“It’s now safe to turn off your computer” (2014)

Thursday throwback post time, this week to 2014. I was living in a studio flat in Rusholme, Manchester at the time and we'd just got our hands on the first Occulus Dev kit at work, I was graphics artist at a museums and heritage experience company doing mobile phone AR and VR stuff... mainly focused on welsh castles, industrial and coastal heritage By day doing UI, sprite and 3d model textures by night... on a diet of anarchopunk, acid house, soundtracker modules and digital hardcore my brain was wired straight into corrupted data streams and glitched-out feedback loops. I was neck-deep in pixel sorting scripts, hex edits, data bending, introspective mosh pits of dodgy broken VSTs, and feeding noise into machines just to see what bled out both audio and visually. This piece "It’s now safe to turn off your computer" was an attempt at dragging that chaos out of the screen and into the physical world, mixing painting with a crash log, using dadaist grottage smearing alongside corrupted ZX Spectrum palettes dripping over a canvas like memory leaks, trying to trap that end-of-signal energy in something tangible. A love letter to dead tech, broken protocols, shutdown rituals, and the eerie stillness after a system collapse. I've probably got a few old directories full of half-broken proto AI experiments, code-garbled visuals, and generative noise art and audio from that era, if anyone wants me to try dig them up, give shout! (It's probably pretty terrible though, you had to be there...) It's something I want to get back to at some point, I have been dabbling in it a bit recently again with much more subtle PIXI.JS scripts and animated reels with displacement maps and digital rotoscoping. I might go more all out glitch again at some point. "The sound of the machine dreaming in error..." (with cats of course) 😻 #ThrowbackThursday #throwback #GlitchArt #DataMoshing #PixelSorting #GenerativeArt #GlitchPunk #ErrorAesthetic #TechnoDecay #DigitalRuin #PostDigital #CorruptedMemory #LowTechMagic #NoisyCode #SystemCrash #HackedVisuals #DeadMedia #MachineDreaming #AnarchoArt