“Don’t Touch My Computer” Home Users GuideParis / Ropac GalleryCory 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 involv-ing 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 coun-tries. 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 mak-ing 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 an-other 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, Gy-romite. 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 fol-lowing for EACH of the 2 cartridges you got. Take some wire clip-pers 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 car-tridge, 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 stu-dent 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 FriendsRecently 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 me-dium 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 every-where. 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 basi-cally 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 “edit-ing” 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 Gar-funkel 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 differ-ent 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 com-puter.

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 cap-tions 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

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appears on the closed captioned part of the DVD.

d. Using a DVD authoring program reconstruct the concert by im-porting 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.

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.

00:01:36Simon forces a smile for the audience after shaking Garfunkel’s hand.

00:14:1200:14:35Garfunkel sings while Simon’s back is turned to him, a gesture which can be seen as oddly aggressive.

*00:14:50Garfunkel points somewhere offstage, and Simon gives him that “what the f#ck r u doing” look.

00:26:06Garfunkel spaces out on the side of the stage with nothing to do while Simon sings his solo material.

00:27:14Garfunkel pretends he knows the words to Paul’s solo material.

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*00:37:08Simon and Garfunkel bicker.

*00:38:21The bickering continues, Garfunkel tries to get in the last word, Si-mon laughingly sneers off Garfunkel’s request (whatever it was)...

01:00:40Garfunkel attempts interest in Simon’s solo material, but can’t even seem to raise enough enthusiasm to clap on time to the beat....

01:02:03Garfunkel spaces out on the side of the stage...again....

01:02:53Garfunkel puttering about on stage with nothing to do during Simon’s solo material....again....

*01:04:27Garfunkel 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.

01:10:36Simon and Garfunkel, a cold embrace with no eye contact. Possible interpretation: “Lets just get through this”.

*01:20:11For the curtain call, Simon motions to hug Garfunkel, Garfunkel re-sists, 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 pro-gram called VOB Blanker. Open this program and select the origi-nal 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 featur-ing many less chapter markers. Cool. To fix all the stuff this screwed up, you need to use a program called “pgcedit”. Open up your VID-EO_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 straight-ened 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 any-more, 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”........

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ColorsCool, 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 horizon-tal line of pixels at a time? Because of the nature of recorded move-ment, 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 start-ing 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 comput-er 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 proces-sor 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 eventu-ally. 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 lan-guage,...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.

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 Macin-tosh 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 Anima-tion 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 hard-drive 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 some-things 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

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:cory.arcangel@gmail.com

C U on the NET!:) Cory 2k6

rip - dimebag