Pursuing shenanigous desires, the author was in dire need of a modifiable version of the ‘thumbprint’ logo of the European Space Agency. Following the official design guidelines, the author called upon Inkscape for the mere task of creating 27 concentric circles. After creating an inner and an outer circle, Inkscapes Interpolate Between Paths extension applied not just the rest of the content but…
These non-snowflakes were created by the futile attempt of the artist to hastily solve their own programming exercise: Paint a snowflake with a for-loop in python with the turtle module. Obviously, the artist still had enough time to document their undertaking. This series is dedicated to the programming course “clownfish”.
When I encoded a sequence of OpenEXR images with FFmpeg into a video the result was rather unexpected. The video should show a 180° spherical HDR panorama of the sky in a stereographic projection. The timeplapse was stacked from 7 exposures every 30s for 8 hours using PTGui Pro. Most likely, the 32bit floating point images were interpreted as half/16bit by FFmpeg causing the doubling and the…
A bug in a binary savefile format code caused data corruption, leading to this rather special chunk of Minecraft world.
An accidental collage of an unknown number of images shot at 37c3 in Hamburg with an analog camera. The Olympus 35 RD I used jammed and didn’t advance it’s film. This is of all 36 possible shots of a standard roll of film the sole one that was left on the camera. In it I have regocnized about 13 different shots by the time of writing. While I’m sad that I just got one image out of all the images I…
I bought a used laptop with Windows XP to remember the old days and take a fresh look at old systems from my experience (I am in software quality assurance). At some point, I changed the screen settings and it began to display in 8-bit. As an experiment, I set Euphoria screensaver and got an error that this animation is not supported. I tried to run it again anyway and got this screen.
A glitch in the Gnome’s PDF reader Evince, caused by yanking out my USB stick while the file was still open and then scrolling down. I like the effect because it’s as if the page has been ripped from a printer, with lines of ink running down the rest of the document. Originally posted on twitter ; the document must have been Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia .
In this work, you still can see the motion which created the data – data that should have been depicted by Python’s Matplotlib library. What the graph should have shown are the positions of multiple sensors in a motion tracking system over time in space – so the x axis should have been time (giving it the format: time, data1, data2 data3, …). But Matplotlib only used time for the first series and…
My currently installed version of Zoom Meetings interacts oddly with my newly purchased earbuds, wherein a large number (probably 10-15) of duplicate i/o devices representing the same pair of earbuds are listed in the Zoom audio settings. Zoom also spawns a new window to notify you when your audio device has changed. Lastly, my audio subsystem is set up to switch-on-connect to newly connected…
This artwork was created by a 9 years old GPU as its swan song. Tasked with rendering graphics for the game League of Legends, it took a more freestyle approach and created this piece of art.
Heightfield terrain patches, but had trouble with the glVertexAttribPointer() OpenGL API call.
Lambda Screen is a project of mine which enables you to draw things (especially fractals) using pure lambda calculus. While working on a variant that also supports colors , I got some fun artifacts. It’s mostly about me messing up the addition of strides due to off-by-one errors.
Tried to code hydraulic erosion on a grid terrain, without success. Lots of tries, some came out interesting.
Optimizing terrain files, instead of storing triangles, converted to store only the heightfield. Didn’t succeed at once.
While working on a project, one day I was trying to generate a pie chart using Python. Didn’t remember what exactly went wrong in the code but the system kind of crashed and didn’t respond for a while. When I opened the Jupyter notebook again this is what I found in the output code cell. It generated thousands of small pie charts (what you might see as Pacman-like structures) in a big pie. Hence,…
While attempting to plot some lines representing the routes of buses in Edinburgh using some point-based data , I didn’t account for multiple bus routes having the same destination. This earned me some unexpected straight lines in addition to the squiggly lines I was aiming for. The glowing neon style is courtesy of QGIS with some minor tweaks.
This photo with a view out of my window on the 5th level was taken in June 2009 with a Canon EOS 350D. GIMP complains for corrupted data, but opens and saves it anyways. Funny thing is: The thumbnail inside the JPG file shows the correct image! All photos before and afterwards were ok. Until the camera broke in 2018 after only ~30,000 photos it never happened again.
These glitches appeared while running KDE’s Plama Desktop on a Framework Laptop using the latest Linux kernel. The author summarizes it like this: Trigger: unknown Reason: unknown Reproducibility: unknown
This was meant to be a simulation of how some species of fireflies sync their flashes in the wild with peer pressure which I found funny. I wrote what is similar to cellular automata like Conway’s game of life and I found this bug when I first made the fireflies flash. It’s hard to remember what the issue was now but I believe it was because light did not decay with time and that new flashes…
I was working on a video which was shot by me on Premiere Pro. After working for 10 minutes, the software stopped working. I saw a black screen and then again the Premiere Pro window editor popped up: My original video had lost its colour and the elements in the video were all outlined, with lower parts of the video missing. I was colour-correcting the video, but after the software glitch, there…
I used an online tool to convert a series of Street View screenshots from the TIFF image format to JPEG and ended up with these altered previews. I see an interesting symbolism here: Street View is a digitalization of the real world. I wanted to print the Street View images – to materialize the digital, so to speak. But the glitch created a representation of “another dimension” and showed the…
Took a photo of my wall with my Pixel 6 to document my floppy disk art plans. Didn’t notice the result until the next day - absolutely no idea what happened here, but it looks cool.
My partner, Brian, noticed that his phone had been taking pictures while he had it in his pocket. He showed me a few of them and then started deleting them, which is why I’m taking partial credit as the creator here. “What are you doing?! Those are amazing!!” I asked him for the phone and started scrolling through the images. Most of them were gradations of color in the beige/green/gray range,…
I took this photo with a Sigma DP2 Merrill camera, which crashed as the photo was taken and I had to restart it. Since then, the photo has crashed both the camera, as well as Sigma Photo Pro and my MacBook Pro every single time I tried to open it. Eventually, something got patched somewhere and the photo no longer crashes my laptop. I am unsure how the pink noise banding at the top happened – all…
I was trying to plot the sequences as visualized in a circle using Python’s “turtle” module. The circle was divided into n points. The numbers in the sequences were modded with another number, and the result was used to mark the next point in the circle while connecting it with the last point. This created beautiful patterns, expressing the fundamental nature of symmetry with modular arithmetic in…
This happened while working on my image resampling library in C . I think I was trying to resize the image of a blue and magenta test grid (visible on the left) using the nearest neighbour algorithm. Sadly, I lost the original lossless image, and only this compressed version is left, which I salvaged from an old whatsapp chat with a friend.
My editing software (DaVinci Resolve 18) ran out of memory, and mangled a frame of the video I was editing. The result was this explosion of red, purples, and yellows, in which my face is still partially visible.
I was implementing an image codec which uses the diamond-square algorithm. There was a bug in the code - after the image passed the encoding-decoding stage, something completely different but beautiful appeared.
Because of the pandemic, the exam for the course Realtime Computer Graphics was transformed into a large assignment that had to be done at home. For this assignment we had to implement multiple typical shaders in vulkan. One of those was the cubemap, for pointlight shadows. When calculating shadows, you typically calculate the nearest object to a lightsource and map this onto a shadowmap. When…
While layering multiple digitally photographed self-portraits in Adobe Photoshop, the program crashed and generated this corrupted file. I’m unable to open it back up in Adobe, but the results are really exciting and fractalized.
I was trying to make a game with isometric graphics. While working on the engine, I accidentally mixed the loading and update functions. This made the game create a new group of tiles every time a rotation event was triggered, resulting in this 3D perspective.
I tried to create packed circles chart, but neglected to summarize the data first. I forgot I had orange labeling turned on for some points, so all 4300+ dots are shown with the same size and and 700 colliding labels. This happened when using the JMP statistical visualization software on a data table of Mastodon instance domain names.
I was trying to code a 10PRINT program but I ended up with this weird thing.
I was experimenting with digital TV reception with a cheap DVB-T stick if I remember correctly, and EyeTV. At some point I managed to detune and wiggle the antenna just right to get some great glitches. This one stuck out to me especially because the image quality itself is very soft but the glitch artifacts are sharp. Paired with the warm colors this looked so intentional to me that I had to save…
Through a yet unknown mechanism during loading data iOS’s photos app decided to replace all photo thumbnails in year view with either light grey or black squares. The distribution paired with the number of pictures in each year of my photo library from 2007 to 2014 made it appear like a digital void infecting the past and slowly devouring the future, ever growing in the process.
After teaching myself the Go programming language in the year prior, I thought it would be cool to make something with OpenGL. I started out with a nice sphere by tessellating an icosahedron. That worked well. An then I wanted to make it better by using vertex indices… Which produced this furry ball. What went wrong? I pondered and tried a few things for a whole day. And then I remembered that one…
This happened when I was experimenting with a combination of 3D rendering and Slit Scanning. My goal was to create smooth surreally warping shapes by re-mapping the x-axis to the time axis and the time axis to the x-axis. Unfortunately I found out the hard way that when you do not randomize everything properly Blender animations rendered in Cycles will have nearly the same image noise in…
It was supposed to become a text editor or something, but primarily I just wanted to make the smallest bitmap font I could manage and draw it on screen. After the simple solution ( glDrawPixels() ) exposed a driver bug (underused code path), this was supposed to be the “proper” version using textured quads. Obviously, the vertices got scrambled somehow. The project ended up on the infinite shelf…
I was attempting to create a node that would repeatedly save the last 100 positions of a given function, traced out in green dots here. Unfortunately, instead of saving into the very last spot in the array, it saved into the second-to-last spot in the array, creating an interesting gap and teleporting lines whenever a new position was saved. It’s always a shame when your creations accidentally…
While animating a transition in some animation software (After Effects or Apple Motion) I accidentally deleted my asset which was a transparent pixel graphic of a red letter “x”. All instances of my “x” got immediately replaced by black squares. Unfortunately I forgot why my background was a tilted checkerboard pattern in this screenshot. In any event, the mistake resulted in something I found…
We wrote a raytracer in university and I made a mistake when calculating the angle between the ray and the object that got hit.
I wanted to test the creation of random Béziercurves and accidentally drew the control points of all curves instead of only the last one. This resulted in a picture that kinda looks like a Jackson Pollock painting.
While playing around with a fractal generator that generates Flames I stumbled across this beautiful pattern by randomizing certain parameters.
I was writing some custom voronoi shaders in glsl where I can dynamically change the number of moving cells and their colors. I’m actually still not sure what caused this bug but it had to do with going over the max number of cells that my shader allowed.
An unexpected error was encountered during an experiment with OpenCV and Python while looking for new ways to create algorithmic artwork. A collection of randomly selected historical artworks was provided as input, and the objective was to merge these images and apply a visual effect to make the output look more like an oil painting. While the function for creating the oil painting effect was…
The artist was trying to hack together a simple solution for a programming exercise: Making a Sierpinski triangle in Python with the Turtle Module. They missed one line of code, and it took some time to find the problem. The exact problem is a missing turn at the end of each cycle. You can find the exercise (all in German), as well as other recursion exercises, here .
While trying to generate an artwork using a Google Colab based software called Disco Diffusion , I tried to get rid of some elements, which I thought were wind turbines. Using a negative weight turned out to have a very large, unintended effect. The full text prompt was: “A windy coast on a cloudy day, by Caspar Friedrich and Albert Bierstadt, featured on ArtStation:5”, “turbines, towers:-10” I…
After taking a few photos of some buildings in Vancouver, I went to post them on Instagram as a Gallery Post. While processing the images, the app crashed and left me this wonderful piece on my phone. I have no idea what exactly happened here, but it seems to have combined two of the images during the compression process.
In this animation made in the fantasy console TIC-80, Paul-Jan wanted to use circles and trigonometry to make a cool effect. Instead, this little face appeared to mock his attempts.
I was trying to render font tests: “SPHINX OF BLACK QUARTZ HEED MY VOW” and “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”. The characters are all positioned correctly, but due to swapping rows and columns, they’re all mirrored and rotated 90 degrees and kind of squished together.