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 .
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 .
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.
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 .
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 .
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 -
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/
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 ?
At the moment I'm obsessed by old silent cowboy films and horses, a constant theme in my work. I've spent a couple of days putting together this video ( cowboy dreams ) from various sources and using various methods .
I found the film ' The son of a gun' on the Internet archive site ( think I've mentioned that before) , looking for things to run through my latest set up , a resurrected circuit bent webcam I first used in 2012 and a tiny 5inch Roadstar TV I found at a local junk market in working condition that is perfect for running video through as it sizes down everything so the webcam can take in the whole screen - I'm using the lens of an old play-station eye toy as it focuses really well at close distance , and I've found some really nice bends I hadn't found before . The mini monitor has really changed the way that I'm working .
This is the web-cam in its new configuration , a lot more wires ,
dedicated pots , all held together with hot glue ! You can just about
see the mini monitor in the background , so so tiny .
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.
