do the same for video files, but generating a valid video at the end.
That is “data bending” (borrowed from “circuit bending”; e.g. opening a toy that makes sound and using ‘a moist finger’ probing the pcb for changes in sound). Glitching is the intentional act of introducing errors in hardware or software, to expose the inner workings (in the case of Glitch art, this was the original aim, to expose ‘the ghost in the machine’). Rosa Menkman wrote extensively about Glitch Art here: https://beyondresolution.info/Glitch-Studies-Manifesto
The best way I've come to describe glitch art in my papers or talks with peers is that a "glitch" in the context of glitch art is the deliberate abuse of a format of media, taking advantage of either noise, compression schemes, or undefined behavior to produce media that would otherwise not exist (due to contraints of, say, a compression algorithm and a binary format like JPEG), or to reproduce media that is discarded by these (and other) mechanisms of the format (The Ghost in the MP3[0] is a fantastic, and arguably the pioneering work in this regard).
Formats such as circuitbending are alien to me, as I primarily work with digital and occasionally analog photos and videos, but generally follow the same principles of breaking away from intended use of some set of rules to express illegal states.
From what i understand "glitch art" is using compression artifacts and encoding errors as art.
Presumably ffglitch is ffmpeg with code to fudge the file checksums so that encoding errors are allowed to accumulate instead of triggering an error.