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)
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 .
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 -
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
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/
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/
