My Favorite Object: jit.slide

I’ve always been a fan of unfocused photographs, foggy mountain valleys and smeared lipstick. I’m also a fan of frame-based video artwork and pixel/frame effects. So picking a favorite object was really easy for me: it’s jit.slide. This object does a pixel-by-pixel slewing of video frames, and basically slows down whatever is going fast. How could I not love that?

I do a bit of live performance video work, and I’m always trying to find something that can feel artistic while still maintaining the focus on the performer. By using a heavily-zoomed camera and feeding the results into a jit.slide, I’m able to get a nice, abstract visual of the subject that, when things slow down, will occasionally slide into focus. This works especially well with a goosed contrast setting and reduced color space, and it provides that great combination of a ‘Look At Me’ artist close-up combined with a smeary ‘Enjoy The Abstract View’ artistry.

jit.slide is also useful for playing jittery video games. One of my great bits of thievery is the use of the jit.matrixset jerky memory patch that I snagged from Luke Dubois (and is part of the jit.matrixset help file). It’s a fun way to make any video feed generate its own glitch. But sometimes it’s too much, or sometimes you want a little variety. I’ve found that a smart application of jit.slide can smooth some of the edges of this hyper-jitter patch and give you a lot of new options to consider.

Actually, thinking about jit.slide as an ‘edge grinder’ is an apt metaphor, and you can imagine all kinds of situations where this would be valuable. Whether smoothing out harsh transitions or providing ever-blending color blurs, it was an easy choice as my favorite object. Since jit.slide lives fully in the frame-based video world, it might not work for OpenGL-based patches. My coworker Cory (Metcalf) was working on a GL-heavy patch, and put together a jit.gl.pix equivalent of the jit.slide object (i.e., it uses the same algorithm):

Here’s hoping that you enjoy jit.slide – especially if, like me, you like your graphics smooth and groovy!

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