when circuits attack

prostheticknowledge:

Facebook Page Performance Art Glitchr Purposefully Tries To Activate Code Glitches

Interesting to see TechCrunch covering a glitch / unicode art project (and even more amusing to see people leaving comments in Unicode style!):

Making the link rounds among designers in Silicon Valley this holiday season is Facebook fan page Glitchr, which tries to mess up Facebook code on purpose.

While I had previously postulated that the page might be run by the venerable former Facebooker Evan Priestley, instead it is run by some Greek dude, Laimonas Zakas. Click on any of the links in Glitchr’s posts and they will do anything from bring up random Unicode characters to load a Facebook navigation bar multiple times. Go on, don’t be afraid.

So how does he do it? Well, Zakas essentially “paints” with Unicode, combining its non-character entities to break layout engines — creating what might just be society’s most obscure and recent art form.

“These symbols, intruding up and down, are made by combining lots of diacritical marks,” says Zakas, “You can see the variety of them there http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diacritic. Yes, It’s a kind of art. There’s quite a lot of artists who use the Internet or specific social networks as their canvas.”

More about the project here (interesting to read how some, but not all, Facebook staff like the page as it helps find bugs in the code).