This project ruled! When someone hands you a project and tells you that the theme is glitch art, it’s hard not to follow up your best Max Headroom impression with an avalanche of high fives. My idea for this project was to take a webcam feed and apply a series of distortion effects to it.

This project got me a lot more comfortable writing shaders and is actually the only time I’ve had the pleasure of writing a geometry shader. For that piece, the video pixels are sampled and transformed into squares of that color. Depending on the brightness of the color, the squares are translated along the z-axis, giving a sort of faux-kinect effect.

Unfortunately, this project only stayed live for about a week. The concept for the window was originally an interesting blend of baroque and glitch art. By the time the window was installed, however, the glitch component was essentially eliminated and my impressive display was determined to be incongruous with the other elements in the window. Nonetheless, it was an intensely satisfying piece of software to build and I learned a lot in the process.

Source files