In may I will be speaking about glitch art at the Digital transformations conference in Ballina , Co.Mayo , the conferences website is here ( tickets to attend are on sale now) http://digitaltransformations.org/ . I'm very proud to be associated with this as it comes at a time when we need to have discussions about art , technology and the subversion of traditional art forms and their hierarchies . As a little taster of what I will be speaking about I've written this short introduction .
Glitch art is everywhere , but maybe you don’t know it , adverts from
Adidas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sotun9qMyrw , films like ‘Ghost
in the shell’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4VmJcZR0Yg , music and
music video Kanye west – ‘Welcome to Heartbreak’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMH0e8kIZtE , groups such as Autechre,
Aphex Twin and genres such as chiptune and Vapor-wave , and fashion
https://www.glitchtextiles.com/ . In the wild its a broken screen
announcement on your daily commute or a rain hit satellite dish turning
neighbors or the six o’clock news into a gibberish of blocks and
melting faces and halting sound or an unfinished bittorent download
that turns flesh into torrents of broken wax and colour.
Glitch
art works to subvert both software and hardware to render images,
sound or physical objects ( deliberately editing 3d software objects
exemplified in the work of Mark Klink
http://www.markklinkart.com/gallery/ ) into something other , often
unreadable and often painful to watch or listen – born on computers and
the early Internet through artists such as Jodi http://wwwwwww.jodi.org/
its gallery is the screen , and the screen is everywhere .
What
is it not ? It is not ‘New media’ , that vague phrase used by the art
establishment to co-opt technology and new forms into its lexicon ,
rendering it open to learned criticism and curation. Glitch Art leaves curation
behind through the mechanism of its transmission , through Instagram ,
Tumblr, Facebook , it is to a large degree self curating through likes,
reputation and sharing . It is not a filter applied through using
photo-shop or after effects ( these are obvious and generally frowned
upon ), it takes many of its tools and philosophy from the open source
and free software movement, software and hardware are political as
closed source hardware and software do not allow for tinkering and
playing and restrict the freedom to experiment , inducing a mindset of
consumption rather than creative participation .
It is
also problematic to older ways of looking at authenticity and authorship
, much of its source, or sauce , is found material, material often than
not under copyright , if it can be found on the Internet it will be
used , and thus has much in common with remix culture, see Antonio
Robert’s (hellocatfood) whats your glitch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPhwzzMXzt0 . It could be argued that
Glitch art holds much in common with pop art but it is much more
cannibalistic and far more ruthless .
When a paradigm crashes it takes no prisoners and the language you have used before no longer makes sense.
