Illarterate.co.uk

My submissions for International Teletext Art Festival 2012: Walkthrough

Illarterate — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 21:17:51 +0000

ITAF12 - Teletext isn't quite dead yet

I first heard about International Teletext Art Festival 2012 through the Teletext Mailing List a couple of months back, but the desire to have works published via public teletext first arose some five years ago, during the research stages of my Pixel is Power dissertation. I considered contacting British teletext broadcasters to discuss the possibility of them carrying my work, but like so many pipe dreams, that idea was slowly pushed to the back of the cupboard as the project progressed and priorities changed. The recent ITAF open call for submissions offered the perfect opportunity to finish what I never really started and finally get some artwork shown on actual teletext and not some second rate backwater internet squat – Pixel is Power would get some long-deserved closure. Well, of sorts, since it’s kind of a never-ending ongoing thing. Yeah, expect to see Harry Yack exhibiting at ITAF2040.

It had been so long since I last opened my teletext editor that I half expected the gears in my computation device to seize up when I double clicked the Cebratext icon, which had been relegated to the ‘Unused Desktop Shortcuts’ folder like a FIFA update that’s out of date before it’s even released. But to my surprise, it worked almost perfectly and I was cutting and pasting those low-res building blocks like it was 2007 once again. Before I knew it I was creating stuff far superior to those experiments I threw together after first downloading the program, and the Pixel is Power was not only back on the road, but thundering along like an HGV stacked to the brim with industrial lard careering down a 50% incline.

Just to tease any lingering bugs out of the Harry Yack-Cebratext machine, I started by chopping up a few recent vector bits and bobs before converting them to the teletext format. Naturally, a lot of these pertained to Illogicopedia, so where better place to start than ‘mascots’ Roberto and Bcbkye?

Around this time, you begin to get to grips with the limitations, or should I say idiosyncrasies of the format. Teletext, or at least Cebratext, allows you to paint one colour on a black (blank) background, and for each instance you would like to use a different colour you must insert a 3*2 pixel data marker (shown in the image to the above right) in an exclusively black area. Note that Roberto’s beard/hair never covers an area less than 2 pixels in width: this is where the yellow and white colour markers are placed.

Rendering text is a little more hit-and-miss than images. You can generate and tinker with the letters in an image editing program, but it will only get you so far because the vast majority of fonts don’t translate very well to such a small working area. The stylised ‘banana’ font required a certain amount of post-import tinkering to negate ‘pixel merging’ for it to be legible. Text in the Bcbkye image, on the other hand, was ‘hand painted’ using Cebratext itself, which, while more time consuming, is satisfying for the sole reason it just feels like teletext. The format was never about fancy fonts and cutting edge graphics (though you can’t deny teletext was, for a long period, state-of-the-art), but clear interfaces and the convenience of simplicity.

Teletext is, through time period association, often linked with a specific sense of humour. That ‘grin and bear it’, frequently dark and realistic approach to comedy is tempered by the bright, cartoon strip colour palette to create something essentially very British, yet at the same time very teletext. It’s hard to quantify, but look no further than the 1980s homebrew video game scene and you’ll get a rough idea of what I’m trying to communicate. This sense of humour is something I attempted to encapsulate in At Least I Don’t Have to go to Work, very probably my favourite entry. ITAF chose this piece to represent my submissions on their homepage for the event, and I can understand why – it has just the right cheese factor that, to me, typifies teletext.

Followers of my Twitter account will recognise the creature in I’ll be Yak as my avatar. The ‘Yak Terminator’ was originally drawn for me by the massively talented Huge Bob of Guffaw Comics, and will, in my eyes anyway, serve as my own identifier at this event. I can certainly see it making an appearance as my YouTube thumbnail at some point in the future. Thanks once again, Bob!

The bloke playing Pong is actually doing so on a teletext programming machine. I don’t know if that is or ever has been physically possible, but for the purposes of the piece, let’s say he’s taking a break from his news-coding duties with a bit of joystick waggling action. A quick glance at the source image reveals he was in fact busy programming a travel news page, so let it be known that this gentleman certainly was not slacking, and this piece was just me being a bit cheeky. Plus I wanted to get a reference to video games, no matter how small, into at least one of my submissions.

Ah, Zenith Space Command: the grandaddy of the modern remote control, a pioneer of televisual convenience. It’s fairly safe to assume that without a zapper, teletext wouldn’t have been quite as successful. Teletext, and indeed much of modern television as we know it is indebted to the Space Command, which allowed users to change the channel from the comfort of their own sofas; gone were the days of poking at buttons with a broom handle. I think it’s done more than enough to earn its place in the Teletext Hall of Fame, don’t you?

Traditional teletext doesn’t have the capability to transmit music, but if it did, the soundtrack would simply have to be programmed by Rob Hubbard. Forget Pages From Ceefax easy listening orchestral stuff, I’m talking about proper 8-bit C64-style SID masterpieces that’d leave even Pink Floyd aghast. In my own personal quest to make Mr Hubbard a household name, I’ve not only managed to get his fizzog on Finnish teletext for the first time ever, but also invented the HY Hubbard C-64 Vacuum cleaner to be released to the European domestic market sometime in late 2012. It plays songs from Road Rash on a constant loop when switched on.

Continuing the video game theme, here’s one I didn’t submit: my own tribute to fungus-fancier Mario Mario, better known to his friends and millions upon millions of joypad-pummelers (yup, the late-80s successor to joystick-wagglers) as Super Mario. Why no submit? Well, it’s already been done by Paul Davis. Consider this my homage to him, if you will.

So what does the future hold for our good friend? Sadly, it doesn’t look good – the digital switchover is ravaging teletext systems across the globe and many nations have already bid their final goodbyes to the format. Britain is in the final stages of its own teletext switch-off, and there are but months remaining of the traditional analogue signal. It feels weird having to attach a little box to your telly in order to receive terrestrial channels, but that’s just the way it is because Stone Cold (AKA the BBC) said so. My parting jab serves as a gentle ‘screw you’ to the ones signing teletext’s death warrant, casting them as the proverbial internet trolls in this tragedy of Ancient Greek proportions.

There is, however, a glimmer of hope, for the very medium which has accelerated the demise of teletext may provide an opportunity for its spirit to live on. Indeed, I would never have known of this festival if it weren’t for the web and Fixc, the artists co-operative responsible for its staging. I think we’re still quite a long way from Windows Teletext 2.0 at this moment in time, but thanks to ITAF12, we’re one step closer.

Heed these words - teletext will rise again.

View all entries for International Teletext Art Festival 2012 here until 8 April, or my own stuff here.
See more info on the participating artists here.

Replay Expo 2011, Blackpool: An illuminating experience [Vlog]

Illarterate — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 12:57:56 +0000

Harry Yack takes a trip to the home of donkeys, expensive lighting and billions of bed and breakfasts. No time for sausage ‘n’ chips or walks along the promenade, however, as the 2011 Replay retro video game type thingy was also taking place just down the road at Norbreck Castle.

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Super Mario Bros. [NES] video game review

Illarterate — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 11:52:14 +0000

Well, this isn’t a proper ‘review’ as such, but an exercise in taking video games far too seriously.

Critical piece discussing the fungus fancier’s first console outing, chronicling the conception, controversies and downright LSD-fuelled insanity of Brooklyn’s most prominent pudgy pipe plunger. Nah, not really. I just reiterate the really obvious, half-humorous observations of other people.

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Who Wants to be a Millionaire? UK [PSX] video game review

Illarterate — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 11:00:12 +0000

Harry Yack takes a look back at a game so culturally significant it hardly matters.

Who Wants to be a Millionaire stood proudly atop the video games sales charts for weeks, nay months, after its release. This delivers false promise, for due to the unbelievable popularity of the TV show, every other parent who got their kid a Playstation for Christmas went out to Dixons and bought a copy. For 35 quid. In actuality, all you get is a bog-standard question and answer affair, and you know how fantastically those types of games translate to the Playstation. Exactly, they don’t.

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‘Teleglitcher’ featured in Dick Whyte’s “Detournement: Critical Cinema and The Internet”

Illarterate — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 13:52:02 +0000

Teleglitcher, an early video from my 2007 Pixel is Power project, has been featured in a special presentation at the New Zealand Film Archive. Kiwi visual artist Dick Whyte, with the help of Mark Williams, put together a screening of various experimental media, described as such:

“What do Miss Piggy, Britney Spears, Mussolini, Super Mario Bros., Charlie Rose, John Key, Ruth Richardson and Buster Keaton have in common? They are all the subjects of avant-garde films on YouTube. Film maker and academic Dick Whyte presents a screening of recent avant-garde films he has curated from YouTube. All of them re-purpose existing material into new works.

“Whyte says, “Technology has taken a long time to get to the point where video makers can sample with the same abandon as musicians and still image makers. YouTube heralds a new age in avant-garde cinema which is fully engaged with popular media.” The screening will be accompanied by short introductions to the films and their particular strategies, looking at the function of avant-garde moving-image at the beginning of the twenty-first century.” — New Zealand Film Archive

The show was screened at the Film Archive Mediatheatre, Wellington, in January of this year. See all films from the presentation at Whyte’s blog.

Sketchbook art: Venice & Verona, 2005

Illarterate — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 14:05:50 +0000

I always promised myself I’d get round to archiving my old sketchbooks, and this Easter weekend has given me the opportunity to do so. I’ve got about five years of stuff in the attic to go through, so that might take a while but to start, here’s a selection of the best artwork from my trip to Venice in 2005. Reflecting on some of these quick sketches and overpaints, I’m left wondering how I managed to put pen to paper during that week, which seemed to pass by in a sleep-deprived blur.

This was the view from our hotel. I was stupid enough to neglect noting the exact location

Some of the architecture around the city is amazing

View from the entry to the city of Verona

St Marco's Square

One of the many waterways which permeate the city

Good fun, just wish I could remember more about it!

Good Copy Bad Copy: Creativity on the line [The VHS Project]

Illarterate — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 13:09:33 +0000

Personally, I am not a fan of copyright licenses. Oftentimes I feel restricted in my work, unable to sample almost anything at all for fear of infringing copyright laws. This comes as no real surprise, me being of the mass media Internet generation who doesn’t much care for the mainstream music or film industries and all.

That said, I still enjoy a good album or movie in much the same way I like lighter, DIY user created content such as video mashups, and respect peoples’ rights to make money from their creations. Heck, it would be nice to one day make something out of what I do, but of course it’s never the primary motivation. People motivated by money may be rich but, on the whole, aren’t very nice individuals, and I’d hate to become one of them.

Good Copy Bad Copy is a Danish documentary offering some hope for the future, a utopian world where individuals are free to express their creativity with as wide a range of media as is available without fear of censorship. It’s a great watch for anyone interested in such things, covering copyright laws in the United States, Europe and even Nigeria. Here’s a bit of taster, the final minutes of the film:

Watch the film on YouTube, or download it from the official website.

Teletext: The Life and Death of a Medium

Illarterate — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 11:58:09 +0000

Clearing out some of the bulkier files on illarterate.co.uk, I came across a timeline created for my final year Graphic Arts Research Project (GARP) I’d completely forgotten about. It may be text only, but wasn’t teletext? Well, I know it incorporated some primitive artwork, but wasn’t the text the bit you were interested in? No? Forget it.

Anyway, with Teletext all but dead now –I believe a small percentage of the UK still have access to digital signals– I thought it an appropriate time to repost this. The top half relates to teletext-specific landmarks whilst the lower portion outlines related technology in other areas such as video gaming and computing development.

Click here or the pic for supreme quality pdf (70kb, right click > save as to save to disk).

The Super Mario Challenge [TCC, 1991] TV show review

Illarterate — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 15:34:42 +0000

Hey, would you look at that. It’s the Yak’s first TV show review, and pretty pants it is too! Well, I had some fun making it so I suppose that’s all that matters. Erm, I mean, it’s awesome and should be watched right away!

Footage mainly grabbed from The Children’s Channel. More info can be found here.

A load of old Babel: Illarterate hits the back pages! Sort of

Illarterate — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 20:37:33 +0000

Anybody who’s bought a newspaper and looked at the back page today will probably have noticed a particularly poor Photoshop of Howard Webb wearing a Manchester United shirt. This one, in fact:

The image that launched a thousand smirks. Maybe.

Well, guess who made it? That’s right, some fool whose text you are reading right now. Namely myself. Feel free to peruse the gallery below, which I am compiling in honour of this moment of (anonymous) fame for Harry Yack.

See here for a brief background on the image’s origin and why it’s such a poor Photoshop. Though I guess anyone with eyes is able to see that.

Fantastical gallery

Click an image for full size version.

Monday 10 January:

The Sun

The Metro

The Guardian

The Daily Mail

Tuesday 11 January:

Daily Sport

The Metro

Oh yeah, and it isn’t ‘mocked-up’ or ‘faked’, it’s a real photo!