Yeah, I made a new thing .

So after all the excitement of the Digital transformations conference , my first time going anywhere on my own for  along time I had to get back to making new things . 

I've been working for a while on a longer length video based on a copy of Johnny Mnemonic I bought a while back from a charity shop, its Ntsc coded , but as I have a few vhs players stashed for emergencies and nostalgia that play NTSC that wasn't a problem. Why this particular film and why this particular tape ? 

Well I saw it when it first came out and later read the William Gibson short story its based on , Johnny Mnemonic fits in with a lot of the Glitch art and Vaporwave work that I follow online, especially the clunky ( though good for its day ) computer graphics and definitely the depiction of virtual reality and all seeing all powerful corporations that have the cures ( and cause) for diseases that they will not release for reasons of profitability. Also the tape was damaged so creating a lot of nice artifacts and noise. Its a nice piece of futurism and early fictional hacker culture , ah the future never seemed so grimy .

So the process goes something like this ; transfer tape to DVD via DVD recorder in real time, play back DVD onto mini TV screen , capture that playback using a circuit bent web cam that I'd recently finished . Edit film , add music . Then came the conference and I'd started to get into rewriting some of the codecs you find in Ffmpeg , so I put it aside until after . When I got back from the conference I'd changed my mind about what I wanted to do with the film , rather than it just being a straight glitching of the whole film I wanted to incorporate more sound and other sources , so I recorded a few more films through the previous method and started to edit at points where the circuit bent copy had dropped out too much to be readable , I want something to be broken , but not so far beyond broken that it becomes unreadable . There was the moment I realised Id have to go back and redo everything because too much light was shining between the screen and the camera , so I had to put a box over the camera and screen otherwise the camera would keep adjusting the white balance - and that black and white worked way better than colour films even though id replaced the infrared adjusted lens with a standard lens, these things matter .

The sound was sourced through the internet archive - old jazz sounds from the twenties slowed down and chopped up in Audacity - I tried LMMS ( Linux multimedia studio) but couldn't get my head round it quickly enough and also 1 other source which was a text file converted to speech using gespeaker , a great text to speech engine , must play around with those more . I wanted to add more sound as I've been told a couple of times that sound would improve the reception of what I'm making .

Anyway In the end the film ended up like this, I quite like the mix of retro hi-tech and old black and white films that I ended up with - all edited on Linuxmint LMDE2 ( due to the debacle of the meltdown and spectre patches messing up render speeds and compiling I had to switch back to pre-patch kernels, huge difference in speed and heat on the cpus under load )  . Clip below is from beginning of the finished film - the full film is here Down and out at the render farm

What is Glitch art ( Digital Transformations part 9 - copy it right seizure warning )

Glitch art works through the confounding of expectations , we expect to see a face , but then the face disintegrates or turns and leaves a trail of pixeldust , a familiar film disintegrates into chaos , narrative lost as characters melt and blur into one another and suddenly a horse bursts through the centre of a chest , eyes melt , sound squeals and breaks into electronica or voices heard from behind the refrigerator , muffled and high pitched like aliens communicating through a radiator - it relies on a familiarity with what we see on old media and internet memes , images from popular culture , or the screen pixelates into randomness and vhs noise , only to hover back with a half glimpse of an eye , or a horse or a train or an asemic text describing who knows what . If our sources come from the environment in which we move , still life equals the advert I just saw or the half downloaded video from pirate bay or a broken video on youtube. If everything is downloadable everything is usable. For instance Dawnia Darkstones' reworking of the lion King as ' Electronic Divinity' : ( I'm issuing a seizure warning before you watch this as its fairly flashy and flickery )

The material we work with naturally includes that which is copyrighted , we access it either through torrent or screen capture , or ripping , or rarer feedback loops created through arcane systems of mirrors and old crts ( cracked ray tube ) taking this raw material is neutral , using this raw material renders it into something new , a lot of its base material or porn , which asks questions ( what of , exploitation , re-exploitation ) just because of the amount of movement and skin tone possibly , but in the re making it becomes something else - almost un-porn , though erotic glitch is a sub-genre . The internet and other media is all seen as raw material - to make into something new is fine but to take someone else's re- rendered work and call it your own is not okay , as is work which skirts close to being indistinguishable from the raw material .

But then I share a lot of my work under the creative commons license , share and share alike , as long as you grant the next in line who uses it the same rights as you grant originally - a cornerstone of remix culture . and as all source material is available to everyone some things get repeated - see the North Korean parades and the work of Thomas Collet  https://vimeo.com/206455322- a natural source we are drawn to like moths to flames - seeking out more obscure sources becomes an obsession in which for me the internet archive holds the key.


The politics of glitch art and open source. ( no mac book required)


Glitch art is a process , that process can be used to describe what is and what isn’t glitch art. To make work in this way it's not enough to have a good brand name expensive computer, often that can be a hindrance leading to a laziness of production, an app can make something which looks like glitch , a glitch alike , but it will have appearance only , the sub culture I find myself in values exploration and discovery , the smooth interface does not lend itself to an inquiry into error , as some of the greatest works of art come out of a restriction of resources so many works of glitch art are made with cheap and broken second hand equipment , it's not the fastest or shiniest device which wins , its novelty , uniqueness, and inquiry , maybe similar to traditional art , what is different though is audience , reception and the gallery of the screen , a painting or sculpture might exist within a gallery as a thing to be seen by a specific audience , they are static , as is film received through cinema or television ,or satellite , what glitch art does that is different is declare here is what we make here are the tools, make something ,it is not received passively it encourages making.

Much of the software and a lot of the methods we use, the simple act of tampering with a codec, or even something as simple as playing a medium such as a dvd with an open source video player including libdvdcss, could in some jurisdictions be considered illegal , in fact much of the content in this presentation has been accessed or referenced in ways which could be considered illegal, ie screen capturing, downloading and reuse of images without consent, in an age when ideas of legality fly in the face of the sheer volume of content and ease of reproduction and manipulation copyright is surely dead . Just like Glitch art itself.

What is Glitch art ( Digital Transformations part 8 - The Gallery is dead )

Whilst glitch art does not need galleries or a physical existence , its exhibition space is as wide as the web will stretch it does tend to self organize . Online residencies and exhibition spaces , such as the Wrong http://thewrong.org/ 

The wrong .

, Super art modern museum http://spamm.fr/
 

Spamm SuPer art Modern museum

 

 and real life organised events such as Fubar 2017 in zagreb croatia

attest to a vibrant scene that is largely sidestepping the traditional gallery . Curating and displaying work on our own terms .

What is Glitch art ( Digital Transformations part 7 - Glitch art and Porn )

The one thing that the INTERNET is really good at is porn and torrents - ready source material especially the method of the incomplete download - an incomplete file will play and melt in unpredictable and subtle ways , but why use porn as source material at all given its ethical and moral implications?  Porn has the movement , texture and color that glitch works well with , and Glitch art reflects the network in which it exists  , Facebook groups , server farms , halted downloads , slow speed connections - the anticipation of loading a porn page only for it to halt at the moment of ( climax ) underlines one of the key moments in glitch , the halt state , when what is expected suddenly confounds - the narrative of this becomes the work of artists such as Mathieu St Pierre and his P2p2014 series and his newer clickbait series see more of his work at https://www.mathieustpierre.com/

Mathieu st Pierre - Paxxion 2014

Mathieu st Pierre - click-bait 2016

And the work of Domineco.Dom.Barra aka DMNC_RMX & NITROGLITCHERINA 

who puts the dirty into dirty new media , Dom has exhibited widely and worked with Jon Cates of SAIC http://www.saic.edu/profiles/faculty/joncates/   another central figure in Glitch art , and coiner of the phrase ' Dirty new media' which stands in opposition to the clean lines and aesthetically insipid look of commercial digital media and photoshop perfection . Find more of Dom's work here http://homeostasislab.com/Dom-Barra 

Further reading here :
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/7xp35x/glitch-porn-makes-being-naked-on-the-internet-interesting-again

What is Glitch art ( Digital Transformations part 6 - How is it made? Codecs and aesthetics )

Manipulating the h261 codec before compiling into ffmpeg

A codec ( short for encode decode ) defines how a moving image , sound or still will be encoded into a data stream or container and can then be read back using the corresponding decoder . We can get between the 2 processes by introducing error at either stage, the nature of that intervention and the codec involved determines the final results , (though often these results need to be captured in playback by using screencapture) depending on variables such as size , format and movement , a video with little movement will not bend that much , a video with lots of movement will change greatly , jpeg is harder to bend than say bmp , raw video reacts to sonification better than H264 . Generally raw file formats are easier to work with than compressed formats , different file viewers will show the same image or video differently , vlc won't play the snow codec , one of the most beautiful codecs to break , but another viewer like mpv will, so hardware and software choices become important , and can change the results of what has been done to a file . In the same way as knowing how to stretch a canvas is important in painting , as is how to mix and thin oil paints or acrylics, Glitch aesthetics are reliant on the building blocks of codecs , or in analog glitch the language of the hardware to which they are tied . 

Glitch art is a process , that process can be used to describe what is and what isn’t glitch art - these are some of the processes and programs we use

Mario Pinto Balsameo -2016

Rob Mac - wordpad effect

The wordpad effect - quite simply open a bmp file in wordpad , the standard simple text editor present in windows in windows 95 alter some data , save it as txt , rename it to bmp then open it as an image again , all files are information , they take on their correct form when using the correct program if you use the wrong program they become corrupted - can also be applied to audio and video in most text editors , each giving a different result. Using wordpad also leads into hex editing , the physical manipulation of the hex code that makes up each file in machine readable form.

Sonification  - opening an image or video file in an audio editor such as Audacity , applying effects then saving .

Kevin Chambers -divx-aic-dds-audacity 

Datamoshing is probably one of the most accessible and widespread forms of glitch art , a way to play with compression artifacts that relies on the structure of video files such as xvid and mp4 which break motion into changing and unchanging , recording only the change between each frame , datamoshing involves either removing the I frames which indicate motion so that images start to blend into each other or interleaving two different videos at points where one breaks through the other pioneered in works such as divxprime a collaboration between Bertrand Planes and Christian Jacquemin in 2006 on a modified divx codec.

 Dawnia Darkstone - Cavs Hex-editing and datamosh.

One of the most commonly used tools for this is Avidemux which in older versions allowed you to load a video file and manually search through a file removing the i frames then trans-coding the file with the errors still in place , though primarily a tool that works with h264 in mp4 it works well with xvid in avi wrapper and strangely webm a newer form of codec from Google ( otherwise known as vp8/9) which breaks as soon as you move through it enabling you to live datamosh ( though not on newer versions ) . There are newer scripts , especially Kasper Ravels' Tomato ( available through git hub) and also the ruby script Aviglitch which automates the tedious task of removing I frames.

Processing is coding for artists , Processing is a bit like a swiss army knife for artists , it covers video , image , sound , interaction in an easily understandable form which is open source and free to use and modify , one of the newer tools we use is made within processing - the glic codec .Which gathers together many of the faults and possibility's inherent within different file formats to enable easier manipulation which can result in images like the next ones:

Daniel Vasconcelas - glic codec in processing.

Mael Lencot - glic and webp

Processing can also be used to create another strand in glitch art , generative art : 

Robert Hruska-krotitel-pixelov

Pixel sorting , pixel sorting is probably the most contentious and overused method in glitch art , it basically sorts colour values of pixels by brightness and colour, there are a many tutorials on how to do it , and even photoshop/ae plug-ins you can buy to automate it and make it easy ,( though ease of making implies laziness of thought and the derision of your fellow glitch artists - we prize novelty and a unique approach) original processing scripts were created by Kim Asendorff in 2012 and since then have gone on to delight and ruin many page feeds.  

Cliff Potberg - grshit pixelsort-2015

Detterentpoem -pixelsort

Heinz Schielmann-2017

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For the truly lazy send a picture to Twitterbot @pixelsorter ( created by Way Spur Chen).
Circuit-bending.

My own personal introduction to glitch art was through camera error and finding the work of Philip Stearns and his ‘year of the glitch’ from 2012 find that here https://phillipstearns.wordpress.com/2012/03/12/cameras-of-year-of-the-glitch/ . This is one of the cameras I use in a lot of my own video work stripped down and being worked upon ( here I'm soldering onto the ccd to create shortcircuit points).

There is a whole subculture and companies devoted to rewiring and remaking old video mixers and effects consoles for reuse in video installations , music videos and art , one of the best companies is Tachyons who release well made and desirable video synths .

Tachyons opti-glitch video synth in action.

3d .obj moshing one of the more interesting sub-genres of glitch art involves taking 3d computer models and running htem through the glitch process , best typified by the work of Mark Klink , allied with the possibilities of 3d printing ( and 3d printing error ) this has a real possibility of changing sculptural practice - imagine being able to freely share , download and print and remix, what previously would have been the preserve of the collector, gallery or museum ) find Marks work at http://www.markklinkart.com/gallery/

Douglas.Paul.nonononono-transient permanence

Mark Klink - head 2.022-variant01

  

Mark Klink - assembly 010 v03

What is Glitch art ( Digital Transformations part 5 - The death of the art critic and gallery curation )

Nick Yasa - Fuck gac (2017)

If it does not need a gallery to be shown , it follows that it does not need the cozy gate way keeper clique of gallery, curator and collector , and typical cultural audience, that’s why I have a problem with the phrase ‘ new media’ . which I see as a way for traditional art to co-opt newer forms of work to sustain its moribund paradigm.

If art criticism and career art speak has no place who then ascribes value and criticality to glitch art ( or art primarily existing on-line ) my contention is that like the INTERNET itself in a way akin to file sharing criticism itself is as blunt as sharing and reputation likes and novelty - how far does something stretch what can be done , how novel is it and how many times has it been shared and liked , the lifespan of most pieces if i can call them that is truly minimal - a successful piece reaches and perpetuates itself further than most , unsuccessful ones fall into the void .

It also has a level of self criticism , ‘ Where's the glitch fam’ is used when work is just simple photoshop filter fests or after effects laziness , in a recent post to GAC Nick Yasa posted the image above which pokes fun at the laziness and self absorption of some of the posters – titled ‘Fuck gac’ – although the cost of admission is free it requires you at least make the effort .

If the birth of modernism starts with cubism , if the camera killed the need for visual art to be a medium of record, leading to a deeper exploration of the possibilities of representation or the need to be representational at all , so the rise of the network and cheap computing devices attached to those networks kills off the need for physical media or gallery presence and self organises its own criticality . An artists literacy used to be defined by drawing and command of paint , or clay or steel , or more recently curatorial artspeak, now a new literacy has emerged .

What is Glitch art ( Digital Transformations part 4 - Relation to traditional art )

Glitch art cannibalizes the art of the past as source material. With the advent of cheap high speed internet access and the low cost of computing devices and the zero cost of open source software anything that can be found online or on media devices is fair game.  The art of the past becomes the source on which we cut our teeth and learn our craft .

Laura Boergadine Sapp - pixelsort of Vermeers girl with a pearl earring 2018

Greek and Roman classical sculpture is a staple of much glitch art ( and vaporwave)

Riccardo Di Trani - Laocoon

I struggle with finding a relationship between traditional art and glitch art as I believe they are fundamentally different , traditional art is grounded in real space, uniqueness and possession, whereas glitch art is grounded in our experiences of and interaction with technology , specifically its malfunction , mediated and disseminated through on line social networks. 

For the most part its practitioners are amateurs and untrained in the traditional sense, but  knowing how to use computers or devices as second nature, breaking the old art school atelier tutor/student system and if the gallery is the screen , and the studio is the screen and your peers are constantly present regardless of location what purpose do traditional art schools have? What is also different to traditional art is audience , reception and the gallery of the screen , a painting or sculpture might exist within a gallery as a thing to be seen or bought by a specific audience, they are static , as is film received through cinema or television, or satellite, what glitch art does that is different is declare here is what we make here are the tools, make something ,it is not received passively it encourages making, the unique object that can be possessed becomes valueless, replaced by images and ideas that can be universally accessed, edited and shared.

Ideas such as finish , the resolved piece , the object in general , concept and ownership become irrelevant ( though attribution of source is always stressed) , instead replaced with immediacy , novelty and speed , sometimes works generating works in response within seconds , the idea of the conversation in art between artist and audience becomes the cut and thrust of post and counter-post . Work becomes intensely collaborative ( see the facebook group Glitch request) as does the exchange of technique and tools ( see the facebook group GAC tooltime ) - it's art at the speed of social media update which traditional art just cannot keep up with or even comprehend .

We eat traditional art as material. 

see also http://www.theperipherymag.com/on-the-arts-glitch-it-good/

What is Glitch art ( Digital Transformations part 3 - The influence of Glitch art )

Glitch arts influence can be seen heavily in the worlds of advertising , fashion and design such as trailers for the recent film ghost in the shell ;

Ghost in the shell trailer 2017

Simple Minds new promotional material with images by Heitor Magno ( find his work here Heitor Magnos' work) which refer back to images by Rosa menkman and especially her ‘vernacular of file formats’ - 

Heitor Magno cover for Simple Minds 'Walk between worlds'

Rosa Menkman from 'a vernacular of file formats'

' A vernacular of file formats' is a hugely influential treatise written by Menkman which runs through image formats , they way they can be be destroyed and re-written , and I see it as a huge influence on modern design aesthetics and advertising in general - you can find a copy of it here  https://www.slideshare.net/r00s/rosa-menkman-a-vernacular-of-file-formats-4923967

though her Glitch studies manifesto could be considered equally as important.

In footwear - Adidas GLITCH football boot system, its design ,advertising, concept and slang #GLITCHFAM ( similar to Glitch artists collective  where’s the glitch fam ( plus use in their adverts of concept of open source etc, words like hacked) which not only incorporates style elements and artifacts seen in glitch but also co-opts its language and some of its source , ie the open source movement where a lot of glitch arts tools come from and are shared ( more glitch aesthetic - lost count of how many times  people in certain groups ask if there's an ae plug in or photoshop method for creating glitch look and feel. Though it must be said from an artists point of view these take the appearance rather than the substance of glitch art , it isn’t a search for error that characterises these uses for the main , more a search for modernity and edge, the concerns of design over art.

Naimus studio for Adidas 2017

Though in textiles ( which with jacquard looms could be seen as a precursor to computing ) - Phillip Stearns has successfully transferred his investigations into circuit bent cameras into glitch textile design which has been taken up by Dior and others )  find his work here https://www.glitchtextiles.com/
and work for Dior -
http://www.phillipstearns.com/christian-dior/7htev3wi29yycyr9lvx4912x0km0dd

In the print medium Glitch creeps in everywhere , this from the Guardian is a very basic pixelsort ( an explanation of that term later ) the most overused method in glitch art .

What is Glitch art ? ( Digital Transformations part 2 - The rise of Glitch art ).

The rise of glitch art 

Most glitch artists would claim - Nam June Paik , and early video artists from the sixties , as precursors , they saw a way in which the medium could be made to interrogate itself , especially using video feedback and the misuse of hardware ( early circuit bending)

 

Nam June Paik - excerpt from Video film concert 1965  

and they would definitely claim the work and methodology of Stan Brakhage especially his use of film scratching and the non narrative nature of his work , as glitch art is mainly non narrative and also makes use of analog material such as damaged vhs and copying sources to the point of degradation.

Stan Brakhage - Dog star man (1961-65)

But the first real inklings of something like glitch art , a purposeful mistreatment of digital or analog devices / software to create meaningful error comes in the form of 'Digital Tv Dinner' by Jamie Fenton and Raul Zaritsky with sound by Dick Ainsworth which apparently was made by banging or pulling the cartridge out of a primitive games console, and recording the output which shows how low tech glitch art can get.

 

Digital Tv Dinner 1979.

But really took off with the beginnings of the INTERNET in the early to late nineties networks , the fall in the price of computing devices and software , hacker culture and the spread of open source ideas and operating systems , for instance the work of the Jodi collective (Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans)website http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/) which is well worth a visit  and a series of game modifications especially ‘untitled game’ which exploits an error within the game engine of Wolfenstein to render something close to art , these are also downloadable and playable .

Jodi collective - untitled game Ctrl-space 

for further reading see http://media.rhizome.org/artbase/documents/Untitled-Project:-A-Cross-Disciplinary-Investigation-of-JODI%E2%80%99s-Untitled-Game.pdf  

game ROM modification (vinesauce corruption(vinesauce is an emulator for playing game systems games on PC) and physical modification ) being one of the things that feeds into glitch art - 

see more here  http://corruptedbytes.com/the-vinesauce-rom-corruptor/

and physical games machine modification with parallels to Digital Tv Dinner  :

 All of the above , and an increasingly digitally saturated and mediated environment have lead to an Aesthetics of failure , one of the first conferences to recognise and bring together these various strands was held in 2002 in Oslo , Norway see here http://www.liveart.org/motherboard/glitch/

and then Chicago in October of 2010 saw the first GLI.TC/H Organized by Nic Briz ( see later - glitch codec tutorial) Evan Meaney, Joe satrom and Rosa menkman , one of modern glitchs greatest influences , especially her ‘vernacular of file formats’
see here http://gli.tc/h/online.html
and here https://rosa-menkman.blogspot.ie/

What is Glitch art ? ( Digital Transformations talk part 1)

We live in an environment which though increasingly mediated and experienced through technology, which promises a fitter, happier more productive life is filled with error.

 

The notorious Windows blue screen of death, a 404 error looking for a website which is unreachable or unreadable in an outdated browser missing plug-ins,

skipping CDs , VHS tracking errors ( for those of us who remember VHS), sat navs directing us off cliffs or to move to roads which do not exist , the crashing of driver-less cars which fail to recognize obstacles, creepy Alexa voices laughing randomly in the night:

In broken times we make broken art that reflects the fractured nature of our existence , the distracting siren call of social media updates , funny cat gifs , glitch art looks at everything with a hammer in its eye .

What is it ?

Glitch art is a way to interrogate that error - through the creative exploitation and creation of error within software and hardware .

When I talk about Glitch art I will be referring to visual art specifically - Glitch has a long history in music , especially Techno , Hip Hop and Electronica , Chiptune ( see Autechre , Aphex twin , Radiohead) and the newer Extratone genre, which goes back into the nineties and arguably the fifties with music concrete .

Where is it ?

Glitch art generally exists within the gallery of the screen, its natural environment and breeding ground , in places like You tube, on Instagram, Flickr, Tumblr with its rich feed of work

or groups like Glitch Artists Collective on Facebook,

or built upon banks of monitors in installations by Cracked Ray Tube ( one of the standard forms of new media art the stack of CRTs )

Glitch art is related to :

Though I’m going to be talking primarily about Glitch art its useful to define other movements which are contemporaneous , to avoid later confusion as visually one may look like the other but come from different intentions .

New aesthetic 

Google map error

a movement commonly acknowledged to have emerged around 2012 - it talks about the newer phenomenon of virtual and real life boundaries starting to merge and blur think drone photography , Pokemon go , ubiquitous surveillance and a nostalgia for older games machines , graphics and iconography - in music the chip tune phenomenon ( chip tune music made with older technology such as the c64 sid sound card and super Nintendo - a nostalgia for a future crossed with the knowledge of observation), it also appropriates some of the language of glitch art .

Vaporwave :

Beachport channel by Campton Raven

Vaporwave is the child of software and hardware dreams that never quite happen , a play on the term vapor-ware ( software or hardware  features that are always coming soon but never quite arrive ) it encompasses cool glitch jazz and synth tunes from Ceefax after station close down along with an iconography that plays with old computing adverts , classical sculpture , 80s smash hits design , dolphins and lots of irony - it’s a nostalgic look back to a future that never happened

Forward to a retro future ( artist unknown)

Perfect users - not so much a movement , more a mindset and commentary on how we use Facebook and social media in general, it uses some of the techniques and language of glitch art ( there is a large crossover of artists between each genre ) and in its reuse of notification icons and emojis it has a lot akin with post-modernism . Typified by the Facebook group perfect users and the work of William Wolfgang Wunderbar

And also the video work of Harlan Ogilvy

Fashwave ( vaporwave for alt-right Nazis )

Fashwave ( or alternately Trumpwave) is a strange phenomenon in that it appropriates the language of vaporwave , especially the classical sculptures ( remember Nazi culture leaned heavily on the neoclassical and an idea that modern art was degenerate ) fashwave works by co-opting INTERNET trends and furthering their message by infiltrating groups with co-opted imagery and trying to subvert the conversation and direction of groups by making the unacceptable gradually acceptable - essentially a Trojan horse.

okay , so now we have some definitions out of the way how did we get here ?