Assignments

Due Next Week: (prior to our Skype meeting)

1 – Final Project Update

In advance of our Skype meeting, please write up a short summary (approx. 250 words) discussing your idea for a final project. This is not intended as a final statement, that will come in a few weeks when you write the first installment of your Project Hyperessay. I just want your thoughts even though the idea may evolve or change altogether. Please include any relevant images or video, either your own work, or a work that has particularly influenced your idea. Be sure and use “Final Project” as the category for your blog post. During our Skype meeting, your Final Project Update will be the basis for our discussion.

Due Next Week: Wednesday, September 23

2 – Micro-Project: Glitched Aberrations

Choose a Photoshop.psd image and use Text Edit to glitch it and Preview to see the results, which can you post as your Micro-Project assignment. Be sure and use the category “micro-project.”

For full details about the project:

• Micro-Project: Glitched Aberrations

It turns out that Rosa Menkman’s instructions in the Vernacular of File Formats don’t give the results they used to with the current version of Photoshop, so just do the assignment as written.

Due Three Weeks: Thursday, October 8

3 – Reading

• Dixon, S. (2007) “Webcams: The subversion of Surveillance” (pg. 443-455), Digital Performance, 2007

4 – Research Critique: Public vs Private

You will be assigned an artwork to research for a short 250 word hyperessay about the work, the artist, and how it relates specifically to the topic of the week. Incorporate the reading (see above), as relevant, into your research post, discussing how it relates contextually to the work you are critiquing. Use the Lecture Notes in the Private vs Public page of the Syllabus to prepare your research, where you will find documentation and links about each of the works.

Research Critique Assignments:

Here are additional instructions for the research critique:

• Create a new post on your blog incorporating relevant hyperlinks, images, video, etc
• Add a featured image
• Apply the “Research” category
• Apply appropriate tags
• Post a comment on at least one other research post prior to the following class

Works for review:

• Jennifer Ringley, Jennicam, (1997)
• Eva and Franco Mattes, Life Sharing, (2000)
• Hasan Elahi, Tracking Transience 2.0 (2003)

5 – Final Project Update

Following our Skype meeting, please write up a short summary (approx. 250 words) revising your idea for the final project.  Base your revision on any new ideas that came up during the meeting, along with any suggestions I make for additional research. This revised version should carry the idea forward, or perhaps reflect a new idea you have. Be sure and use “Final Project” as the category for your blog post. We will discuss your ideas during our next class on October 8.

Outline

Works for study:

• Dirk Paesmans & Joan Heemskerk, Jodi.org,  (1995)

NOTE: Each time you go to Jodi.org, you will encounter a different Website. Here are a few of sites you may find interesting. Once entering, click and explore if you dare!

http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/

http://text.jodi.org/

http://joid.org/archive/

http://compositeclub.cc/

“We are honored to be in somebody’s computer” boast art collective Jodi.org in 1995, who early on in the age of the Web, instantly became the medium’s most celebrated and notorious artists. Their aim was to deconstruct the interface of the Web and reveal the code hidden beneath the surface. Their work essentially functioned as a viral entity that virtually embedded itself into the viewer’s own computer system, as the artists described: “We explore the computer from inside, and mirror this on the net. When a viewer looks at our work, we are inside his computer.’”

• They approach the computer and the creation of their work with a hacker intent: to probe, to disturb, to disrupt.
• The look at the Net as theatrical space, activating the space through coding. Code is for them a vehicle for transformation, for undermining the status quo.
• They were creating glitch art before it was called that. Their intent was to find the accidental disturbances of the machine and its language: to subvert the expectations, and expose its aberrations.
• Ultimately, they have revealed what lies beneath the surface of the “design” of the Web, reversing the role of code as a visual experience, rather than its functional qualities.

Jodi, or jodi.org, is a collective of two internet artists: Joan Heemskerk (born 1968 in Kaatsheuvel, the Netherlands) and Dirk Paesmans (born 1965 in Brussels, Belgium). Their background is in photography and video art; since the mid-1990s they started to create original artworks for the World Wide Web. A few years later, they also turned to software art and artistic computer game modification.

In 1999 they began the practice of modifying old video games such as Wolfenstein 3D to create art mods like SOD. Their efforts were celebrated in the 1999 Webby Awards where they took top prize in the category of “net art“. Jodi used their 5-word acceptance speech (a Webby Award tradition) to criticize the event with the words “Ugly commercial sons of bitches.” Further video game modifications soon followed for Quake, Jet Set Willy, and the latest, Max Payne 2 (2006) to create a new set of art games. Jodi’s approach to game modification is comparable in many ways to deconstructivism in architecture, because they would disassemble the game to its basic parts, and reassemble it in ways that do not make intuitive sense. One of their more well-known modifications of Quake places the player inside a closed cube with swirling black-and-white patterns on each side. The pattern is the result of a glitch in the game engine discovered by the artists, presumably, through trial and error; it is generated live as the Quake engine tries, and fails, to visualize the interior of a cube with black-and-white checked wallpaper.

Since 2002, they have been in what has been called their “Screen Grab” period, making video works by recording the computer monitor’s output while working, playing video games, or coding. Jodi’s “Screen Grab” period began with the four-screen video installation My%Desktop (2002), which premiered at the Plugin Media Lab in Basel. The piece appeared to depict mammoth Mac OS 9 computers running amok: opening windows cascaded across the screen, error messages squawked, and files replicated themselves endlessly. But this was not a computer gone haywire, but a computer user gone haywire. To make this video, Jodi simply pointed-and-clicked and dragged-and-dropped so frantically, it seemed that no human could be in control of such chaos. As graphics exploded across the screen, the viewer gradually realized that what had initially appeared to be a computer glitch was really the work of an irrational, playful, or crazed human. (This description matches Jon Cates’ Bold3RRR and provides fertile territory for live desktop performance.)

• Mark Napier, The Shredder (1997)

NOTE: The Shredder is no longer functional but explore the concept of how it worked as a custom browser.

Mark Napier’s The Shredder from 1997 was designed as a custom browser that enables the viewer to deconstruct or “shred” Websites. This work comes out of a long 20^th century practice of appropriation and collage of mass media, with the addition of user interactivity. Napier’s software application gives the viewer the ability to appropriate and generate their own collage work. And like Jodi.org, the work investigates the hidden mechanisms of the Web, revealing the underlying code and its operations.

• This form of collage find its roots in 20th century appropriation of mass media, such as in works by Robert Rauschenberg and Nam June Paik:

• Unlike Jodi, Mark Napier brought the viewer into an interactive relationship with subversive, hacker tactics.
• Napier changed the function of the browser into a tool for disruption. One of the first examples of what is now referred to as “software art.”
• In surprising ways, Napier demonstrates a way of viewing the underlying functionality of code as having aesthetic quality.
• The Shredder predates current glitch art because it essentially brings to the surface the accidents, errors and aberrations rather than the expected and controlled.

Mark Napier, Riot (1999)

NOTE: Riot is no longer functional but explore the concept of how it worked as a custom browser.

The Tompkins Square riots and the state sponsored enforcement of gentrification in New York’s East Village in the ’90s inspired Riot, an alternative browser that crosses the virtual boundaries in the web. Riot breaks the software-based rules of Internet domains and blends web pages together as users surf from site to site. Playboy.com blends with whitehouse.gov, CNN.com with NPR.org. Visitors surfing with Riot see their own pages merged with pages from other users. Riot was the first and only multi-user browser. Riot revealed the soft territories of the web, enforced by the rules of browser software and domain name servers.

Riot is an alternative Web browser that builds its page by combining text, images and links from the recent pages that any Riot user has surfed to more…

From the page instructions: Use RIOT as you would use any other browser:

• surf by entering a URL into the location bar
• choose a recent page from the history list
• choose from the Bookmarks.

Mark Napier is an early adopter of the web and developed my first web-based applications for financial data in 1996 while working for a market data startup called LPC. For much of my career I’ve worked in a designer/architect role – information architect and user experience – but my background in programming (Java/SQL, Javascript, C++, C) gives me insight into the inner workings of software systems. After LPC was sold to Reuters in the late ’90s I made a name for myself as a new-media artist and am considered to be a pioneer of digital art on the Internet. More recently, after several years in the big corporation experience at Thomson Reuters, I am back in startups, consulting for a new personal finance company.

• Rosa Menkman, Collapse of PAL (2012)

Note: Rosa Menkman is this week’s visiting artist. We will discuss her work with the artist present via Adobe Connect.

Rosa Menkman, guest speaker

Rosa Menkman, in her inspired treatise on glitch art, The Glitch Moment(um), speaks of the RUPTURE – the departure from conditions of the expected, the normality of the mediated experience – into the BEYOND, where systems fail, aberration prevails, and our preconception of systems and their flow of information is disrupted or even halted. The Ghost in the Machine? A destructive force at work in our digital systems revealed through accidental failures systematic to technology? Or perhaps an intentional act of digital subterfuge: artists searching for new modes of expression through the aesthetic construction of dazzling patterns and the disorientation of pixels.

And yet, Menkman’s critique of the exploding genre of glitch art reveals how little we understand of machines and their potential to fail. It is this lack of understanding that sets the stage for our wonderment of the breakdown, our attraction to the noise, our awe of the strange manifestations that the machine exudes when left to its own devices. Ironically, our design of machines is intended to produce concrete results, functional processes, and predictable behavioral patterns. But the machine is an independent entity in so many ways: it will pull itself back from our feeble attempts of control and wander into otherworldly realms of ephemeral, inexplicable renderings, that even we, the so-called masters of the system, could never imagine. THAT, in essence, is the magic. Like John Cage’s use of chance technique to break from habitual models of creation, the glitch manifested work is often a search for the impossible, in which the machine transcends our finite, human capability to shape reality.

You might call this “computer-assisted composition,” but it is much more than that. The machine is hardly a slave, it is our guide into the other world, a world only IT is native to, an alien world to us made up of blood and flesh. The machine resides in the fantastic world of the electrical and the mechanical, and yes, it can dream impossibly sublime beauty in which we, the artist, become the model posing for its creation.

(From The Ephemerality of the Machine by Randall Packer)

Rosa Menkman is an artist and theorist who focuses on visual noise artifacts, resulting from accidents in both analogue and digital media (such as glitch, encoding and feedback artifacts). Although many people perceive these accidents as negative experiences, Menkman emphasizes their positive consequences: these artifacts facilitate an important insight into the otherwise obscure alchemy of standardization via resolutions: the creation of solutions or protocols, and their black-boxed, unseen, forgotten or obfuscated compromises and alternative possibilities.

In 2011 Menkman wrote the Glitch Moment/um, a book on the exploitation and popularization of glitch artifacts (published by the Institute of Network Cultures), co-facilitated the GLI.TC/H  festivals in both Chicago and Amsterdam and curated the Aesthetics symposium of Transmediale 2012. Since 2012 Menkman has been curating exhibitions that intend to illuminate the different ecologies of glitch (filtering failure, glitch genealogies, glitch moment/ums). In 2015 Menkman started the institutions for Resolution Disputes [iRD], during her solo show at Transfer Gallery New York. The iRD are institutions dedicated to researching the interests of anti-utopic, lost and unseen or simply “too good to be implemented” resolutions. Menkman is also pursuing a PhD at Goldsmiths, London under the supervision of Matthew Fuller and Geert Lovink.

Housekeeping

• Rosa Menkman is our guest speaker tonight, she’ll be joining us at 9:00 pm SGT
• Next week is a holiday, Hari Raya Haji, so there will be no class. Instead, I will schedule individual Skype sessions on Tuesday and Wednesday of next week. We will also use next week to begin work on the final project. Prior to our Skype meeting, your assignment will be to write up a summary of your ideas in a blog post for discussion.
• The following week after that is recess, so we won’t be meeting again in Adobe Connect until Thursday, October 8th.
• The first installment of the Project Hyperessay is due October 15th. During the break, review the assignment and begin working towards the Hyperessay and the Powerpoint presentation. Review your Research Critiques, think about the various concepts we have discussed in class and how one or more of these ideas will apply to your Final Project idea. We will discuss the presentation in detail when we meet on October 8th when an additional Project Update will be due.

Pirate Broadcast II

Short discussion of everyone’s experience experiencing the live broadcast via Periscope.tv and its integration with social media and mobile devices. I am interested in the following based on your comments:

• What is the responsibility of the artist to create an engaging moment in the broadcast?
• Is it possible to broadcast anything, including the most mundane events?
• How does it change the dynamic of the broadcast when viewers are interacting?
• What is possible given the mobility of the broadcast?

Review of Assignments for Next Week