Glitch Art Dot Com

With the immortal WJ-AVE5 two channel mixer from Panasonic being so plentiful on ebay right now I thought it might be a good time to highlight the unique Time Base Correction flavor making it popular amongst live glitch folk (the price tag and extreme mod-ability helps as well).  Time base correction creates a stable signal (in moments of desired instability) by digitally buffering the signal and releasing it at a steady rate.  For those seeking stable use of circuit bent glitch video gear a mixer with a TBC (or a stand-alone TBC) is imperative to prevent projector or capture card dropout.  In the process of buffering your signal those analog glitch video FX that may have looked one way on your CRT may now look another way when passing through a mixer.  This is not true with all mixers as I find some to buffer video with minimal digital impact.  The Sima SFX-9 for instance creates little to no variation or artifacts.  The WJ-AVE5 is another story however.  It’s buffer does pleasantly AWFUL things to video.  Like a full episode of MTV’s Amp crawled into your TV and died, in a good way.  Or like you rented the Lawnmower Man 2 on VHS and Jobe gave your eyes AIDS or whatever he does, I forget.  It’s been a while since I’ve seen Lawnmower Man 2 thankfully.

With instances of working with really broken video the WJ-AVE5 tends to artfully stutter and pause segments of your image coating whatever sweet sweet analog signals you may have had cooking with a thick layer of cold digital soot.  Personally I really like it’s flavor.  I think that while the WJ-AVE5 has a tendency to stray away from the original look of some FX (namely heavy sync corruption and edge feedback) it in no way produces whack-ness.  Often times you’ll be surprised by how it re-interprets your favorite (or least favorite…. rendering them your favorite) effects.  Combine all of the above with a corrupted FX buffer as found on the BPMC Touch 2xCH CV edition and you got yourself somethin’ extra tasty.  Possibly deserving of a whole other video.

In the video above I highlight a couple of things.  I’ve got a great new Burton video for source going in clean to channel 1 on the WJ-AVE5.  I’m taking the monitor out of that channel in to the Lil’ Wizard glitch video FX processor and back into channel two.  This way I can easily mix the clean and the dirty.  Somewhere at about a fifty percent channel mix you get a cool glitch shadow effect.  For the most part I am just using two sync corruption fx from the Wizz-Wizz.  The L-Wizzy?  L Wizz Hubbard?  Anyways…… while not shown, quite a few glitch FX seem to produce an infinite horizontal scroll.   I also find that exploring heavy sync corruption with the WJ-AVE5 is terrific for producing interesting stills being that you have the strobe and lag factor to work with.  Peep the captures below and grab yourself an WJ-AVE5 before it’s back down to 2 month waits for a decent one under two hundred bucks.