BOLD3RRR rings up a whole bunch of thoughts; not all of which are concrete. I think akin to impressionist paintings, (as pretentious as that might sound, especially in an opening sentence) the art piece gives an atmosphere or a sense of the moment. Funnily enough, I’d say this links up to what mise en scène does; through the visual information of what’s in the scene, the viewer gains an understanding of what’s going on, often in a subconscious manner. The difference with BOLD3RRR being the element of surprise. An element Jon Cates says to be an important focal point in keeping glitch fresh.

Its sort of funny in that a commonly heard or seen element of glitch is repetition. In BOLD3RRR, we hear many word and phrases repeated again, layered over the existing dialogue, if any; assumedly the the only distinguishing aspect being if I had heard a similar phrase before or not, though in retrospect, I can’t be certain. Repetition can and has been used in a multitude of ways before, eg. Andy Warhol, the difference in glitch perhaps, would be the letting go of control from the artist.

Visually the piece was a mash of text, his computers display, his face, and the interface of the Ableton software; amongst other spliced in visuals. But I especially enjoyed the moment at 4:24. This bit particularly hit me as he transitions it by saying “and she said” and then jumped into this glitchy visual of what I initially thought was a skyline with accompanying text in the lower left displaying the quote of what was said. It’s intriguing in that it jumps from speech to text in such a noteworthy manner. The typeface along with the scratchy noise and the gloomy grey visual invokes a sense of melancholia and nostalgia for the older days of the computer.

A moment that helped me put the work in some context was hearing the phrases “…now no such thing as real time… …perpetual altered dimensions”. This harks back to when I realized that I couldn’t distinguish between what was being said and what was just feeding back into the system. It made me wonder about how much we’re putting into the digital world and how much of what we see actually the result of our input being fed back.

the machine world is machined by us out of the world + we have literally machined the world. it’s our world, in the sense that we have crafted it. + we’re constantly uncrafting && re-crafting it. – jC

This brings me to a point about Dick Higgins and the idea of intermedia. Which I take to be the melding of art and life or “everything else”. The manner in which Jon Cates types appears to show this intertwining of the two. And while his spelling is “glitched out” (almost like l33tspeek) it’s still readable to me, which in turn agrees with his quote on glitch.

they might be glitched, + they might be imperfect + noisy, + that might be what attracts us or me to those systems. but still they are functional or rather functioning in one way or another systematically

His typing might appear imperfect but it’s still functional. That level of consistency even if unintentional, was pretty cool.

 

 

Mise en scène of the desktop arguably could speak as a reflection of the user, but I’ve also learnt that the elements shown could be indicative of numerous other aspects, each possibly branching off into an entire discussion on it’s own. But one thing that I ponder is the level of curation and intent in what we see. Social media provides a clearer sense of this, we can only see what has been chosen to be shown to us. In BOLD3RRR, I’m unsure. The off beat manner of speech, overlapping clips of audio, the claustrophobic close-up of only a portion of the entire desktop. I’m unsure what was intended and what was improvised; and when one moment is in question, it seems to call most other moments into question as well. At that point, it starts to feel like an exercise into existentialism; and perhaps that was the intent in the first place.