Vague Terrain

Vague Terrain has recently entered its fifth year of showcasing progressive, idiosyncratic digital art practices. Our growth is due in large part to the contributions of guest curators who have shared their expertise and energy with us, including Joshua Noble, Kim Cascone, Paul Prudence, Rob Cruickshank, CONT3XT.NET, Carrie Gates and David McCallum. We would like to continue to collaborate with members of the digital art community, and are inviting proposals from interested artists or curators to work with us on future issues of Vague Terrain.

Journal Format: The best way to get a sense of our project is to browse the archives. Each issue is a mix of essays, interviews, in-depth documentation of multimedia projects, broader surveys of art practices and EP-length audio art and experimental music releases. We aren't locked to a specific formula and have featured issues almost entirely dedicated to article-length essays or music. Each issue should feature 8-15 contributors.

Schedule: We are looking for guest curators for issues to be published in January 2011 and onward. A curator will need about 90 days of lead time to organize an issue and establishing communication with the invited artists at the beginning of the process is one of the most involved tasks. The guest curator will work with the Vague Terrain team to set up a timeline for participating artists to follow.

Responsibilities – A guest curator is responsible for the following:

• Writing an initial statement and using it to invite artists to participate in the issue
• Ensuring that participating artists understand our submission guidelines (we provide documentation)
• Ensuring that incoming submissions are approximately on schedule and complete
• Writing a forward to frame the issue theme and contextualize included work

Support – Vague Terrain offers the following assistance with the above duties of the curator:

• Provide documentation regarding submission guidelines
• Arrange for the proofreading and editing of content
• Organizing and publishing all the content that the curator has solicited
• An FTP account for the issue through which contributors can upload their work 
• Once the issue is launched we will promote the material through various online art/media networks

Interested curators and digital artists should email us with the following:

• a brief abstract describing their proposed theme and how it relates to their research
• An artistic or scholarly CV or a link to a personal website
• Optional: a list of artists whose work would be representative of the proposed topic

Deadline: This is an open, ongoing call. However curators interested in the January slot should contact us ASAP as we'll be selecting the curator for that issue in early September.

Submissions and inquires should be sent to submit@vagueterrain.net

Editor's note: The following text and images are selected excerpts from Rosa's recent self-published PDF A Vernacular of File Formats: A Guide to Databend Compression Design. Be sure to check out the entire document and/or Rosa's workshops at the upcoming In/Out and GLI.TC/H events in New York City and Chicago in September.

'Glitches are hot; proof can be found on MTV, Flickr, in the club and in the bookstore. While the coffee table book Glitch: Designing Imperfection (2009) has introduced the glitch design aesthetic to the world of latte drinking designers, and Kanye West used glitches to sing about his imperfect love life, the awkward, shy and physically ugly celebrate under the header "Glitched: Nerdcore for life".'

Glitch has transformed from cool to hot. Its no more then a brightly colored bubblegum wrapper that doesn't ask for any involvement, or offers any stimulus. Inside I find gum that I keep chewing, hoping for some new explosion of good taste. But the more I chew, the less tasty / rubbery it gets. Glitch design fulfills an average, imperfect stereotype, a filter or commodity that echoes a "medium is the message" standard.

Above: Joint Photographic Experts Group (.JPG) (lossy), severely downsampled so that the 8x8 macroblocks (and quantization error) are apparent. (irreversible databend)

A JPG compression consists of 6 subsequent steps:

1. Color space transformation
2. Downsampling
3. Block splitting
4. Discrete cosine transform
5. Quantization
6. Entropy coding

Above: 8 × 8 DCT basis patterns of a JPG.

1. Initially, images have to be transformed from the RGB color space to another color space (called Y′CbCr), that consists of three components that are handled separately; the Y (luma or brightness) and the Cb and Cr values (chroma or color values, which are divided into hue and saturation).

2. Because the human eye doesnʼt perceives small differences within the Cb and Cr space very well, these elements are downsampled.

3. After the color space transformation, the image is split into tiles or macroblocks. Rectangular regions of the image that are transformed and encoded separately.

4. Next, a Discrete Cosine Transform (which works similar to the Fourier Transform function, exploited in datamoshing and macroblock studies) is used to create a frequency spectrum, to transform the 8×8 blocks to a combination of the 64 two-dimensional DCT basis functions or patterns (as differentiated by the red lines).

Above: high frequency mapping from which basic values are derived.

5. During the Quantization step, the highest brightness frequency variations become a base line (or 0-value), while small positive and negative frequency differentiations get a value, which take many fewer bits to represent.

Above: low res JPG, Baseline standard. (irreversible databend)

6. finally, entropy coding is applied. Entropy coding is a special form of lossless data compression that involves arranging the image components in a "zigzag" order. This allows the quantized coefficient table to be rewritten in a zigzag order to a sequence of frequencies. A run-length encoding (RLE) algorithm groups similar frequencies together and after that, via "Huffman coding" organizes what is left.

Because the RGB color values are described in such a complex algorithms, some random data replacement often results into dramatic discoloration and other effects.

FABRICATE is an International Peer Reviewed Conference with supporting publication and exhibition to be held at The Building Centre in London from 15-16 April 2011. Discussing the progressive integration of digital design with manufacturing processes, and its impact on design and making in the 21st century, FABRICATE will bring together pioneers in design and making within architecture, construction, engineering, manufacturing, materials technology and computation. Discussion on key themes will include: how digital fabrication technologies are enabling new creative and construction opportunities, the difficult gap that exists between digital modeling and its realization, material performance and manipulation, off-site and on-site construction, interdisciplinary education, economic and sustainable contexts.

Call for Work: Central to the aim of FABRICATE is to interrogate and disseminate difference, similarity and innovation across design and making practices in industry and academia. Submissions will be independently blind reviewed by two members of an international panel of experts. Selected submissions will be featured in ‘FABRICATE: Making Digital Architecture’ published by Riverside Architectural Press.

Deadline: September 10th, 2010. 

For more info on submitting work please see: fabricate2011.org/submissions