But what is a desktop ?
A lot of what I do at the moment is based around online collaborations with Format C ( https://formatc.hr/about/ ) Of which I am an associate member and specifically around a sub-project of Format C - medialab which at the moment is focused on a project called Suda https://formatc.hr/medialab-2021-diwo/
The previous post was about a script I've been working on called Mantissa which itself came out of ideas and discussions in Medialab which then fed back into the work we are doing in Medialab which led me back to discussions I've been having with myself about the nature of the computer desktop and what it actually is. So the process of making the script and showing the script in operation became a feedback loop in itself.
Mantissa itself doesn't do anything that other scripts and programs don't, what I perceive as broken when mantissa is running isn't broken, the scripts work mostly as I intended , as a self perpetuating feed back loop using the 'desktop' space as input via two cameras that act as observers of what is going on in a perpetually changing and evolving glitch via ffmpeg displacement. But it is very rigid , far more fun to start to interact with the process and move windows about and create feedback windows which follow the mouse around say by using ffplay in this way
ffplay -f x11grab -follow_mouse centered -framerate 10 -video_size 640x480 -i :0.0
Which leads me to this:
Why ? Feedback loops are essentially generative and what they create is often unexpected , depending on the elements I bring up or delete, open or close. It escapes the trap of looking for material to make glitch art from by becoming the process through which glitch is created in real time. And more than that it becomes an arena to play within outside the formal office space bounds of the gui based operating system or what we expect from video play back. If i use what i would usually consider to be a finished work as the basis for experimenting in this way I can stretch the work beyond the bounds of where I would have left it before ( this is an excerpt from a longer work):
Obviously we have, as an audience and as artists , been here before in different ways and I would be remiss if I did not mention or link to Jodis 'my%desktop' from 2002 here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPpUQQ7vMBk and further information here and here
