So ya gotta shiny new mac and want to run linux scripts?

 So, you've sold your soul to the devil and bought a shiny new or second hand ( in my case ) mac book pro ( with the shiny new apple silicon you know the one that isnt apple silicon but something they licenced from arm and added a few tweaks and whistles too but called it apple silicon cos apple is soooooooooooooo innovative) and now you have a folder full of linux bash scripts you want to run but now they wont work cos , yay non standard everything and well , apple. 

so first things apple is based on unix it inherits a lot from bsd ( you see sooooooooo innovative) , linux is unix like in philosophy but isnt based on bsd its different so a lot of the commands you know and love on linux wont exist or exist in different versions and operate slightly differently so to get those commands working on mac os as they do in linux go here , read and implement what they say here : Hint - you need to install homebrew first 

https://www.developnsolve.com/linux/running-linux-terminal-on-macos 

But then go here cos this is what makes it all work from the terminal 

https://www.developnsolve.com/linux/running-linux-terminal-on-macos 

But then, cos mac os you need to do this in your terminal to have access to that gnu goodness instead of whatever the eff it is mac os ships with,  first on a temporary basis do "source ~/.linuxify" 

to make it permanent do  

 "echo 'source ~/.linuxify' >> ~/.bash_profile" ( ignoring the quotes obviously )

But the fun doesn't stop there

if you want to , heaven forbid convert from jpg to gif in the terminal say mogrify -format gif *.jpg , or one image say mogrify -format gif example.jpg you get not one but two files created , ie example.gif and ._example.gif , soooo if you have a script that does this somewhere "find . -maxdepth 1 -name '*.gif' | head -n 2 | xargs -d $'\n' mv -t $h/frames/" - that script is going to fail , so you have to add in exceptions like this " ! -name '._*' " to that line so it becomes "find . -maxdepth 1 -name '*.gif' ! -name '._*  | head -n 2 | xargs -d $'\n' mv -t $h/frames/"

so things like that will have repercussions through out a script - if there is a quick answer I havent found it yet but im looking . This will be updated later on when or if i find a simple workable solution - mac os apparently has something called dot clean for such a circumstance but ill need to investigate and then see if it can be implemented while a script is running .  

 

Slowgram

* This is the text of a talk I gave online as part of a day long online / offline  session presented as part of the 'Falling from the shoulders of giants sessions' at the Digitalvilla , Potsdam curated by Verena Voigt more information here 

I’d  like to thank Offaly county council for part funding slowgram through an equipment grant through arts act funding – it means a lot to get this support.

Note  Xavier Dallets work influenced the way that I saw social media and the interfaces they present and how to work with them which directly fed into the way I approached slowgram. And it wasnt until I started working on this that I realised that connection.

What is Slowgram?

Slowgram is a design fiction and artistic intervention that deliberately changes how we experience Instagram.

Instead of endless scrolling, recommendations and algorithmic feeds, it creates a static record of a moment in time. A social media page becomes something to examine slowly rather than consume rapidly.

There is also an irony in that to build a program to counter the algorithm I used A.I .

Slowgram is also designed to be cross platform and currently works on Mac (intel and apple silicon) Linux, Windows and ChromeOS

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Why does it exist?

• Instagram has become increasingly mediated by algorithms.

• AI-generated content is making genuine human interaction harder to find.

• Platforms increasingly determine not only what we see but who we see.

• Slowgram removes that mediation by freezing the experience into an image.

Instagram and many modern social media platforms are effectively walled gardens. Much of the information they contain is only fully accessible if you have an account. Although public profiles are, in theory, visible without logging in, users are repeatedly encouraged—or required—to create an account in order to continue browsing. These walled gardens are skinner boxes, contributing to the death of the idealism of the open web and the monetization and manipulation of users who have become product to be fed into an increasingly politicized and policed surveillance culture.

One might assume that publicly available pages could be accessed using a simple web-scraping tool. In practice, this is far from straightforward. Modern social media platforms employ a range of technologies designed to discourage or prevent automated access, even to content that is nominally public.

The purpose of having an Instagram account is to see what friends, colleagues and artists you follow are posting. For many artists, curators and cultural organizations, Instagram has become an essential place both to discover work and to present their own. Yet the experience of using the platform has changed significantly. Maintaining connections with the people you choose to follow is becoming increasingly difficult as recommended content, advertising and algorithmically curated feeds compete for your attention. Rather than simply presenting posts in chronological order, the platform actively shapes what you see according to its own predictions about what will keep you engaged.

Slowgram began as an attempt to cut through this noise. The original idea was simple: create a way of viewing only the accounts that mattered to you, free from recommendations, advertising and algorithmic intervention. During development, however, it became clear that Instagram's interface, authentication requirements and anti-scraping technologies were not merely technical obstacles—they actively shaped the final form of the project. In that sense, the process of building Slowgram became an investigation into the platform itself.

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Accessing a public page manually

I looked at the process manually to begin with. Asking how would I usually do this as say a screenshot

1) Find user name

2) Navigate to that page

3) Click the x to get rid of the sign up dialog

4) Take a screenshot of the page

slide – find the user to screenshot ( titled as instagram screenshot)

slide - Click x on sign up take screenshot

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How would it work?

Could we replicate that behaviour programmatically?

“The software must open Instagram in an automated browser, capture the page exactly as a visitor would see it, crop it into a consistent format, and store it as part of a growing offline archive”

Made in collaboration with members of the Giant glitches group including Verena Voigt, Laila Shereen Sakr (vjumamel) after an initial discussion, with a logo designed by Domenico Dom Barra, and html and css created by Michael Betancourt for the Aesthetic Hazard website.

Aesthetic Hazard website here  https://www.aesthetichazard.info/index.html

Slowgram was originally intended to work as part of the Aesthetic Hazard website but this proved problematical due to the nature of the back-end, so was redesigned as a standalone script which could be used separately from the website or as part of an installation.

How it should work

1) – Enter 3 instagram profiles

2) – Wait for accounts to be accessed and saved

3) – Success

4) – Access pictures in gallery

5) – Private accounts cannot be accessed

6) – Becoming a perfect user

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Interesting problems

"The project became an investigation into how difficult it has become simply to look at publicly available information. And how to circumvent those restrictions"

I Initially used Gemini in writing the program, for speed and because programming in this way was a little beyond my skill set. So I asked

“Is it possible to create an application using python which takes a web page as input then takes a snapshot of that webpage then displays it?”

And it suggested it was but as I was focussing on Instagram there were caveats

“Caveats **Note on Instagram's Terms:** Using Instaloader (or any scraping tool) for automated access likely violates Instagram/Meta's Terms of Service. Any public-facing application built on this architecture may be quickly blocked or banned by Instagram.”

But it then proceeded to help me do just that !!

401 unauthorized user

Instagram has checks on whether you are a real user or a bot :

for instance if you make too many requests in the earlier versions you get a "401 Unauthorized" combined with the message "Please wait a few minutes before you try again" this is Instagram's standard way of telling an automated client (like Instaloader) that it has made too many requests too quickly, even when scraping public profiles. It temporarily throttles or blocks the IP.

To make the scraper look less like an aggressive bot, we need to introduce a mandatory sleep delay between scraping each of the requested usernames. Adding a pause for 3 seconds after successfully scraping a user helps deal with that.

slowdown or we capture nothing

• Dynamic content loading – Instagram relies heavily on JavaScript. Simply waiting for the page to load is often insufficient because images and other content continue loading afterwards. If the screenshot is taken too early, only placeholder elements or empty areas are captured.

Without an account everything is grey

In the earliest versions of Slowgram, I was determined not to create an Instagram account. My reasoning was simple: if a page is publicly accessible, why should I need an account simply to document it? Without an account strange things start to happen to the images that you capture, they become greyed out because even though we have automatically clicked off the sign up boxes and have accepted cookies there is still some routine lingering in the background.

 

At this stage the software was still operating without logging into Instagram. It could successfully capture public profile pages and divide those captures into individual images. However, the more extensively the software was used, the more obvious it became that Instagram was detecting the automated behaviour.

Requests that had initially worked reliably began to fail more frequently. There was a growing risk that continued use would result in my IP address being temporarily blocked from accessing Instagram altogether. Operations that involved repeatedly cropping or requesting multiple images were particularly likely to trigger HTTP 401 "Unauthorized" responses, suggesting that the platform was becoming increasingly restrictive towards the software’s attempts at automated access.

An unavoidable account.

Making an account is easy enough, it does kind of compromise the original intentions behind the script but it does leave us with a functional tool, without grayed out images and intrusive login boxes, this was achieved by creating a separate account profile in Firefox and then extracting the authenticated session to use as login credentials ( along with adding an ad-blocker).

With automated login and slowgram branding 

 

Now you will notice that the images are not cropped into individual images they are kept as just a screenshot of that page with the Instagram branding removed – this is because I’d noticed that cropping the images into individual images caused more rate limiting and ip banning behavior

There have been Many many versions of Slowgram from earlier experiments to test proof of concept to the current version which uses a slightly different mechanism which imitates how a real user would behave using a headless browser which is much more reliable and less prone to triggering website counter-measures than previous versions which I’m going to demonstrate now then we can open the floor to discussion. There is going to be one more version where I restore the original idea of individual images rather than just the profile page now that I’m more confident that this version is more stable which will lead to the program becoming more useful for archiving and curating which is one of its intended purposes. 

 

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Discussion

• Why archive social media?

• Why preserve the interface instead of the individual images?

• What changes when viewing becomes slow instead of algorithmically driven?

• Is a screenshot a photograph, a document, or an artwork?

• Can collecting become a form of artistic practice?

• What happens to an artwork when the platform that hosted it disappears?

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Open source software: A realistic and pragmatic approach

Glitch art, more than most disciplines, asks questions of the software and hardware it uses in very specific ways, what happens if I misuse this, how do I break that, why can’t I install the software I want to use on this or that device, or to put it more simply “what assumptions about my tools have I accepted without questioning?” It is obsessed by file formats, codecs and the systems they are embedded in, the stuff that our digital existence is built from. These questions are also relevant to other disciplines within digital art.

Existing primarily online Glitch art relies on an open internet to exist and propagate through the sharing of ideas, techniques, scripts and opportunities. Accessibility and inclusion is at its core, denying the standard wisdom that you need the latest most expensive hardware or software product to create valid work with. 

This was written on a modern, open-source,  fully libre, operating system (a Devuan respin using the linux-libre kernel) , on hardware I have modified myself ( a 4th gen intel i7S running on a thinkcentre E73 and a 6th gen intel i5 running on a Fujitsu lifebook E546) which most standard thinking would state is outdated and  ready for e-waste. They aren’t considered modern enough to run windows 11 though if I wanted to  I could use an open source tool like Rufus, to create a version of win 11 which bypasses windows 11 requirements like TPM 2,  an online account or a specific generation of processor. 

Open source software empowers the user to make choices which enable access and inclusion, my own view of proprietary software and hardware is that it disables and monetises the user trapping them in software as a service subscriptions and updates which remove functionality and increase bloat and obsolescence.  

This is my position as an artist it may be very different to yours but certain themes will be common.

Open-ness

As Wikipedia summarizes it, "Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, modify and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose."

This is a concise summary of the principles set out in the Open Source Definition (OSD), maintained by the Open Source Initiative. The OSD is a formal set of criteria that software licenses must satisfy to be recognized as open source, and it has become the foundation for evaluating and approving open-source licenses. If you're interested in reading the complete definition, it can be found on the Open Source Initiative website here https://opensource.org/osd

Open source code means that a program can be independently inspected to verify that it is doing what it says it does, as you have access to the source code, not just an opaque binary.  It also means that if there is a bug in the program its going to be possible at some point for someone to read that source code to find and fix that bug, improving the software for everyone. 

Open source software is developed collaboratively often by unpaid maintainers though some large organisations such as Nextcloud , Proton mail, Collabora, stability.ai, Framasoft and others  contribute financially to projects that are seen as important. 

Now just to clarify, there is a distinction between open-source software (as defined by the open source initiatives OSD) , which is distributed under licences such as the Apache Licence 2.0, the GNU General Public Licence (GPL) or the MIT Licence

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License

and more on Foss Licensing here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-software_license 

and the free software foundations definition of ‘free software’ which defines software as free when it satisfies these four conditions also known as the four 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.

In practice there's a great deal of overlap between open-source software and free software. Many of the licences you'll encounter, including the GPL and MIT Licence, are recognised by both organisations. The main difference is one of philosophy rather than day-to-day use, but whatever licence a project uses it's worth reading it so you understand what rights and obligations each licence grants the user.

In glitch art and in general ‘the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose.’ and point 3 in the free software foundations definition is important as something like ffmpeg say which as well as being a truly useful and important cross platform command line tool for manipulating video, sound and images is also reused in open source applications such as handbrake, Kdenlive, audacity sound editor and parts of it are embedded within vlc video player , it can read and write multiple formats , some proprietary, some not but the important point being that you can use it for free and modify as you wish ( as I have done) and not have to pay licensing fees to use it or its codecs 

Closed-source software

Contrast this with the definition of closed source or proprietary software

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open-source_and_closed-source_software

‘The primary business model for closed-source software involves the use of constraints on what can be done with the software and the restriction of access to the original source code. This can result in a form of imposed artificial scarcity on a product that is otherwise very easy to copy and redistribute. The result is that an end-user is not actually purchasing software, but purchasing the right to use the software. To this end, the source code to closed-source software is considered a trade secret by its manufacturers.’

Trusted software, app stores, age verification and more

This business model is furthered by changing the model of the operating system from one where the user could install what they wanted from where they wanted using their own judgement as to safety or otherwise, to one where walled gardens of approved software such as the Microsoft store, Google play or Apples app store make it increasingly more convenient for the user to install software from ‘trusted sources’ and less convenient to install from other sources. While these systems are often presented as improving security, they also shift more control over software distribution from the user to the platform owner.

This can have the knock-on effect of narrowing user choice, making it harder for smaller independent developers to reach audiences, and reinforcing existing software ecosystems and so-called 'industry standards'

These blocks on running what you want on your own device can be circumvented but this is becoming more and more difficult and not without consequences.

See this https://f-droid.org/2026/07/01/adv-malware.html

and this https://keepandroidopen.org/

and this Apple blocks sideloading unverified apps https://lunduke.locals.com/post/6304352/apple-removes-ability-to-run-unsigned-apps-in-macos-15-1

As an example Googles Chrome browser is introducing changes which will reduce the effectiveness of some ad blockers. As an artist working with long form video that I publish on YouTube this is a real problem as chrome is the dominant browser. I don’t want the continuity of something I’ve made being interrupted every five minutes by whatever an ad-company chooses to show. As an online artist I can either accept this friction or move my work elsewhere, but this then brings up questions of visibility, reach and who controls the platforms we use - and why, which is a related argument for another day.

https://cybernews.com/security/chrome-update-disables-adblockers-manifest-v3/

And then of course there is age verification where vendors of operating systems may soon be required to verify or record aspects of a users age so that the device can then communicate that information to app stores and only allow age appropriate software to be installed on that device – which begs the question how much control of your own device do you really have ?

https://www.pcmag.com/explainers/your-pc-might-demand-proof-of-age-before-browsing-heres-what-to-know

Politics

It occurred to me whilst writing this that I’ve been giving a variation of this talk either in conversation or in presentations since I started making glitch art, with a hostile Govt. in America openly threatening European values this conversation is more relevant than ever, as much of the software and hardware you as artists use will be controlled by American corporations.

Microsft blocks ICC accounts https://www.heise.de/en/news/Criminal-Court-Microsoft-s-email-block-a-wake-up-call-for-digital-sovereignty-10387383.html

Claude fable blocked outside of US https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c932g3v3e13o

E.U digital soverignty https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-tech-sovereignty

The US cloud act https://wire.com/en/blog/cloud-act-eu-data-sovereignty

“ The CLOUD Act overrides local data protection laws whenever criminal investigations involve U.S. interests. Its scope is extraterritorial, meaning it applies regardless of where the data is physically stored, as long as the service provider is based in the United States. It grants U.S. authorities the power to access personal, corporate or even classified data with a warrant, without prior notice to affected users or European regulators.” which can conflict with European GDPR regulations and given the current political situation in the US is ripe for misuse.

Collaboration

Using a common set of tools that anyone can access makes it a lot easier to collaborate, especially when exchanging files to be worked on. The argument can be made that proprietary software has created industry standards that everyone can work with but if the software to do that is prohibitively expensive then that software ( or hardware ) is exclusionary, the very opposite of what art should be , open source software and open source standards allow all of us to collaborate regardless of income, class or often hardware.

Or to sum up the last two points as the Libreplanet mission statement says: https://libreplanet.org/wiki/LibrePlanet:About/Mission_Statement

‘As media and technology mediates how we experience and interact with the world, the private owners of software, knowledge, and culture have control over us. With a strong commitment to free software and free cultural works, we work against the exploitation, domination, and oppression enabled by private ownership of technology, media, and communication. While free software and free culture are radical stances against one form of oppression, we acknowledge that there are systemic structures of control embedded in our society which permeate our movement. Therefore, we maintain a Code of Conduct which takes those into account.’

Our vision is to free the world from technological and legal barriers for all software and cultural works to be free as defined by the GNU Project and Definition of Free Cultural Works.’

My view’s on all of this are just that, I take a particular stance as an artist to use only open-source software and also to release my work under a creative commons licence, some of you may not be comfortable with doing that, but it is an option.

The Convenience trap

Most of the software I use is cross-platform. I can and do use the same tools on macOS, Windows, or Linux. That matters because when I show someone a technique, I need to know they can reproduce it on whatever computer they already own. I don't have to tell them they need to buy a particular operating system or spend hundreds of euro on proprietary software before they can even begin, fostering inclusivity and increasing accessibility.

Some of you will probably be thinking, "But this isn't industry-standard software."

My response is that the very idea of "industry-standard software" has become one of the most successful marketing strategies ever devised. It encourages dependence on proprietary tools, proprietary file formats, and increasingly, perpetual subscription fees. Once an industry is locked into a particular ecosystem, the software company has a captive market and very little incentive to reduce prices or improve the user experience.

You will own nothing and be happy

Adobe's subscription model is a good example. You no longer own the tools you depend on—you rent them indefinitely. Stop paying and, in many cases, you lose access to the software that created your own work.

Those same corporations have also spent the last few years scraping web content to feed into A.I models to capture the content that we create to monetise for themselves ( ironically built with open-source tools) and cut the artist out of the equation, using and paying for these tools increasingly reinforces the very business model that marginalises artists.

Open source software offers a fundamentally different relationship. It puts the user, rather than the corporation, in control. The software can be used, studied, modified, shared, and preserved. It allows knowledge to be exchanged freely instead of being mediated through licensing agreements and recurring payments.

I don't reject proprietary software because it is technically inferior. I reject the business model because I believe it concentrates power in the hands of a few corporations at the expense of artists, educators, and the wider public.

Cost

Open source software generally comes at no cost other than downloading and learning how a program or operating system works or how to install it, for an artist wanting to try out new techniques and ways of working or for a student/artist on a budget cost of access to hardware and software can be a big barrier, but if there is an alternative open source program which works just as well and is free why not use it ?

Question 1.

Ask yourself this basic question when deciding on a particular piece of software for a particular purpose:

‘is there an open source alternative?’

then ask -

Question 2,3 and 4

‘ Will it do what I want it do, can it read and write the file formats that I need it to write, is their a user manual or user forum’

Question 5

Will it work on my operating system and my hardware?

Question 6

If I can’t replace the big thing can I replace some small things

Pragmatism

There is no one size fits all solution but we can make small shifts, re-examine why we are storing things in places like google cloud , could we store more files locally , run programs locally rather than online etc.

I'm not suggesting everyone should abandon the software they rely on. If Unreal Engine or TouchDesigner enables you to make work you couldn't otherwise make, then that's a perfectly rational decision. What I'm suggesting is that we become more conscious of where we have genuine choice—and where we've simply accepted the default.

The where

I’m not going to cover this too much in depth as searching the internet for software is a pretty obvious thing, though there are pitfalls as most of you probably know, and I’d recommend using a projects website rather than blindly following links to dodgy software aggregator sites that use deceptive layouts to trick you into downloading malware or paid for versions of software.

If you're looking for an open-source replacement for a particular commercial application, Open Source Alternatives has a useful searchable database of software organised by category. https://opensourcealternative.to/

The FSF ( free software foundation ) has useful resource pages of free software https://www.fsf.org/resources/

For windows if you are still on windows 10 I’d recommend using the chocolatey package manager, its web page has a handy package search function, for windows 11 there is the newer winget system.

https://chocolatey.org/

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/package-manager/winget/

For Mac os I'd strongly suggest installing homebrew https://brew.sh/ the website also has a handy package search function.

For linux use your package manager of choice

Many of the most interesting creative tools are hosted on GitHub, GitLab or Codeberg. To make the most of these you'll probably want to install Git—another open-source project that has become something of an industry standard. Some projects will also require a little familiarity with compiling software, creating Python virtual environments or basic scripting. Don't let that put you off. Most of us learnt those skills because there was something we wanted to make, and they're well worth acquiring if you're interested in developing your own creative tools. Much of my own work relies heavily on Python and scripting.

That being said, this a quick overview of some options

Green

Things where the open-source alternative is genuinely excellent.

• FFmpeg

• ImageMagick

• Blender

• OBS

• Krita

• Kdenlive

• Audacity

• VSCodium

• Git-bash

• Blender (obviously)

• Sumatra Pdf (windows only though)

Amber — Mixed

Where it depends on workflow.

• GIMP vs Photoshop

• LibreOffice vs Microsoft Office

• Inkscape vs Illustrator

Some people can switch tomorrow.

Others can't.

And that's okay.

Red — Not yet

Things where, for many artists, proprietary software still has capabilities that are genuinely difficult to replace.

• TouchDesigner though it might be worthwhile looking at puredata https://puredata.info/

• Unreal Engine (although its source-available model makes it a more nuanced case) see https://www.unrealengine.com/ue-on-github or see if godot might work for you https://godotengine.org/

• Certain specialist CAD or media tools ( though freecad and meshlab are making good strides it comes down to file formats) https://www.freecad.org/index.php?lang=en

 

 

Perfect censorship - (Meta - Requiem for a dream)

 

Meta – Requiem for a Dream

Algorithms, Glitch Art and Invisible Censorship

Introduction

As artists, many of us rely on social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Threads, tumblr or in the case of NFT’s X . These platforms allow us to share work, build reputations, connect with peers, exchange ideas and opportunities, and make our work visible to audiences and curators.

For glitch artists this dependence is even greater. Glitch art exists primarily online. It spreads through networks, communities and platforms. Without those networks it becomes far more difficult for the work to circulate, be discussed and develop.

However, these platforms are not neutral spaces. They are owned by corporations, governed by rules, and increasingly moderated by algorithms.

Algorithms as Gatekeepers

Most social media moderation is now automated. Algorithms are used to determine what content is recommended, what content is promoted, and what content is removed.

When these systems work incorrectly they can have significant consequences. Content can be removed, accounts can be restricted, visibility can be reduced, and users may find themselves effectively hidden from audiences without fully understanding why.

This process is often described as shadow banning: the reduction or suppression of visibility without an obvious ban. A user can continue posting while their reach and impact are quietly diminished.

In this environment the algorithm becomes a gatekeeper.

Community Standards and Cultural Bias

Meta describes its community standards as a way of keeping users safe and creating a welcoming environment. These standards are presented as universal, but they are inevitably shaped by cultural assumptions, political pressures and corporate priorities.

The standards are also subject to change.

For artists working internationally this raises important questions. Which cultural values are being enforced? Who decides what is acceptable? And what happens when an automated system misunderstands artistic work?

A Case Study: Glitch Art Misidentified as Pornography

In October 2024, glitch artist Maelle Lencot posted a piece of work in the Glitch Artists Collective Facebook group.

The work was identified by Meta's systems as violating rules relating to nudity and sexual activity.

The image contained no pornography.

Nevertheless, the post was removed and sanctions were applied. More importantly, the action threatened the status of the Glitch Artists Collective itself, a community of almost 100,000 members and one of the most important spaces for sharing glitch art online.

The incident illustrates a central problem: when an algorithm makes a mistake, the consequences extend beyond a single artwork.

Reviews and Contradictions

Meta provides an appeals process.

Eventually, after review, Maelle's work was restored. Meta acknowledged that the removal had been incorrect.

However, despite restoring the content, restrictions affecting the group remained in place.

This reveals a contradiction. The system recognised the original decision was wrong, yet the consequences of that decision continued.

The left hand did not appear to know what the right hand was doing.

Reduced Distribution and Content Demotion

Meta openly acknowledges that it reduces the distribution of certain content.

Content can be demoted, shown less frequently, or recommended less often. In practical terms this means fewer people see the work.

For artists, visibility is everything.

A work does not need to be removed to be censored. It only needs to become difficult to find.

When distribution is reduced, the effect can resemble censorship even when the content technically remains online.

Learning Systems and Feedback Loops

Algorithms learn from data and previous decisions.

This raises an important concern. If glitch art is repeatedly misidentified as problematic content, the system may reinforce its own mistakes.

Each incorrect classification becomes additional evidence for future classifications.

The result can be a feedback loop in which glitch art becomes increasingly likely to be flagged, restricted or removed.

In effect, glitch art may be exposing weaknesses within the moderation system itself.

Personal Experience

Following the removal of Maelle's work, I began paying closer attention to my own interactions with Meta's platforms.

A non-glitch image I posted on Instagram was removed for allegedly containing nudity and sexual activity. The same image was not removed from Threads.

Subsequently I noticed increasing numbers of glitch works being flagged, hidden or subjected to reduced visibility.

Friends and colleagues reported similar experiences. Comparable work posted elsewhere, such as Tumblr, often did not produce the same results.

While much of this evidence remains anecdotal, the pattern became increasingly difficult to ignore.

Self-Censorship

Perhaps the most significant consequence is not content removal but behavioural change.

When artists become aware that certain kinds of work may trigger moderation systems, they begin adjusting their behaviour.

They may alter images, avoid particular themes, or stop posting certain work altogether.

Fear of losing visibility becomes a powerful incentive to self-censor.

The algorithm does not need to explicitly ban artists. It merely needs to encourage them to police themselves.

The Glitch as Environment

Traditionally, glitch artists explore failures in systems.

We investigate the edges of software and hardware, searching for moments where systems reveal themselves through error.

In this case, however, the glitch is no longer confined to the artwork.

The glitch has become the environment in which the artwork circulates.

The moderation system itself becomes the site of investigation.

Beyond Art

These concerns extend beyond social media.

Similar forms of automated decision-making are increasingly used in areas such as facial recognition, policing, welfare administration and surveillance.

If systems cannot reliably distinguish glitch art from pornography, we should ask how reliable they are when making decisions with far greater consequences.

The issue is not simply technical failure. It is the social and political power granted to opaque systems.

Conclusion

Algorithms are not neutral.

They reflect the assumptions, priorities and biases of those who design and deploy them.

Meta's moderation systems shape what can be seen, what can be shared, and ultimately what kinds of cultural production are encouraged or discouraged.

For glitch artists this presents a paradox.

We work with error, disruption and uncertainty. Yet we increasingly depend on systems that struggle to recognize those qualities as legitimate artistic practice.

The question is not simply whether glitch art has glitched Meta's algorithms.

The larger question is what happens when algorithmic mistakes become part of the cultural infrastructure through which art is produced, distributed and understood.

And what is lost when visibility itself is controlled by systems that cannot explain their own decisions?

Final question

How do we as Europeans foster our own values online in social media spaces when those very values are not reflected in largely American owned and allied spaces with their own political agenda using an algorithm which promotes division, hatred and disinformation under the guise of free speech?

A shiny new website

 26/07/2025

Hi all, thanks to all of you for reading along over the last few years , really appreciate it, hope that you've found what I've been writing useful.

I have a shiny new website here https://crash-stop.org/.

Ive wanted to make my own site for a while and its a means to an end also of getting out of the corporate web sphere for obvious reasons.

Again thanks for reading along crash-stop.

 

Mark Fisher – ‘Ghosts of my life’, Fukuyama’s ‘End of history’ and rebooting the future with glitch art.

Note- this was the introduction I gave during a recent online discussion with Verena Voigt ( https://www.verena-voigt-pr.de/) as part of Fubar 2024 which in turn reflected the theme of this years Fubar - Archives and failure in archiving, and it's interesting to me personally that in the last year or so a number of initiatives have started within the glitch art community to archive work of the past that we as community find important or significant , in part before it disappears due to the often ephemeral nature of digital media, storage strategies ( or lack of) and the internet in general. It seems that we as an art movement have woken up to the fact that what we are doing / have done may have some historical importance.

In light of that it also seems that there are the first tentative movements towards us as artists to find some kind of framework in which to view glitch art and its offshoots , not the traditional art historical framework based in 19th/20th century art criticism and political theory ( the last thing we need are more scholarly isms ) but rather an attempt from within our own community to define what we are, what we have been and what we will be , that implies a knowledge of the past and a hope for the future . 

Introduction

I’m going to start with this quote from 1891 which comes from a speech made by Missouri Senator George Graham Vest, a former congressman for the Confederacy

‘“In all revolutions the vanquished are the ones who are guilty of treason, even by the historians,” Vest said, “for history is written by the victors and framed according to the prejudices and bias existing on their side.” ( from the American newspaper The Parsons Daily eclipse Friday Aug 21 1891)

https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/419139525/

This idea, that history is written by the victors, is a fairly common one and has been used by various figures good and bad through the last few centuries, from Churchill to Goering and so on.

After the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, the collapse of the soviet union and the end of the cold war Francis Fukuyama published a book in 1992 titled ‘ The end of history and the last man’ in which, to quote from Wikipedia, Fukuyama argues

‘that with the ascendancy of Western liberal democracy—which occurred after the Cold War (1945–1991) and the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1991)—humanity has reached "not just ... the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man

If the victors write the history it can also be said that the victors also create and maintain the archives on which that history is based, what is left in, what is left out, what is purposefully destroyed or rewritten – if we cannot write our own history and keep our own archives others will do the writing and maintaining for us, to quote Vest again ‘framed according to the prejudices and bias existing on their side’.

To rewind a little, my perspective as an artist ( and most artists ) is coloured by the era in which I grew up. I was born in the late sixties and started school in the last dyeing days of the post war settlement in Europe we can call Social democracy, a system with public provision for universal education, Healthcare, a program of easily available and rentable social housing, easy access to Higher education via a system of means assessed grants which benefited the less well off and rebalanced the arts and public services away from middle and upper classes in a democratic way.

I say the last dyeing days of social democracy as post 1979 and the election of Margaret Thatcher in the UK And Ronald Reagan in the US this idea of social democracy was superseded by an economic theory called neo-liberalism hatched by a group of economists nicknamed ‘The Chicago boys’ taught by the economist Milton Friedman ( Wikipedia has a great article on the Chicago boys here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Boys) which was initially trialled in Chile under General Pinochet which rejected the post war consensus and as that article says

‘They sponsored state run policies to decrease national spending, end inflation and promote economic growth. They promoted a policy of strict austerity and cut government expenditures substantially. Free trade agreements and the breakdown of barriers to trade were also promoted to help Chile compete in the world market. They also privatized public companies and used the free market rather than government rule to promote their economic policies.’

In other words privatisation, free enterprise, an end of access to education via grants , a gradual return of the arts to those who could afford higher education and not those who had merit – a recolonisation of the arts by the upper and upper middle classes with their attendant biases and agendas.

But before that happened there was still, in the U.K at least and elsewhere in western Europe, the last vestiges of the the old social democratic system and a final generation gaining access to an arts education through merit and this is where Mark Fisher comes in and what he talks about in various chapters of his book ‘Ghosts of my life’

What Reagan and Thatcher and neoliberalism represented was a paradigm shift and rejection of the political thought and consensus that came before, this was also reflected in the arts as a crisis within modernism ( the prevailing artistic movement since the beginning of the 20^th century) there were no more isms left and modernism (the pursuit of the new and the pursuit of innovation over the form that might take) had itself become tired, elitist, overly academic and increasingly obsessed with ideas both esoteric and irrelevant outside the circle of those in the know, essentially cutting itself off from audience and accessibility.

Paradoxically the last generation to make it through art colleges or higher education on grants, many from the working classes created something new when exposed to modernist ideas, exemplified in a new style of music, post punk which came out of the ashes of punk turning modernist ideas into a new form of what Mark Fisher calls ‘Popular modernism’ exemplified by groups such as pre sparkle in the rain Simple Minds, Joy division, pre Midge Ure Ultravox ( see also John Foxxs' Metamatic) , Siouxsie and the Banshees , The Cure , Echo and the Bunnymen, Clock Dva, The Teardrop Explodes and The Chameleons, awkward angular music made by awkward people. Music both a promise and a death knell for a time about to be consigned to the scrap heap as neoliberalism gradually colonised culture and the arts returning or rehashing old ideas and old forms , and in relation to that another point that Mark Fisher makes is that neoliberalism cannot invent or innovate.

If, as Fukuyama states, this is ‘the end of history’ nothing new can be created, all we have left is a rehashing of ideas, a recycling of forms and consumption ( see Mark Fisher on his shock at realising that ‘valerie’ as sung by Amy Winehouse and produced by Mark Ronson was not an original sixties era song covered in imitation by the band The Zutons but in fact the other way round – a modern Zutons song sung in the style of a sixties soul singer by a modern singer imitating a sixties style, imitation upon imitation but almost undetectable as we only exist truly in this neoliberal now, we have become unmoored in time ( see also the slow cancellation of the future) as the band the chameleons said in the song Caution from the 1986 album ‘Strange times’

‘We have no future, we have no past
We're just drifting ghosts of glass
Brown sugar, ice in our veins
No pressure, no pain

Everybody looks the same to me
Rows and rows of faces on a balcony
I can hear them calling down to me
"Come up here, set us free"’

Or as Japan state in the chorus of their 1981 track 'Ghosts' 

'Just when I think I'm winning
When I've broken every door
The ghosts of my life
Blow wilder than before
Just when I thought I could not be stopped
When my chance came to be king
The ghosts of my life
Blew wilder than the wind'

 

The problem with ghosts or ideas is that even though a paradigm may have been killed off by a competing paradigm it doesn’t make those ideas disappear, if we look at China Mievilles book ‘The city and the city’ we can see two parallel systems existing side by side , deliberately and purposely ignoring each other even though they may be in touching distance co-existing ( it could be argued that even though the Berlin wall fell and communism ended the wall in fact did not fall at all even with German reintegration ) in ‘The city and the city; there is also the shadow of a time when the two parts of the same city existed as one , a third city and this is at the heart of the book and possibly the heart of the situation we who make glitch art find ourselves in – we are a third city which exists within the wreckage of two old opposing systems of thought.

To quote from wikipedia again https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_%26_the_City

‘The City & the City takes place in the fictional Eastern European twin city-states of Besźel and Ul Qoma.’

plot outline:

‘Inspector Tyador Borlú, of the Extreme Crime Squad in the fictional East European city-state of Besźel, investigates the murder of Mahalia Geary, a foreign student found dead in a Besźel street with her face disfigured. He soon learns that Geary had been involved in the political and cultural turmoil involving Besźel and its "twin city" of Ul Qoma. His investigations, which start in his home city of Besźel, lead him to Ul Qoma to assist the Ul Qoman police in their work, and eventually result in an examination of the legend of Orciny, a rumoured third city existing in the spaces between Besźel and Ul Qoma.’

and

‘These two cities actually occupy much of the same geographical space, but via the volition of their citizens (and the threat of the secret power known as Breach), they are perceived as two different cities. A denizen of one city must dutifully "unsee" (that is, consciously erase from their mind or fade into the background) the denizens, buildings, and events taking place in the other city – even if they are an inch away. This separation is emphasised by the style of clothing, architecture, gait, and the way denizens of each city generally carry themselves. Residents of the cities are taught from childhood to recognise things belonging to the other city without actually seeing them. Ignoring the separation, even by accident, is called "breaching" – a terrible crime for the citizens of the two cities, even worse than murder. The origin of this odd situation is unclear, as it started at an uncertain time in the past, perhaps before recorded European history. Residents of the cities speak different languages that use distinct alphabets. Besź is written in a Greek-derived alphabet resembling Cyrillic while Illitan, the language of Ul Qoma, is written in a Latin alphabet. However, Besź and Illitan have a common root and share a degree of mutual intelligibility. The cities also have different religions: Besźel's state religion is the Besź Orthodox Church and there is a small Jewish and Muslim community, while Ul Qoma is officially secular, though religions other than the Temple of the Divine Light face discrimination.’

We can think of the two art movements - modernism and postmodernism as being the two separate cities within the one city and glitch art being the rumored third city .

Art under neoliberalism is post modernist – art talking about itself and feeding upon itself allied to the biases and agenda of the system that it arose from saying nothing new picking over its own bones but re-presenting them cyclically in the same way that Hollywood has been rebooting the same ideas and films over the last few decades – The fall of the Berlin wall and the end of communism did not bring about a bright new era of freedom but instead a deeper slavery to ideas which have become harder and harder to think around because if there is no future there is no destination, no escape, no possibility of escaping the locked room in which we find ourselves.

We can also see across Europe and America the slow falsification of the past, the demolition of buildings, especially in the United Kingdom, built post world war two that represented the post war consensus, brutalist buildings are either demolished (see the wholesale demolition and rebuilding of Birminghams bull ring centre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bull_Ring,_Birmingham or its brutalist library https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_Central_Library or the East German Berlin Palast der Republik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_of_the_Republic%2C_Berlin which was replaced by a facsimile of an old Berlin palace that had been bombed during the second world war and subsequently demolished. Or the co-option and gentrification of publicly funded and owned housing and its wholesale sell off and consequent purging of local populations ( the unworthy poor) to make way for the worthy rich ( see San Francisco, London etc ). The victors write the history but also demolish that which does not fit into their idea of the past or sell off public goods to private hands ( Birmingham city council is controversially at the moment going through a bankruptcy under circumstances which are disputed but as a consequence one of the biggest publicly owned collections of pre-raphelite art may be sold, neo-liberalism cannot abide the thought of publicly owned assests for the benefit of the public thus the slow war of attrition on libraries and public spaces such as parks and amenities) .

How then can we look at the ideas and cultural analyses of Mark Fisher as exemplified in his book ‘ Ghosts of my life’ , use them to look at glitch art and hence reboot the cancelled future to break out of the locked room in which we find ourselves?

Escaping the trap that sapphire and steel find themselves in as Mark Fisher writes in ‘The ghosts of my life’ on sapphire and steels final episode -

‘The problem that Sapphire and steel have come to solve is, as ever, to do with time. At the service station, there is a temporal bleed through from earlier periods: images and figures from 1925 and 1948 keep appearing, so that, as Sapphire and Steels colleague Silver puts it ‘time just got mixed, jumbled up, together, making no sort of sense’. Anachronism, the slippage of discrete time periods into one another, was throughout the series the major symptom of time breaking down………….’

‘In this final assignment, the anachronism has led to stasis: time has stopped. The service station is in ‘a pocket, a vacuum’. There’s still traffic, but its not going anywhere’: the sound of cars is locked into a looped drone. Silver says ‘there is no time here, not anymore’.

I can make parallels with culture and art under neo-liberalism ( as does Mark Fisher) within this trap , culture isn't over, art isn't over, it is still happening but it is in stasis without the future it is constantly flicking through and re-presenting past modes, there is nothing new . Like the characters in the city and the city we can see this but are taught to ignore it from an early age, no other system or escape can be seen because we are locked into the room of capitalism which is eternally stuck in 19^th and 20^th century economic and political ideas, because for it the future is over and whilst it would like us all to believe in that the democratisation of artistic and cultural production via the web, opensource/floss software and the diminishing costs of devices and access recreates the fertile grounds online/offline that post punk grew within .

To write our own history's, to keep our own archives is one of the ways we can find our way out of this locked room – like Post punk in the past we can forge, through glitch art, new ways seeing and new forms of culture , within a framework which is open and denies the power of neo-liberalism and its self contented end of history. Through glitch can we un-cancel the future.