GL*T©H
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LOO$*NG CONTROL _ GETT*NG LO$T
Introduction
Most
of us making or studying glitch art have a glitch art origin story
where we notice and then become fascinated by glitch. It might be
through machine malfunction, a blue screen of death, broken images
recovered from a failed hard-drive, a rhythmically skipping cd or a
mangled image file downloaded from a camera that suddenly changes
from being a banal family photo into something new and compelling, or
a satellite signal drops out and reveals a new landscape in which
faces melt into each other and narrative is halted and slowly lost.
We only notice the technology that surrounds us when that technology
works in a way other than expected. Loss can lead to transformation.
Glitch art works by understanding, replicating and expanding those
transformations and in that process ( and glitch art is very much a
process) reveals the fragility of digital media and the cultural and
technological assumptions digital media stems from.
Digital
art is inherently fragile, to make digital art is to work with loss,
we change computers, we change operating systems, equipment fails,
software that we use either becomes ‘updated’ so it doesn’t
have the same functionality or won’t work unless we ‘upgrade’
to a newer machine. The environment where our work lives is also
fragile, websites and social media companies change moderation
policies, social media sites may vanish taking down whole swathes of
work, I may not keep up hosting fees and my carefully constructed
website might disappear, the environment in which we work is in a
state of constant flux.
The
one constant in making digital art is change and loss, part of
control must be about archiving, not only work , but software and
hardware. A lot of what I do as an artist revolves around
researching older versions of Linux and how it interacts with various
hardware and file formats, to that end I collect and maintain an
archive of older machines and software as well as maintaining an
archive of my own work and techniques.
There
is a paradox at the heart of what I do, I embrace loss within my own
processes but try to reduce it in the archiving of my own work –
knowing that all digital work tends towards entropy and that ideas of
permanence are futile.
A
quick discussion of generational loss
Far
from being a perfect record a digital file is often compressed or
lossy, subject to bit rot or corruption over time, susceptible to
being lost, over written or destroyed by hard-drive failure, files
may live on in online copies on google drive or via Instagram which
can itself inadvertently glitch images ,
 |
| The classic Instagram glitch |
Facebook
or whichever social media network survives the next few years but
those copies are often different to the originals due to the
differing ways that social media networks compress images –
Facebooks’ compression algorithm is especially egregious so in
effect these are copies of copies of copies and many people have
experimented with repeatedly uploading and downloading images and
videos to demonstrate this or work with it
For
instance to quote
from a gizmodo
article from 2015 on
Pete Ashton’s ‘I am sitting in stagram’, with
a nod to loss this article can only be accessed via archive.orgs
wayback machine :
https://web.archive.org/web/20160321010334/http://gizmodo.com/heres-what-happens-when-you-repost-the-same-photo-to-in-1685260122
(See
also Pete Ashton’s website on this
https://art.peteashton.com/sitting-in-stagram/)
‘Artist
and photographer Pete
Ashton has sped up this gradual disintegration process in his
recent project entitled "I
am sitting in stagram." He began with a single photo,
uploaded it to Instagram, took an unfiltered screenshot and reposted
the resulting image, repeating the process 90 times to produce an
effect akin to the real-life aging process.’
 |
| Pete Ashton – Lucier grid |
This
work in turn was inspired by the work of composer Alvin Lucier ( thus
lucier grid) specifically his work ‘I am sitting in a room’
From
the wikipedia article on that work
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Sitting_in_a_Room
‘ The
piece features Lucier recording himself narrating a text, and then
playing the tape
recording back into the room, re-recording it. The new recording
is then played back and re-recorded, and this process is repeated.
Due to the room's particular size and geometry, certain frequencies
of the recording are emphasized while others are attenuated.
Eventually the words become unintelligible, replaced by the
characteristic resonant
frequencies of the room itself’
There
is
also a
video
homage to Luciers work by
Patrick Liddel which illustrates video decay via youtube upload and
download - ‘VIDEO
ROOM 1000’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icruGcSsPp0
There
are technical
explanations around
‘generational loss’ with jpegs which explain what is happening
each time we save a jpeg
https://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/99604/what-factors-cause-or-prevent-generational-loss-when-jpegs-are-recompressed-mu
but wikipedias definition
is probably better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_loss
To
quote from that article ‘ Generation
loss is the loss of quality between subsequent copies
or
transcodes
of
data. Anything that reduces the quality of the representation when
copying, and would cause further reduction in quality on making a
copy of the copy, can be considered a form of generation loss. File
size increases are a common result of generation loss, as the
introduction of artifacts
may
actually increase the entropy of the data through each generation.’
In
their work Alvin Lucier, Pete Ashton and Patrick Liddle are not
talking about loss as a bad thing rather loss becomes the basis of
the work in a similar way
to the use of feedback in analog video art where
a screen and a camera gradually interact too create new, unique ever
changing work.
Each
copying or sharing of a work changes it subtly, in effect creating a
new work or as
I’ll talk about later a remix, digital work may be inherently
fragile but it is also inherently mutable, loss rather than being an
enemy can also be a useful tool, control of that process is via the
environment it lives in , be it storage, the internet, the work
itself, as well as
setting the conditions under which that work can be reused.
Other forms of loss to consider
Where
you display your work determines the quality its seen at, Facebook
has notoriously bad image compression and videos uploaded there can
be really badly artifacted, you
could ask ‘but don’t we
want this?’ – yes but the artifacts we want to see are the ones
we generate, though allowing for the happy accident and working with
the internet as a medium there are limits to how much we want these
happy accidents to remake the work. Instagram
stubbornly insists on a
square format which in itself influences the work we make and post –
a landscape image becomes a square selection of part of an image so
loss is inherent in that platform which
also does not allow for posting gifs and has a narrow range of video
codec options, the texture of some work relying on a specific codec
for impact or texture (see
the differences in texture between h261, h264 or webp/ogv for
example) – but
to mitigate
that loss we begin to use
that format to our advantage,
see chan something stars
baobab users project - https://www.instagram.com/baobab_users/
( which I’ll talk about
shortly) where both the
format of Instagram and the format of smartphone galleries,
screenshotting and cropping
is used to its fullest extent reflecting online
culture in a
collision of collected or
shared images, personal
photographs’ memes and
underground stars
reflecting
a stream of consciousness poetry which is like watching the internet
dreaming and thinking.
Generation
loss via platforms and within
online communities
Glitch
art lives
on
the internet – but
web
sites disappear
or appear , content moderation policies change,
website ownerships
change. Tumblr ( arguably
one
of the birth places and incubators of glitch art as
we know it now)
passes through different hands and new
owners ban
content that they
deem to
be NSFW – YouTube content disappears
in
a haze of copyright strikes or
is rendered unviewable by constant adbreaks
– the job of an artist who exists to any degree online is to manage
what happens when content policies change or websites disappear
– control of loss is what we do – when Tumblr
policies changed after
it
was bought by Verizon , leading to mass takedowns of blogs back in
2018 ( articles here
https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/tumblr-users-are-leaving-in-droves-as-it-bans-nsfw-images-heres-where-theyre-going-instead/articleshow/67002132.cms
and here
https://www.fastcompany.com/90277836/meet-the-tumblr-refugees-trying-to-safe-its-adult-content-from-oblivion
and many other articles)
the
internet archive swung into action to try and save many of these
blogs but
much good online
work
was lost,
distorting the space that was Tumblr and
the narrative / conversation going on within glitch art.
Those
works might exist on the artists hard drives but often those making
this work don’t back up their work,
one of our primary responsibilities as artists working on the
internet must
be
to archive and keep our own work safe and
also to start building mechanisms to save the work of others we and
the wider community see as important. We can’t expect the
traditional art world or art historians to do this for us because
they either don’t care, aren’t looking in the right places or
don’t
know
what to look for in the first place
–
these spaces move so quickly we can’t wait for hindsight, academia
or
others to write and preserve our history for us because by then it
might be gone.
The
frankly odd moderation policies on nudity or
that defined nebulously as NSFW on
Facebook and Instagram
lead to strange situations
like shadow banning –
Shadow bans
wikipedia
definition of a shadow ban
‘Shadow
banning,
also called stealth
banning,
hellbanning,
ghost
banning,
and comment
ghosting,
is the practice of blocking or partially blocking a user or the
user's content from some areas of an online community in such a way
that the ban is not readily apparent to the user, regardless of
whether the action is taken by an individual or an algorithm. For
example, shadow-banned comments posted to a blog or media website
would be visible to the sender, but not to other users accessing the
site.’
Many
glitch artists will use a
pseudonym, not something Meta or
other platforms approve of
and they will try anything to get you to use a real name or
interact more fully with the platform even
though you may only be there for that one group,
it soon
becomes obvious to
a user when
shadow banning is happening to
their account. Pseudonyms
are an important part of glitch art, they
allow artists to take on personas for
safety reasons or that
reflect better their idea of self, gender identity or
to take on a degree of anonymity which separates personhood from
work, glitch art is a great community for allowing us to be who we
are rather than our given or
assumed roles irl, shadow
banning becomes problematic when it forces us to give
up identities we
have fought hard to take on
as our
own.
These
kind of bans
make the community's themselves a less vibrant and inclusive place as
much of
what is termed NSFW or falls
foul of content moderation algorithms
is often
work by marginalized and more diverse communities, communities such
as queer or trans which
have been the bedrock on which movements like glitch art have been
built, for them to be excluded or
shadow banned from platforms
makes movements like ours poorer – if you don’t control the
platform the platform controls you and we
lose the richness and
diversity of what made our
online
communities great in the
first place. Its the digital
equivalent of gentrification.
To the Fediverse
There
are good decentralized( not in the nft sense) fediverse alternatives
to mainstream social media sites such as peertube ( a youtube
alternative) , mastodon ( a good alternative to twitter), pixelfed an
instagram alternative but I’m not going to talk about those now but
they are good directions to go in to take back ownership of our own
social online presence.
Further
research
pixelfed
- https://pixelfed.org/
peertube
- https://joinpeertube.org/
mastodon
- https://joinmastodon.org/
Working
with loss
The
work I’m currently making embraces loss by purposefully shrinking
images down to a tiny fraction of their original resolution and then
blowing them back up again to work with the artifacts created in
that transition and then turning those images into grids which are
mirrored and cropped and rebuilt. Originally these works started as
an attempt to replicate the methodology of Xavier Dallet and his
baobab users project find that here -
https://www.instagram.com/baobab_users/?hl=en
 |
| Baobab Users |
 |
| Xavier Dallet, Baobab users, extreme replication |
 |
| Xavier Dallet, Baobab users, extreme replication |
specifically
the grid structure and repetition I found appealing which derives
from using smartphones to build sets off images and meaning passed
between users via the messenger platform, I wanted to do that on a
desktop rather than smartphone so I created a set of scripts to
replicate that.
 |
| Icewm Icons |
 |
| Reduced to Pbm 10x10pixels |
which
led me to find a basic set of images like these icons from Icewm
window manager as starting points . These are already at a small
resolution typically between 32x32 or 16x16 pixels – I transcoded
those from jpg to pbm ( black and white bit map) then made repeating
grids
 |
| Wopa wopa wopa |
But
the process I created which takes groups of images and grids them and
crops them randomly into smaller and smaller grids within a larger
grid started me exploring what could be done by shrinking images down
deliberately almost to the point where they lose meaning and become
just material doing this I’ve found creates small islands of
distortion around which further techniques anchor themselves (
something I’d experimented with before but I’ll explain that
later) .
As
an example I can scrape the images from a news website
https://www.spiegel.de/kultur/
 |
| Spiegel kultur page 26/11/2023 |
 |
| The scraped images |
 |
| Now reduce those images in size to 80x80px from original sizes
and make them square |
 |
| Original size |
Use a script to rearrange blocks of pixels in a specific way and
use gmic to displace originals against that output.
Or
using a slightly different technique run those images through a
computer with a specific type of graphics card using an old version
of Linux and record the output using a capture card.
 |
| The same Image on a computer with ATI graphics card running
LinuxMint Bea 2.1 |
Japans’ ghosts original
Or
we could take the original video for japans 1982 performance of
ghosts and play that through the same computer and record that output
Ghosts versus ati graphics card and mint bea 2.1 In this version I
reduced the original video file down from 640x480 pixels to 352x288
and changed the format of the video from h264 mp4 to h261, h261 one
of the earliest codecs created for video is more blocky and more
prone to artifacts , and more useful when used in conjunction with an
ati graphics card and mintbea 2.1 – the smaller the image the
richer the output.
Or
I could combine the techniques I talked about earlier , by turning
the original ghosts video into stills , reducing
those stills from 640x480 to 20x20px
then
displacing every other still against its previous still , and
colourising them in the process
Then recombining those into a new
work, the audio taken from the original cut up stretched and glitched ( this was 10000 images)
Ghosts part 1
So
Just to illustrate the difference without and with ATI graphics card
 |
| LinuxMint Bea 2.1 without ATI graphics card |
 |
| LinuxMint Bea 2.1 without ATI graphics card |
 |
| LinuxMint Bea 2.1 with ATI graphics |
 |
| LinuxMint Bea 2.1 with ATI graphics |
These
images all started as 640x480 pixels but at lower resolutions like
256x256 or even 80x80 more interesting things happen.
As
I change resolution the artifacts created change, each new technique
used adding to those artifacts like wind blowing sand around
obstacles in real life.
Lower resolutions = more artifacts
Or
we could just cut the original images up and attempt to reassemble
them a technique I’ve started to use a lot more of late , its
useful as a technique in its own right but also for creating
displacement maps in scripts. This script happened by accident – I
was actually trying to create a simple cut up and rejoin routine and
to test that I worked on this process which didn’t work how I
intended but I like what it does .
Output as displacement maps for originals.
Loss
or reduction of quality can lead to a rich breeding ground for
artifacts. And discovering and exploring these flaws had a serious
effect on how I viewed resolution and quality , the lower the
resolution the more interesting things became for me when working in
this way.
These
images were made on a Dell Wyse 5010 Dx0D Thin client from 2016 with
AMD G-T48E apu early versions of this technique used a standard mid
2000’s mini-atx motherboard and AMD Radeon HD 3650 agp graphics
card ( these give different colours and effects) the hardware was not
altered in any way and these images are direct output as seen on
screen – this effect can also be replicated with variations in more
modern versions of linux such as Gnuinos chimera .
To
return to the theme of this talk
Part
of our work as artists is to fight against the entropy of
generational loss, we keep copies of work on hard drives, have back
up strategies to keep our originals intact, all the while these
images are being accessed, changed, uploaded, downloaded and remixed,
an image on the internet is always changing, its meaning changing
with each iteration, context or even the device it is viewed on,
whatever we think about copyright or ownership an image or video or
file on the internet is always a remix away from being turned into
something else, it is a thing in itself but it is also a base
material.
To
work in this environment means giving up a large degree of control,
but how then do we retain authorship if anything can be copied and
remixed – essentially we have to change our ideas of what
authorship and ownership mean – controlling work online is a losing
game unless we take lessons from the the open source and free
software movement. One way of controlling authorship is by giving
others the right to use a work, remix it, or keep a copy of it, as
long as those others grant the same rights to others if they make
work based on what I have made – a culture of sharing rather than
denying ( and also legally binding) which fosters rather than
restricts. To gain control we must lose control and give up on the
now absurd idea of a unique or investment work beloved of the old
art establishment.
Scarcity value.
As
a side note NFT’S also slyly acknowledge this absurdity whilst
still charging for files in editions similar to the way that artist
printmakers print limited editions giving the illusion of ownership
via block-chain ledger entries and the notional passing of notional
money ( cryptocurrency) most of the ideas that underpin these
‘markets’ reflect old art world practices and fight against the
reality of digital art which is that if it is on a screen or a
device or in an accessible file it can be copied, remixed, shared as
part of a cultural commons.
Traditional
printmakers may make a limited edition of prints from their own
original plates for sale, the value of those prints reflecting their
scarcity, the printmaker could still run off a few hundred extra
prints which could be sold but that would reduce the artificial
scarcity value on which the old art gallery system/establishment
works and which controls artists and what is seen and valued
culturally and monetarily.
Scarcity value and greed = New Warhols = Art as commodity
In
a particularly interesting turn of events the artist Paul Stephenson
tracked down original Andy Warhol acetates and made ‘New’ Warhol
works. From the BBC article from 2017
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-41634496
‘Stephenson
has made new versions of Warhol works by posthumously tracking down
the pop artist's original acetates, paints and printer, and
recreating the entire process as precisely as possible.’
‘While
Warhol's assistants did many parts of the physical work, the artist,
who died in 1987, was the only one who worked directly on these
acetates, touching up parts of the portraits to prepare them for
printing.’
‘Stephenson took the
acetates to one of Warhol's original screenprinters in New York,
Alexander Heinrici, who offered to help use them to make new
paintings.’
An artists value as a
commodity for investment and speculation increases after death and to
be able to print new works to satisfy demand seems logical from a
money making persepctive but what does it say about authorship and
the ethical state of the art market itself? In a
way I can only applaud
the artist doing this as eventually it will reduce the monetary value
of all Warhol works ( and Warhol
would probably be
quite amused and approving of this making of ‘new’ works) But old
world copyright laws might have something to say about this, scarity
value and ownership could be viewed as anti-cultural and anti
society.
To
be a digital artist also means to acknowledge the absurdity of the
‘original’ unique work and questions interacting with the old art
world, the need for commercial galleries or even the notion of
curatorship, as in the online communities where we work such as the
glitch artists collective network we become
Self organising – self curating
See festivals such as The Wrong
Biennial , Glitch art is dead, Fu:bar, Glitch art Brazil.
There
is parallel self curating and self organizing within the NFT space
but my take on it is that though laudable from a community aspect
ultimately these are only seeking legitimacy from or aping
pre-existing structures within the traditional art market , they are
less about creating or reflecting a shared cultural commons and more
about money and reputation and the next generation of investible art
stars.
Creative Commons reject the notion of scarcity foster abundance.
I
share my work under creatives commons licence CC
BY-NC-SA 4.0 which
states ( find legal code here
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode.en#s3
 |
| creative commons licence
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 |
 |
| Terms and
conditions |
This aspect of sharing and
remixing is fundamental to glitch art ( though not many artists use
creative commons licenses there is an unwritten understanding that
sharing and remixing is good) both in source material, final work (
in that any digital work can be final ) and the sharing of
techniques, software and scripts.
My work is made using pretty
much entirely free or Libre software which relies on an open and free
software eco system and its one I strongly believe in and advocate
for , creative commons goes hand in hand with it – libre software
being founded on the principles of the fsf Foundation and its list of
four software freedoms
0) The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
1) The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
2) The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
3) The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
see also definition
of free cultural works here - https://freedomdefined.org/Definition
The four freedoms applied to cultural works
1)
the
freedom
to use
the work and enjoy the benefits of using it
2)
the freedom to study the work and to apply
knowledge acquired from it
3) the
freedom to make and redistribute copies, in whole or in part,
of the information or expression
4) the
freedom to make changes and improvements, and to distribute
derivative works
To
sum up - Control of authorship (other than attribution and crediting
the original source) does not exist within digital art other than
through peer pressure which often states its okay to remix, but wrong
to steal and claim work as your own. We could fight to control our
work and our ownership of an image or a video or a music file, a
document, whatever, but ultimately there is a copy of that somewhere
someone has made for their own use and purposes – but as I believe
in remix culture and the idea that culture and art should be
available that is a problem only if we adhere to the old ideas of
copyright and ownership – if a digital file is not a thing who can
truly own what is intangible ?
This
attitude also reflects a culture of realism – most of us who make
art will not make money from it or even be able to support ourselves
through it, instead taking up jobs outside of art, in teaching,
research or looking for funding through grants, residencies etc , or
working completely outside of the art world, but that also makes us
free to make the work we want to – it does not make the work we
make any less valid, far from it, it allows us to work freely outside
of old establishments and paradigms which no longer understand or
serve us, free to create newer more relevant structures which
operate along lines of a culture of abundance, sharing and a more
open access to the means of artistic production and dissemination. It
allows us to build a cultural commons where work has value for what
it is rather than how much it is worth or a received assignment of
value.
Because
seriously who goes to galleries ? Contrast the number of people who
wouldn't be seen dead in a gallery but will quite happily look at
work on their devices – definitions of art have changed with the
onset of the internet and the audience has grown and often the
audience makes art in response to what they see, they don’t just
passively receive it – we as the makers and consumers define what
it is rather than old institutions and vested interests, it as an
alive thing rather than a dead thing to be studied and dissected.
Towards a cultural commons
Lawrence
Lessig
is the originator of creative commons and from creative commons we
can infer the idea of a cultural commons, where art, culture and
learning are shared and valued without ideas of scarity value and
ownership, something which already exists at the heart of glitch art
where ideas, techniques and work are shared freely and openly and
from Lawrence lessig we also get the formulation of ideas and
discussion around the idea of remix culture through
his book ‘Remix:
Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy’
What
is remix culture and why do I say everything is a remix? If we talk
about generational loss then the remix element is obvious as a file
is physically copied, recopied and remixed by transmission, in terms
of culture itself its the act of taking a pre-existing work or idea
and making something with that , In glitch art the use of archive dot
org is near ubiquitous as a source of material, much of it out of
copyright or public domain ( its safer to remix a work that's public
domain) or say a photo library like pixabay we could also consider
collage art as a precursor to glitch art in that pre-existing works
are used and re-contextualised through deconstruction and the
reassigning of meaning through proximity beyond the inadvertent
remixes engendered by device or generational loss.
Remix
culture is at the heart of any art going back to the renaissance or
further – each generation looks at a previous generations work and
borrows themes , iconography , techniques or just plain copies as
Lawrence Lessig states:
‘ I’ve
described what I mean by remix by describing a bit of its prac-
tice.
Whether text or beyond text, remix is collage; it comes from
combining
elements of RO (read-only) culture; it succeeds by leveraging the
meaning
created by the reference to build something new.
‘There
are two goods that remix creates, at least for us, or for our kids,
at least now. One is the good of community. The other is education.’
And:
‘Remixes
happen within a community of remixers. In the digital
age,
that community can be spread around the world. Members of
that
community create in part for one another. They are showing
one
another how they can create, as kids on a skateboard are show-
ing
their friends how they can create. That showing is valuable,
even
when the stuff produced is not.’
Glitch
art is fundamentally a community, people sharing their latest
technique or work, trying to one up each other – but it is also an
inviting community in a way that traditional art communities are
often not .
In
the example I showed towards the beginning of this talk I scraped the
images from a website, downloaded the probably copyrighted images and
turned them into something new, who then owns these images – and at
what point does a remix become a new work ? If everything can be
looked at as source material who owns it ? My answer to that question
is that we all do, if we look at cultural hoarding and gatekeeping
in the old art world as a cultural loss to all of us then remixing
allied with the free software movement and creative commons can be
seen as cultural gain expanding as it does the access to tools,
audience and participation. But this also implies a duty on us as
artists to further participation, inclusivity, curatorship and
opportunity.
But
we must also be wary of creeping academicization – the need to
study, dissect and classify within terms the establishment
understands and can use to co-opt, curate and fit within an old art
world narrative – we must forcefully resist this by writing our own
histories, our own studies and our own narratives – work which is
already under way.
Getting
back to the theme beyond philosophical implications
With
glitch art we often work in ways that turn the idea of control on its
head, if control means retaining everything including physical
objects , all the information, all the detail if anything glitch art
reflects the idea that loss is an integral part of existence and to
try and hold on to anything is a losing game – digital art exists
in an inherently fragile ecosystem – without power it doesn't exist
, or rather it does but as the inaccessible content of hard-drives or
remote servers – without power it cannot be seen without networks
it cannot propagate . I make work which realistically will sooner or
later disappear and probably more completely than previous
generations of artists work.
We
may be one of the first generations of artists in recent history to
leave no trace of our work other than the physical and broken devices
on which they were made and an oral history of practices which gets
lost or changed over time. Therefore it is of primary importance that
we both archive our work individually and collectively ( to take
control of those processes) and also to record an oral history of
practices and timelines and to have control of that process as well –
asking the traditional art establishment to critique, write about, or
show glitch art or digital art in general risks at the very least
misunderstanding or at worst misrepresentation and caricature. We
must also control the narrative around what we do.
Control the means of production
Control
the means of digital production , understand your tools , maintain
your hardware become good at managing your files , don’t rely on
big tech to keep a record of your work fight the scourge of bit rot
and dead links, record our shared history.
I neither use or endorse Apple products. No proprietary or Apple hardware/software was used in the preparation of this talk, which was written on completely libre operating systems ( Trisquel, Gnuinos and PureOS) and partially written on a libre-booted Dell Latitude E6400.
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
