Jon Cates, Gl1tch.us

In the interview by Randall Packer, Glitch Expectations: A Conversation With Jon Cates, Jon Cates’ works are referred to as ‘dirty new media’, which is an apt description for the low-fi, hypnotic quality of his animations.  In the homepage of Gl1tch.us, the header image and layout brings to mind the work of David Carson.  Grungy, pixelled, deconstructed… It’s like the virtual version of what you get if you made printer ink smudges or colour half-tone. The low-res quality of gif images is both nostalgic and analog. Another description of the dirty new media I resonated with in the article is that the ‘dirtiness’ in this form of new media work suggests that there’s a human touch to it. I thought it’s a good thing to take note of and try to weave into my work online so that in terms of aesthetic and concept it’s congruent with my print work.

 

A closer look at the source code of Gl1tch.us site. I find the layout of source code fascinating sometimes. I’m no programmer and I’ve not done much research into why the layouts look like this, but from a typographical point of view, it makes for an interesting visual experience. One of the things I want to include in my virtual work is this idea of coding. Coding as the backbone and underlying side of what you see on a webpage. Perhaps in order to make this concept accessible for viewers, I could arrange my text layout online to resemble the source code. While typographical explorations on print are always fun, I’m quite excited to see what I can come up with online. I briefly showed the class one of the projects I did over the summer break with my friend where we made ‘glitch poetry’ using predictive text, and then we played with the type and layout. I think I can definitely take it further online by incorporating animated sequences.

 

 

 

Here’s another interesting web layout. This is Sunshine in My Throat by Rosa Menkman. I thought the animated bits were absolutely wacky and psychedelic. Just a visual reference of what I can do…

(ps. need to get started on some work too)