Here - Cory Arcangel

“Don’t Touch
My Computer”
Home Users Guide
Paris / Ropac Gallery
Cory Arcangel 2k6
What is this?
Hey, welcome to the “Dont Touch My Computer Home Users Guide”,
a pdf 4 my first art show in Paris!!!!...basically this is a guide to help
you better to understand the technique of how I made the works in
the show, and that will allow you to recreate them at home. Also,
besides technical detail is a little running commentary connecting
all the works in the show (for example on the surface a work involving an old war game doesn’t have much in common with movies by
Sean Penn, but actually they do!).....So there are three works in this
show--> “Mig-29 Fighter and Clouds”, “Colors”, and “Old Friends”. Ill
explain them one by one in the order that I have made them, and
hopefully it will be interesting....cool, here we go...
“Mig-29 Fighter
and Clouds”
This work is a hack of the Nintendo video game “Mig-29 Fighter”,
which is an early 90’s video game in which you are a Soviet Fighter
Jet asked to go on bombing missions in various Middle Eastern countries. I like the game cause it is a bit of a role reversal, as usually in
these games you are an American pilot, etc, etc. It is also interesting
to note that this game was not an official Nintendo game but instead
produced by CAMERICA which was a bootleg Nintendo game making company. This could very well be the reason the content is a bit
unorthodox. So for this hack, I simply singled out the plane from the
intro screen of the game, and programmed a new cartridge with just
that, and then stole the clouds from later in the game, and made another cartridge which just has those. It is a bit of a dry concept, not
as memeable as other Nintendo works of mine because I made this
project to be an installation meaning it kinda has to be set up with a
bunch of projectors to make any sense. All of my other hacks were
made for my web site and then retrofitted to installation later as an
opportunity to gallery-ify them because available.
1. Warning, ....the following info comes with a NSFNN warning,
which means it is NOT SAFE FOR NON NERDS, meaning it gets wicked
technical. For the remainder of this users guide all obscene technical
information will be in italics. This information is aimed at the other
computer nerds out there who are feeling this kinda technique, and
who would like to recreate copies of these works at home. I would
like to have had this document have a more beginner feel, but since
there three works in the show are so different, this was impossible.
a. If you want your own Mig-29 Fighter and Clouds, here we go......
first you have to get some Nintendo Games which we will dismantle
and then change around to make this work. As opposed to some of
my earlier cartridges, because MIG-29 Fighter is a bootleg cartridge
which has little to no information available on it on the web, for this
work I have decided to run it off of generic Nintendo cartridges. .....
So to make this work you need 2 generic Nintendo cartridges. By
generic, I mean the first run of old Nintendo cartridges, before their
cartridge formats got all complicated and messy. What games will
work? Here are some: 1942, B-Wings, Duck, Elevator Action, Galg,
Exed Exes, Geimos, Hydlide, Igo Sinan, Lot Lot, Mach Rider, Mag
Max, Ms. Pac Man, Pachicom, Soccer, Super MArio Brothers, Gyromite. The easiest game to use is Gyromite, cause Nintendo made
like 10million of them so they are wicked cheap.
b. Ok, next you need to get 2 of them and you need to do the following for EACH of the 2 cartridges you got. Take some wire clippers and clip the legs off of both chips. Each cartridge has a CHR
chip which stores the graphics, and also a PRG chip which stores the
program data. I like to use the red clippers from Radioshack.
c. Once the legs are clipped you should be able to take the chip off
like this.
d. The end of the legs will still be soldered to the circuit board
though.
e. Now, with a pair of wire holders, hold a leg that is still attached to
the board. While you are holding it, touch it with a hot soldering iron.
This will melt the solder that is keeping it attacked to the board. You
should feel the leg loosen, and you will be able to pull it out of the
circuit board. Do this for each leg.
f. Next, get some Desoldering Briad!
g. Put it over the holes in the circuit board. Then place the soldering
iron on the braid. This will make the solder heat up and the braid will
suck it up.
h. When you are done, the holes in the circuit board should look clean
like this
i. Now you will need to solder a socket into the holes where the chips
used to be. You will need to buy 28 pin low profile sockets. You can
get these form Jameco.com. This makes it so you can take the chip
in and out of the socket with out re soldering. This isnt so necessary,
but I always make mistakes, so it is kinda a precaution incase I need
to make a new chip.
j. To solder, just touch the pin, and the solder at the same time, and
you will see the soldering melt into the hole thus sealing the socket
pin into the hole.
k. Now you can place a chip into the socket. The way you make
these chips is by getting an EEPROM burner. It is like a CD burner,
except for computer chips as opposed to Cd`s. I would get one from
Jameco. The new one I just bought from Jameco last week which
is super awesome is Jameco # 225947. The kinda chips you will
get are called a 27C256. This is a 32k EEPROM which is exactly the
same one the Nintendo used for cartridges like Gyromite. I would
also get those from Jameco.com. So once you have this, (or maybe
a friend has one?), the files are included in the ropac.zip file which
should have come with this, or if not, is available by emailing me.
The clouds: mig_clouds.prg, mig_clouds.chr; The plane: mig_plane.
prg, mig_plane.chr. So you need to solder the PRG and CHR of each
one onto thte cartridge. If the circuit connector is facing away from
you the PRG would go into the left socket with the knotch on the top
facing left also. The CHR chip would go into the right socket with the
knotch facing left.
l (not shown). The next part is the easy part. Get a drill, drill some
start holes into the front of the plastic cartridge. Then with your wire
cutters you used earlier, bore out the plastic. You need to do this
cause the socket we used is too tall for the plastic case of the cartridge, so you need to drill out a hole so the new chips can stick out.
When you are finished it should look something like this!!!! (c next
page)
Volia, and congrads you now have your own copy of the work!!!Ok,
now moving on, so as we can see from the previous project, I have
this interest in reducing media down to a few elements. I am a student of composer Pauline Oliveros and grew up in Buffalo under the
city’s media art umbrella established by Tony Conrad and the Va-
sulkas, therefore my bent towards minimalism should be no surprise.
So yeah, for many years I have been stripping video games down to
almost nothing. Why video games?, well, I see them the same as
movies as far as content is concerned, and they of course are built
on code, so they can be taken apart. Imagine if movies were made
on code, wouldn’t it be great to be able to remake them anyway you
wanted!? Well, it is this thought pattern which had led me out of the
video game genre in search of ways to modify traditional video, and
Old Friends
Recently it dawned on me that of course DVD’s are a digital format.
I mean everyone knows that, but I never put 2 and 2 together until
this summer. My thought pattern was such, --> well, if a DVD is just
a bunch of files on a disk, these files of course can then be hacked,
and thus, I am sure something interesting could be made somehow.
Now for those interested further, alot of my process works like this.
1. I will focus in on a medium, 2. study it, 3. determine the various
pranks and hacks that are possible, and then 4. sit on it for a while
until I find a complimentary piece of culture that exists in that medium that will mesh with the particular kinda hack possible. It is alot
like putting pieces of a puzzle together, but the puzzle pieces consist
of culture and the technology that displays, drives, and distributes
this culture. As a pop culture junkie, being a computer nerd more
and more is like being a kid in the candy shop. Everything is everywhere. So for “Old Friends” my thought pattern was such (getting
back to the earlier series steps). 1. Woah, Dvd’s can be hacked, 2.
DVDs are just a bunch of files, some video, some audio, and some
menu stuff. 3. Well it seems that we can change where chapter
markers are placed on DVDs without altering anything else on the
DVD. This is fascinating to me, I mean as I said much earlier I am
always interested in changing as alittle as possible in the original
media to create something cool (art?), so here I have a way to basically bring peoples attention to parts of a video without editing the
video! I mean when it is screened the video is EXACTLY the same
as it is in the original, the only difference being when you skip with
the chapter << >> buttons. I have always been interested in “editing” art, but since I dont believe in video editing I have never done a
project which edited material. (Well, I dont believe in computer video
editing because it is an art form unto itself which has been made too
easy to execute without any understanding as to what is happening.
Analogue and inCamera editing are Ok though,....hahahaha.....) 4.
Recently I made a work called Sans Simon, in it I rescanned a 1960’s
Simon and Garfunkel performance and every time Paul Simon shows
up, I covered him up with my hands. While making this work, I got
really really into Simon and Garfunkel. I watched all their DVD’s like
600000000 times. On my 4000th time through “Simon and Garfunkel Live at Central Park”, I started to notice that if you look close
enough you can see that they really do not like each other that much.
I mean, the closer you look the more obvious it is. Once I realized
this, I quickly remembered my DVD idea, and THUS a perfect match.
Why dont I hack the Simon and Garfunkel DVD and move the chapter
markers from the beginning of songs to places where you can see the
animosity between them? This became the work “Old Friends”. The
final work would almost be invisible, and as I write this I am almost
regretting its inclusion into this art show cause it is so subtle, I am
pretty sure it will have no effect. hahahahah.
To make old friends you need to buy the 1981 Simon and Garfunkel
Live at Central Park DVD. The basic idea of this piece, is to extract
the video from a DVD, and then once we have the whole concert as
a video and audio file, we need to re author a new DVD with different chapter markers of just this main feature, and then we will swap
the main feature that we made back into the original DVD! This is
the only way to switch chapter markers on a DVD cause when a DVD
is burnt to disk the video chunks are stored according to where the
chapters are. Ok, to make this:
a. You will then need to RIp the DVD to your hard drive. I did this
on the Macintosh program called “Mac the Ripper”. The best way to
get all the software I mention is to google it. Anyway it’s easy just
select the DVD in your drive and rip the whole thing to your computer.
b. Once you have thse VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS folders, you will
need to extract the m2v video and ac3 audio file from the VIDEO_TS.
I did this on the Macintosh with a program called “MPEG Streamclip”
by opening VTS_02_01.VOB, letting the program figure out how to
slap it together by agreeing to “Select All Files”, and then fixing the
time code by hitting Open-Apple-H. After this, I selected Demux m2v
and Ac3 from the file menu.
c. Move these VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS folders to a PC. By using
the super handy program “SubRip 1.50_Beta”, rip the closed captions to a series of bmps. To do this you will need to select VTS_02_
01.VOB, check “Save picture as BMP” + the hit start. This will throw
1000’s of mbps to your harddrive, one for each piece of text which
b
appears on the closed captioned part of the DVD.
d. Using a DVD authoring program reconstruct the concert by importing the m2v and ac3 form the show (Step b), and also import
the subtitles. Note: Depending on what DVD authoring program you
use, the kinda subtitles it imports might be way different. I used
DVD Studio Pro and had 2 rename all the bmps that were exported
by our Subrip program. In the ropac.zip file I have included a simple
perl rename program 2 help with this (knowlege of perl needed).
If you are following me, they need to correspond to the naming
“test.102.psd”, plus as u may have noticed, I also had to record a
photoshop action to change all the bmps to PSDs cause DVD Studio
Pro doesn’t import .bmps. This you can do in photoshop by recording
it once, and then writing an action to apply it to a whole ofder. In the
ropac.zip I included the subtitle file which works with DVD Studio Pro.
c
d
e. After reconstructing the concert, you need to change the colors of
the subtitles to match the original DVD, in DVD Studio Pro your colors
should look like this, but if you are using a different DVD program
just play around a bit....:
f. Next you need to insert chapter markers. This part can be up to
you, ... there are lotsa points in the DVD where you can see they
hate each other, I picked the 5 that I thought were the most intense.
Here is alist of all of them with stars next to the ones I picked.
00:01:36
Simon forces a smile for the audience after shaking Garfunkel’s hand.
00:14:12
00:14:35
Garfunkel sings while Simon’s back is turned to him, a gesture which
can be seen as oddly aggressive.
*00:14:50
Garfunkel points somewhere offstage, and Simon gives him that
“what the f#ck r u doing” look.
00:26:06
Garfunkel spaces out on the side of the stage with nothing to do while
Simon sings his solo material.
00:27:14
Garfunkel pretends he knows the words to Paul’s solo material.
*00:37:08
Simon and Garfunkel bicker.
*00:38:21
The bickering continues, Garfunkel tries to get in the last word, Simon laughingly sneers off Garfunkel’s request (whatever it was)...
01:00:40
Garfunkel attempts interest in Simon’s solo material, but can’t even
seem to raise enough enthusiasm to clap on time to the beat....
01:02:03
Garfunkel spaces out on the side of the stage...again....
01:02:53
Garfunkel puttering about on stage with nothing to do during Simon’s
solo material....again....
*01:04:27
Garfunkel messes up on the first verse of “The Boxer”, Simon with a
quick double take and roll of his eyes lets him know he f$%ked up.
01:10:36
Simon and Garfunkel, a cold embrace with no eye contact. Possible
interpretation: “Lets just get through this”.
*01:20:11
For the curtain call, Simon motions to hug Garfunkel, Garfunkel resists, replies with “pat on back”.
g. Make DVD, in DVD Studio Pro you select “Burn”. This will made
you a VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS folder of the new concert with the
different chapter markers you just places in.
h. Get these new folders onto the PC u were using before. Basically
you now need to swap the 3 VOB files in. You do this by using a program called VOB Blanker. Open this program and select the original copy of the DVD you have on your PC by using the Input Folder
Browse button. Then double click on VTS_02_*.VOB. In case you
havnt noticed, all of the concert data in the Simon and Garfunkel Live
at Central park DVD is located in our VTS_02 file. Dont ask me why,
though!. Basically what we are doing now, is we are going to the
contents of this VTS (it is called a PGC, or program chain) with that
new concert we just authored. Next click on “01 Entry”, and then
select the “Replace” button to the right. When the dialogue comes
up, go to the new VIDEO_TS folder you just made, and select VTS_
01_01.VOB (that is where the concert information in your new DVD
is placed,....). Then make sure you have an Output Folderselected
(this is right under input folder....ps I forgot to do this in the sample
pict.....). Then hit PROCESS!!.
i. Ok, so now, you just replaced your old PGC with a new one featuring many less chapter markers. Cool. To fix all the stuff this screwed
up, you need to use a program called “pgcedit”. Open up your VIDEO_TS folder in this program. Then double click on VTST2,1. Here
you will see 20+ “Chapters”. You want to delete all the ones that
have nothing in them by clicking on the “Remove Cell” button. Then
you have to click on “Edit Chapter (PPT) table” and delete all the
chapters that have no where to go. Once you have this all straightened out, the “Edit Chapter (PPT) table” will turn to the color black
which means everything is cool.
j. One last thing, we have to delete the Menu form the start of the
DVD which says “SONG SELECTION” because it doesn’t work anymore, cause the chapter markers are no longer on songs!!!!! Using a
programmed called “Menu Edit Free”, open your new DVD file, select
the VTS_2_0.VOB (that’s where your menu is), double click VobID:2,
select menu #3, and then click on the delete button. Make sure you
“Remove from menu”.
k. Burn that Video_TS and Audio_TS folder to a blank 4.7 GIG DVD,
and congrads, you now have “Old Friends”........
i
h
Colors
j
Cool, so now we have gone over two of the works in the show. After
making “Old Friends” I was still interested in prying away at this idea
of changing media as little as possible, but again wanted to do it to a
movie. I thougt “Old Friends” was a sucess, but I wanted to take it
further. But what if I started to focus literally on parts of the screen
of a movie as opposed to content? For example the idea I had was
why didn’t I just make a video that was the first pixel from a movie?
Or why dont I just play a movie on my TV and focus a video camera
right at the last pixel? This idea I thought was half baked, and would
have done nothing more than make a video with an ever changing
color (cool, but not so compelling to someone who could care less
about how the work was made....), so racking my brains about this, I
decided instead of concentrating on one pixel; why dont I take a line
of pixels? For example, why dont I simply play a movie one horizontal line of pixels at a time? Because of the nature of recorded movement, I knew this would create a video of ever changing gradients.
This is the idea behind “Colors”, where I simple wrote a program to
play the movie “Colors” one line of horizontal pixels at a time starting at the top and moving down one line of pixels each time it plays
through the movie (thus the video work is about 2 months long.......).
Ok, how to make “Colors”. ...I experimented with a few ways to do
this. Basically I have to single a movie down to stips of colors.
The problem of course is since Colors is 2 hours long and has 404
lines of horizontal data, this takes even the most wicked fast computer a long time to process. The first way I wanted to do it was write a
script for the popular video program Adobe After Effects which would
export the movie to 404 strips of Color, then I would use a Quicktime
command line application to glue them together, and I would have
a nice 4GIG quick time movie which would play for 2 months. This
was a great way to do it, but I found out would take a dual processor G5 3 months to process which sucked cause I thought of this
idea only 2 months before my exhibition. Hahahah. So that was out
the window, but cause it is so elegant, I would like to do it eventually. The next way I tried to do it was to do it within the quicktime
file format using “masking”, alittle known quicktime feature. This
would have allowed me to make a “meta” quicktime file which would
have pointed to the original movie and would have genreated the
movie for me. To make a long story short, this didnt work cause of
bugs in Quicktime which do not allow for movies to be under 8pixels
in height. This was SO FRUSTRATING cause this would have been
the most amazing way to do this project, but oh well. The next way,
working with my friend and frequent collaborator Alex Galloway, was
to write a program which would churn out the strips of data similar to
After Effects. This had the same problem though cause it would take
months. So this left with only one options that made any sense.......
use the video manipulation program Jitter. Now, I really dont like
Jitter, but have to admit, making this project was super easy using it
(so maybe i like it now?). Jitter is a real time video processing language,...for (glup) artists....ok, how to make colors....
a. Buy “Colors” the movie.
b. Rip it, again I used “Mac The Ripper” on Macintosh. This will
make a VIDEO_TS folder and and AUDIO_TS folder.
first.
Ok, thanks for downloading this DOC, hope you liked the art and
good luck in making the projects. Again like I said, this is some
tough stuff, so please take it easy, and dont do anything that you
think is over your head. Like I said earlier, I am working on a series
of workshops and beginner tutorials coming soon. If you have any
questions please email me:
[email protected]
C U on the NET!
:)
Cory 2k6
c. Save it as a quicktime. On Macintosh, I use “MPEG Streamclip”
selected VTS_0_1.VOB, and then selected “Export to Quicktime”.
Now ideally you would save it as a “m2v” and “aif”, because this IS
THE EXACT file which appears on a DVD, but I found out that Macintosh computers have a weirdo mpeg-2 bug which means they really
screw up when trying to play those kinda files back. So you have
to save it as a different kinda quicktime. The best would be Animation or some kinda lossless Quicktime file format, but I used the new
H.264 cause I read it was supposed to be the bee’s knees (to use a
prase I learned form George Martin on the Beatles DVD Box set) and
I still use a computer with the mindset that I have to conserve harddrive space, so I guess I showed my age with this decision. I am
happy with it even though it isnt losless. Actually this is a conceptual
ERROR in the work. I should have used Animation. But, I get so
nervous changing anything once I get it working. So ... anway, at
least i admitted it. I also admitted to using Jitter, so I already have 2
strikes against me. Hahahaha.
d. Install Jitter and Mac/MSP on your computer. They are available
from Cycling 74 (google it).
e. Drag ropac.pat file on the Max MSP runtime, hit the read button,
select your Colors Quicktime file. Then hit the big Round button.
Congrads you have “Colors”. You can look at my Jitter Script if you
like, but Ill just jump ahead and tell you it took me like 5 minutes and
was mostly a copy of their “bit” shifting demo. I just erased somethings and changed some others. Yep,...it took me three years of
gradual thought to come up with this concept, and all I had to do was
change soem values in a tutorial file. Awesome. You heard it here
rip - dimebag