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.
