the glitch moment(um) by rosa menkman

Was introduced to this reading in Internet Art & Culture class. Rosa Menkman is a Dutch artist who is specialised in glitch art. She is also a theorist, specifically in the area of glitch art, so this piece of writing is a key reading for my project.

Some relevant points for my research:


brief history: the notion of glitch art was just crossing over from sound culture, and leaking into visual art cultures only sporadically. The bugs Goto80 used gave a very specific texture to the sound (the result of noise artifacts) and I began to develop and recognize visual equivalents to this process. I found more and more artifact-based correspondences between audio and visual technologies, such as compres- sions, feedback and glitches.

the collapse of pal (2010): I tried to underline that there is more to glitch art, and more at stake, than just design and aesthetics. The work addresses themes such as planned obsolescence, built-in nostalgia, critical media aes- thetics and the gentrification and continuing development of a glitch art genre.

definition of glitch according to rosa: I describe the ‘glitch’ as a (actual and/or simulated) break from an expected or conventional flow of information or meaning within (digital) communication systems that results in a perceived accident or error. A glitch occurs on the occasion where there is an absence of (expected) functional- ity, whether understood in a technical or social sense. Therefore, a glitch, as I see it, is not always strictly a result of a technical malfunction.

relationship between technical and metaphorical or cultural dimensions of glitch culture. Focusing on the glitch within this broader perspective makes it possible to think through some of the more interesting political and social uses of the glitch within the field of digital art.

Moreover, glitch transitions between artifact and filter, or, in other words, between radical breakages and commodification.

glitch studies manifesto:

2. Dispute the operating templates of creative practice. Fight genres, interfaces and expectations! Refuse to stay locked into one medium or between contradictions like real vs. virtual, ob- solete vs. up-to-date, open vs. proprietary or digital vs. analog. Surf the vortex of technol- ogy, the in-between, the art of artifacts!

4. Employ bends and breaks as metaphors for différance. Use the glitch as an exoskel- eton for progress. Find catharsis in disintegration, ruptures and cracks; manipulate, bend and break any medium towards the point where it becomes something new; create glitch art.

5. Realize that the gospel of glitch art also tells about new standards implemented by corruption. Not all glitch art is progressive or something new. The popularization and cultivation of the avant-garde of mishaps has become predestined and unavoidable. Be aware of easily reproducible glitch effects automated by softwares and plug-ins. What is now a glitch will become a fashion.

.gif + dither: Graphics Interchange Format is a bitmap image format that supports 8 bits per pixel. This compression can therefore consist of no more then 256 colors. The format supports animation and employs dither (a grain or block artifact). Dither helps to prevent images from displaying or transforming into large-scale patterns such as ‘banding’ (a stepped process of rendering smooth gradations in brightness or hue).

what happens to glitch? However, if the cause of the glitch remains unknown, the glitch can either be ignored and forgotten, or transformed into an interpretation or reflection on a phenomenon (or the memory there- of) defined by a social or cultural context (conventions, histories, perspectives) and the technology that is malfunctioning.

humanizing errors: A glitch represents a loss of control. The glitch makes the computer itself suddenly appear unconventionally deep, in contrast to the more banal, predictable surface-level behaviors of ‘normal’ machines and systems. The glitch has become a new mode; and its previous uncanny encounter has come to register as an ephemeral, personal experience of a machine.

accident of art: Notions of disaster, aesthetics of failure and accidental events have been integral to modern and contemporary art, Avant-Garde progressions and turnings.

To invent the sailing ship or steamer is to invent the shipwreck. To invent the train is to invent the rail accident of derailment. To invent the family automobile is to produce the pile-up on the highway. To get what is heavier than air to take off in the form of an aeroplane or dirigible is to invent the crash, the air disaster. As for the space shuttle, Challenger, its blowing up in flight in the same year that the tragedy of Chernobyl occurred is the original accident of a new motor, the equivalent of the first ship-wreck of the very first ship.

— Paul Virilio

cultural meaning: Virilio argues that although many people encounter ac- cidents as negative experiences, an accident can also have positive consequences. The accident doesn’t only equal failure, but can also ‘reveal something absolutely necessary to knowledge’. The accident (and thus the glitch) shows a system in a state of entropy and so aids towards an understanding of the ultimate functioning of a system. This opens up space for research and practice, and the arts are a special domain for this. Dadaists and Surrealists cannot be understood without World War 1. Virilio explains how WW1 blew reality into pieces and how the cubist painter Georges Braque collected those pieces and put them back together, not just as a formalist experiment or as a destruction of perspective but as an artistic realism appropri- ate to the techno-cultural present. Thus, many artists could only use some (destroyed or mutilated) form of figuration. This understanding leads Virilio to conclude that in the art of the accident. In the digital realm, what has come to be known as glitch art deals with the digital dimension of error, accident and disaster from different angles, within a larger context of cultural meaning.

defining glitch art?  Their destructive or disfiguring processes have no technological name, definition or explanation (yet). For this reason, it is necessary to not only define and categorize glitch at technological levels, but also to look closely at how specific media are exploited on a more complex techno-cultural level.

databend generative artists such as stAllio!, glitch-irion Pixelnoizz and Hellocatfood.

inherent openness of glitch as a concept makes glitch art difficult, if not impossible, to define.

binary approach to glitch art? 

Design-driven glitch art has tended to be referred to as artificial or ‘glitch-alike’. Iman Moradi has gone so far as to develop a true-false binary to deal with these matters of glitch imitation, which he explains with the following statement and schema: Because of the intrinsic nature of this imagery and its relation to pure glitches, both in terms of process and viewer perception, I felt the need to form a word that adequately describes this artifact’s similarity with actual glitches and present it as an obviously separate entity. Thus the term “Glitch-alike” came about to fulfil this role. […] Glitch-alikes are a collection of digital artefacts that resemble visual aspects of real glitches found in their original habitat.

binaryglitch

intentional faux-pas: They challenge the ideological aspects of proprietary design by misrepresenting existing relationships between specific media functionalities and the aesthetic experiences normally associated with them.

You cannot prohibit the catastrophe, you must surf it!11

– PAUL VIRILIO

the perfect glitch: The perfect glitch exists, momentarily, at the shocking tipping point between (potential) failure and a movement towards the creation of a new understanding. The glitch’s inherent moment(um), the power it needs or has to pass through an existing membrane or semblance of understanding, helps the utterance to become an unstable ar- ticulation of counter-aesthetics, a destructive generativity.

built-in obsolescence and pop culture: technological progressions causes built-inp obsolescence. things are designed to last x number of years before they become obsolete. I would like to argue that this economical reasoning is very much connected to the growing fetishization of nostalgic imperfection in (glitch) art, which over the last decades has become a kind of conceptual virus. Today it is completely normal to pay extra money for aesthetically appealing plugins like Hipstamatic or Instagram, that imitate (analogue) imperfections or nostalgic errors, like ‘faux vintage’ lens flare and lomographic discolorations.

 

 

Research: Derrida’s deconstruction

Notes from various books on Derrida’s deconstruction.

Deconstruction For Beginners, Jim Powell

Our minds work by way of binary opposites. They form pairs:

east/west
male/female
mind/body
muslim/pagan
christian/pagan
sacred/profane
speech/writing

Our minds make use of this kind of either/or logic to put everything in the world into neat little categories. The problem is that we tend to privilege one memeber of the pair and repress/oppress the other. This kind of phallogocentric thinking governs not only our social life, but our philosophical, scientific, literary and legal thought as well.

Deconstruction is a way of reading a text.

Derrida Reframed, K. Malcolm Richards

Destruction is not a negative act, but also a positive act, such as clearing away something that is no longer useful. The term ‘to deconstruct’ conjures an image of a structure or object in mid-air, suspended, all of its parts visible. Deconstruction can also conjure an image of something in the midst of collapse, not destroyed, but falling apart — a ruin, even. To deconstruct something suggests that the act of taking something apart can be the first step toward understanding something anew.

The idea of delay can be thought of in the way the meaning of a work of art accrues only with time. When we examine works of art or popular culture closely and on more than one occasion, the meaning of the work will be different over time. If delay is one element to differance, then difference is the other. This spatial distance structuring our exterior relations to the world is simultaneously a structure dependent on internal constructs. These internal constructs framing our relation to the world collide with the myriad external structures that come to mediate our visual experience.

The role of institutions in constructing our image of the part impacts in some way our image of the present. In framing what is included and excluded for an exhibition, numerous decisions must be made. In the space of the archive, however, reside objects that have the potential to deconstruct the values framing an institution. (Christopher William’s) work offers powerful examples of how an artist’s work can be further appreciated by approaching it from a deconstructive stance. Williams also works frequently with archives, finding in the space of the archive a space filled with potential for deconstruction.

Research: B Is For Bauhaus

Just read a book ‘B Is For Bauhaus’ by Deyan Sudjic. It’s a book about understanding contemporary culture and design.

Here’s some interesting things I found in the book that will be relevant to my report.

On our relationships with our possessions,

The collecting impulse is universal, and it goes on to the roots of what is it to be human. It pre-dates mass production and design, but it reveals the essential nature of our relationship with our possessions, how they communicate with us, and the various ways in which we value them. understanding the nature of collecting tells us something about ourselves as well as the nature of things.

To collect any object, we have traded in the original meaning and are looking for something else from them.

The journal is a repository of memories and events. These are also considered possessions. When I look at my archive again, I find myself looking for something else from the words and drawings that I’ve made over the years. Many times I draw the comparison between the person I am then, and now. These are markings that indicate my growth as a person and a creative.

We collect possessions to comfort ourselves, from addiction and to measure out the passing of our lives. We collect because we are drawn to the subtler pleasure of nostalgia for the recent past, and the memory of far-distant history. We collect sometimes to signal our distress and console ourselves in our inability to deal with the world. These are the motivations that designers need to understand, and the qualities which they manipulate when they create objects, whatever their nominal function.

I’m particular drawn to the point he made about distress and consoling ourselves. This year I hardly made any drawings. My journals are filled instead with writing that I made in order to try to understand my own FYP concept better. I also find myself grappling with the struggle of being with a young adult. Time and finance are the resources that have to keep competing with each other, and it makes me feel frustrated. I find that I must divide my time and attention each week to work commitments, FYP, and spending time with friends and family. I look at my older journals and I find that I lost the luxury to make the drawings and writings that I used to. I rarely have the time to feel bored anymore, each moment is dedicated to keeping up with my to-do list. I guess it’s one of the reasons why I needed to deactivate myself from social media. In becoming a young adult, some of these juvenile struggles have definitely (and thankfully) faded away, but along with that, I also lose the need to make artwork about these things. But that’s not to say that I need to be some kind of angsty youth to fuel my creative process. Looking at my journal archive also makes me realise that I sometimes need to not give a damn, and occasionally make some impulsive artwork that makes no sense. To think like a child again.

Collecting is in one sense about remembering, but the digital world never lets us forget anything. Paradoxically, it has also undermined our ability to remember. Our email and text trails will last as long as the server farms that have already conferred a kind of immortality on anybody with a Twitter account.”

This point is definitely relevant to the virtual part of my work. My project is split between my virtual and physical archives. It documents the relationships made online and off.

We remember where we started from online, because the date is recorded when we first made friends on the virtual realm. Green buttons tell me that I know you from a measurable distance. Conversations are trivialized with the advent of animated and very expressive egg man oyster cat girl stickers. Grids of photos let me glimpse into your life and I could say yeah I guess I know you. How many backspaces will it take to bring me back to when there were no green buttons? When your status is set to Away on MSN? Remember the time I told you I was playing The Sims and you told me how you got rid of your Sims? And then you said you were going to build some furniture for your room over the break. And then the conversation ended and the next time I went online there were no traces of the conversation happening. Despite being given a chance to keep an archive of the chat, nobody really goes to the effort to do so. And now we can go back as far as we wish to and point out the beginning of everything. Everything is laid out and easily accessible, pictures and words and the little green circle next to your name. Archiving comes easier for all of us, collecting data is as easy as typing hello to you. The question is how much of this is worth remembering and archiving. You may not remember, but the Internet remembers for you.

Research Critique IV: Jon Cates ‘Bold3RRR’

It takes me a while to understand Jon Cates’ work, though from my own understanding of it, I see it as a theatrical piece of sort: specifically a monologue theatre. I am drawn to his dialogue, even if the screenshots is at first hard to understand. His spoken word is deliberately paced, and almost poetic at times “I want to reflect, I want to reflect, I want to reflect…” His inclusion of the noise and feedback sounds also contribute to the idea of this piece being a reflection of real-time: it represents the whole idea of “lagging” and how apparent it is in real-time video conferencing. I think it’s interesting he has chosen to embrace this technological error and include this in this piece because we inevitably go through such errors when engaging in these forms of communication. For example, we get that a lot in our Adobe Connect meetings in this class – such glitches are all part of what this is all about.

Another thing I’ve noted from the work is the idea of anonymity – similar to what Adriene Jenik mentions in her essay: “in virtual space, spatial and temporal bodies are masked and shrouded from view; it was fascinating to discover that shrouding ourselves instigated an emergence of people from behind their shadow online selves.” The image of Jon Cates is ambiguous and blurred, and even though we can see his screenshots and his actions on the computer, it does not offer the full picture. The images are monochromatic and so highly contrasted that they are whited out. Despite being denied of the physical identity, what is crucial is still being able to see his actions on the virtual space.

reading: what is contemporary art

notes from e-flux journal: what is contemporary art

critique of presence by Jacques Derrida
the present is originally corrupted by past and future, there’s always absence at the heart of presence.

‘comrades of time’ by boris groys
when we began to question our projects, to doubt or reformulate them, the present becomes important. it’s because the contemporary present is constituted by doubt, hesitation, uncertainty, indecision, by the need for prolonged reflection.

the past is also permanently rewritten, names and events appear/disappear, reappear/disappear.

comrades of time: contemporary in German means comrade. to be contemporary is to collaborate with time, helping time when it has problems/difficulties.

now and elsewhere by raqs media collective
time girds the earth tight. day after day, astride minutes and seconds, the hours ride as they must, relentless. in the struggle to keep pace with the clocks, we are now always in a state of jet lag.

how do we orient ourselves in relation to a cluster of occasionally cascading, sometimes overlapping, partly concentric and often conflictual temporal parameters?

on forgetting
as time passes and we grow more into the contemporary, the reasons for remembering other times grow, while the ability to recall them weakens. memory straddles this paradox. we could say the ethics of memory have something to do with the urgent negotiation betwene having to remember (which sometimes include the obligation mourn) and the requirement to move on (which sometimes include the need to forget). both are necessary and each is nontionally contingent on the abdication of the other, but life is not led by the easy rhythm of regularly alternating episodes of memory and forgetting, cancelling each other out in a neat equation that resolves itself and attains equillibrium.

haunt a record
what does it mean to haunt a record? when does a presence or a trace become so deeply etched into a surface that it merits a claim to durability simply for being so difficult to repress, resolve, deal with and put away?

 

from austin kleon’s “show your work”

 

“the problem with hoarding is you end up living off your reserves. eventually you will become stale. if you give away everything you have, you are left with nothing – to replenish, to give away, the more you give away, the more comes back to you”.
– paul arden

dumpster diving/
treasure in trash/
culture debris/

we all love things that other people think are garbage. you have to have the courage to keep loving your garbage. because that makes us unique is the diversity and breadth of our influences.