GLI.TC/H

systemsapproach: 2012: THE DAZE DITHER D00M CRASHEDPatrick...

Thu, 10 May 2012 19:28:57 -0400

2012: THE DAZE DITHER D00M CRASHED
Patrick Quinn && Alfredo Salazar-Caro interviewed by jonCates (2012)

INTRO:

Chicago is home to various musical moments. Currently, from the innovative moves of Cheif Keef and Young Chop, referred to as New Chicago, to the superniche tumblr energy of Seapunk, Chicago’s music culture knows the rapid movements of reinvention. Among New Media Artists, Chicago is also known as home to a ‘Chicago School of Glitch Art’ as well as being ‘the birthplace of Dirty New Media Art’. When all of these aspects combine online and AFK (Away From Keyboard) while referencing the histories of Chicago House parties, Industrial Culture in our post-industrial decline and Noise Art / Music in the heat of summer 2012, looking forwards to the ends of the worlds, a result is this: An Introduction to / Retrospective of Mayan New Media Art: the POST-DIRTY NEW MEDIA, APOCALYPTIC, END TIMES AWARE ART!

And whois at the intersections of these moments / movements / momentums? Patrick Quinn && Alfredo Salazar-Caro have already taken these Chicago-based end times on the road through the rustbelt, presenting at the FLASHFL00D event at Little Berlin in Philadelphia; Quinn is curating a DITHER D00M event this upcoming Saturday, May 12th at 6 PM at The Nightingale in Chicago and is currently planning a summer 2012 tour. They are alrdy connected internationally through darknets, deaddrops, sneakernets, USB drives, tumblrs, Noise shows and mixtapes to other like minded End Times Aware Artists and Musicians. Quinn’s curatorial program speaks to this situation: Quinn has assembled Animated GIFs made specifically for this event by artists such as Kim Asendorf, Michael Manning, Max Capacity, A. Bill Miller, Theodore Darst, Eric Fleischauer, Daniel Temkin and Shawne Michaelain Holloway to name a few names in this game of End Games.

+ from my owwwn perspective, in my ripe old age of late 30s, situated in the Midwestern Wastelands of these United States, i am alrdy an old hat among Computer Magicians, Glitch Artists && Noise Nomads. so when a young crew comes along that references the work of experienced beards such as myself but breaks traditions as they proclaim doomsdays, i listen closely to their end-times proclamations. is Glitch Art over? have we reached the end of days for Dirty New Media? && if so, then what?! or mayhaps if then, so what?! …their answers are: DITHER D00M, Mayan New Media && other forms of End-Times Aware Art!

2012: THE DAZE DITHER D00M CRASHED
Patrick Quinn && Alfredo Salazar-Caro interviewed by jonCates (2012)

INTERVIEW:

jonCates: How did DITHER DOOM first end?

Patrick Quinn: It was a synesthetic experience. If I recall correctly, I first saw the white light, and then the white noise slowly faded in. White noise became a reptilian hiss, the hiss became flesh ripping feedback. I closed my eyes, and then re-opened them, everything was pixelated. Then nothing.

Alfredo Salazar-Caro:
First there was the total eclipse.
All was encompassed by darkness.
Then, slow and massive, the sun approached with the power of one billion subs.
All was (bit)crushed under it’s brøøtal power.
†††††††††††††††††††††††††††††††††††††

Patrick Quinn:

jonCates: nowww, just to clarify for those who may not yet have been aware, DITHER DOOM is the musical genre associated w/the Mayan New Media Art movement correct? DITHER DOOM has been described as incorporating the sounds of nihilistic joy + an overwhelming sense of forlornness. DITHER DOOM has also been compared to the experience of listening to 1990’s IDM (Intelligent Dance Music) slowed to a bitcrushed crawl through frozen midwastelands. are there specific techniques that these musicians/artists are using to achieve these poetics? + are there specifics to DITHER DOOM, i.e. could we reverse engineer the algorithms found in this musical genre?

Patrick Quinn: Yes Exactly. DITHER DOOM is the musical genre associated with Mayan New Media Art. DITHER DOOM is simultaneously an aesthetic sensibility and also a philosophical preset. Personally, what I remember most about listening to DITHER DOOM is what you said, a nihilistic sense of joy because I was aware that the end was coming and unchangeable. Others have described it differently, feelings of forlornness and overwhelming sadness. The sound was almost ineffable, undoubtedly influenced by IDM, but also industrial and power electronics. It was slow (unlike IDM), patternistic (like IDM), crushed down to nothing/dust, and bitter cold (as if there was no element of humanity present). Pitch shifting was obviously integral to the DITHER DOOM “process”, as was the use of white noise and downtuning. However, the great thing about DITHER DOOM was how different bands/individuals translated their own feelings of the end of the world differently, and thus, the eclectic canon that is D.D. So yes, there were different interpretations of what it was, which made asserting the fact that you were a D.D. band interesting.

jonCates: turning towards the Mayan New Media Art movement, the movement is often also referred to as End Times Aware Art. do you think of these 2 categories as mutually beneficial? in other words, are there End Times Artists that are not Mayan? Mayan New Media artists that are not End Times? have you seen any conflicts or complications arise between these crews, cultures, categories? or are they supportive of 01 anothers?

Alfredo Salazar-Caro: Although the most recent prediction of the End Times is derived directly from Mayan scriptures, it affects the world at large. The mass paranoia that is capitalized by the Mayan New Media Artists can be felt across nations, races, genders, tumblrs and facebooks. Neither solidarity nor animosity exist between M∆Y∆N New Mediaers and D1TH3R DØØMers, only the mutual knowledge that everything that begins must also end.

Patrick Quinn:

jonCates: on the dirtier sides of these post Dirty New Media movements, Media Art Hystorians have observed that your movements share features w/Dirty New Media in that you have a focus on problematizing while also aestheticizing glitches + errors as cultural critique(s) on our natures/technologies. still, i wonder about another set of desires +/or connections to dirtiness in content && context… among projects && aestheticonceptechnics such as MAX CAPACITY’s Pixel Smut publication:

or tumblr’s such as LOVECAMP:

&& Porn Glitches:

, is it important to understand dither-fetish as expressing a sexualized approach to bitcrushed compression? + if so, what makes limited palettes, compression artifacts && lossy formats so sexxxy?!

Patrick Quinn: I think the hard edges/dithered/pixelblushed/binary_bodies aesthetic which clearly grew out of Dirty New Media, is championed by these post Dirty New Media Movements in large part due to the
physical/symbolic nature of compression. There is a certain “lossy” nature involved with dither, which is mysterious and unknown, and these characteristics lead to fetishism in my mind. So yes,
I would say that bitcrushing is in many ways an extension of subconscious desire, and undoubtedly, the lossy format plays a large role in this. but also on a more symbolic level, if you examine the language of these
compressions, one can’t help but to notice its physicality (“crushing”, “dithering”), which in turn can lend itself to provocative themes.

Alfredo Salazar-Caro: I think that there is a sexiness to having the power to break something as metaphysical as data. I think it creates a more “raw” relationship between man and computer. One could even call it a more physical relationship.
In searching for these “raw”/”physical” qualities in these aesthetics we inevitably end in eroticism/corporeal desire.
Also, the crushing/glitching/distorting/ of images create a type of unintentional censorship. This evokes nights of attempting to watch porn on cinemax and catching only small glimpses of voluptuous bodies through the static.
This type of voyeuristic anticipation is certainly found in works such as LOVECAMP //glitchporn//adulteryyy.com/

To get dirtier with these POST-DIRTY NEW MEDIA Artists, DITHER D00M Musicians and otherwise APOCALYPTIC, END TIMES AWARE ART goto Quinn’s DITHER D00M event this upcoming Saturday, May 12th at 6 PM at The Nightingale in Chicago as a part of SWAG PARTY: Emerging Curators Showcase. The Nightingale is a rough and ready microcinema dedicated to screening emerging work across film, video, and new media genres and aims to support Chicago’s vibrant cinema community:

The Nightingale
1084 N. Milwaukee
Chicago, IL
60642

http://nightingaletheatre.org

LINKS

Patrick Quinn
http://adultlifesciences.com
http://aduult.net
http://adulteryseminar.tumblr.com
http://adulteryyy.com

Alfredo Salazar-Caro
http://www.alfredosalazarcaro.com

jonCates
http://systemsapproach.net

Cheif Keef, i.e.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eS8OMv8VF70

Young Chop
http://www.myspace.com/youngchop88

Seapunk, i.e.
http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/seapunk-twitter-tumblr-ultrademon-zombelle-molly-soda/Content?oid=5389539

Chicago School of Glitch Art
http://rosa-menkman.blogspot.com/2011/08/glitch-art-spheres-organized-graphs-in.html

Chicago, the birthplace of Dirty New Media Art, i.e.
http://chicagoartmagazine.com/2011/10/dirty-new-media-art/

FLASHFL00D event at Little Berlin in Philadelphia
http://littleberlin.org/flashfl00d/
http://littleberlin.org
http://glidottcslashh.tumblr.com/post/20397968013/leetusman-last-night-we-held-little-glitches-in

DEAD DROPS
http://deaddrops.com

Kim Asendorf
http://kimasendorf.com

Michael Manning
http://www.themanningcompany.com

Max Capacity
http://maxcapacity.tumblr.com

A. Bill Miller
http://www.master-list2000.com/abillmiller/

Theodore Darst
http://theodoredarst.net

Eric Fleischauer
http://ericfleischauer.com

Daniel Temkin
http://danieltemkin.com

Shawne Michaelain Holloway
http://missholloway.tumblr.com

MAX CAPACITY’s Pixel Smut
http://www.lulu.com/shop/max-capacity/pixel-smut-1/paperback/product-18880769.html

LOVECAMP
http://lovecamp.tumblr.com

Porn Glitches
http://porn-glitch.tumblr.com

ASCETICHARLOT
http://soundcloud.com/asceticharlot

BAD NEW FUTURE CREW
http://soundcloud.com/badnewfuture

The Queer Identity and Glitch: Deconstructing Transparency

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 20:28:36 -0400

The Queer Identity and Glitch: Deconstructing Transparency:

[…] Sterne aptly states, “the MP3 plays its listener” (Sterne 835). Likewise, it can be said that gender, as a cultural method, plays the gendered individual.

pretty rad essay by Kevin Benisvy draws parallels between glitch + compression && identity + the performance of gender…

[…]Individuals are trained to believe that gender is itself physical and purely physical, to think that the expression of gender is naturally bound by certain biological criteria. Under this assumption, loss of the details of identity may go unnoticed. It is at the point where thoughts and expectations are translated into performance that the opportunity exists to interrupt the signal of gender coding complicity within our cultural imagination.

There is a strong analogy in this act to the phenomenon of signal disruption, or glitch, in digital media. In contemporary day-to-day life we are almost constantly exposed to media which has been edited and altered. One of the most common processes imposed on media is compression. When media is compressed, it is stripped of specific bits of data and reformatted to serve a specific purpose. In this way it is also transitory as the process takes bits of media and transitions them into other forms by using compression and formatting.

read the whole essay here.

../n!ck.bot

systemsapproach: Dave Musgrave WINs a custom Corrupt.video...

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 23:34:10 -0400

systemsapproach:

Dave Musgrave WINs a custom Corrupt.video box by Benjamin Gaulon aka (я) | RECYCLISM :: + Martial Geoffre-Rouland @ NOTACON && PixelJ.am!

A couple of Daniel Temkin’s glitch projects (Glitchometry...

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 19:22:22 -0400

A couple of Daniel Temkin’s glitch projects (Glitchometry and Dither Studies) were covered in Triangulation Blog, which spun_off this article (Synesthesia 2.0: Digital Images, Distorted By Sound Waves) in Fast Co.Design …check ‘em out!

../n!ck.bot

systemsapproach: Glitch / Artware Category @ PixelJ.am @...

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 00:40:03 -0400

[Flash 10 is required to watch video.]

systemsapproach:

Glitch / Artware Category @ PixelJ.am @ NOTACON just got 4RLY !!!

systemsapproach: we’re inna Dirty New...

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 14:46:32 -0400

systemsapproach:

we’re inna Dirty New Media Glitch / Artware Dungeon Party Environment @ NOTACON!!! w/myself, Jake Elliott, Melissa Barron, Dave Musgrave, Devon Scott-Tunkin, Miss Holloway && Ei Jane Janet Lin!!!

systemsapproach: gettn rdy NOTACON! in our Dirty New Media...

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 02:47:35 -0400

systemsapproach:

gettn rdy NOTACON! in our Dirty New Media Glitch / Artware Dungeon Party Environment! w/Jake Elliott, Melissa Barron, Dave Musgrave, Devon Scott-Tunkin, Miss Holloway && Ei Jane Janet Lin!!!

Corroding the Machine Net art pioneers JODI and their...

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 10:01:49 -0400

Corroding the Machine

Net art pioneers JODI and their instructions for building a bomb

by Tom McCormack posted April 6, 2012

1. The Present

On the third floor of the Museum of the Moving Image right now you’ll find an exhibit called “Street Digital,” which includes, among other things:

- a mass of LED displays, turned horizontal, placed on the floor, set on the fritz, with lights going out and tracing strange patterns in the black of their absence

- a keyboard turned into skateboard hooked up to a Twitter account (step on the keys until, eventually, you hit ‘enter’: a tweet!)

- four versions of the early video game Quake that have been rendered entirely abstract text fill one screen, violent slashes of black and white light another

- an omnium-gatherum of YouTube videos documenting charmingly innocent destruction.

What are these defiant objects and how did they get here?

From the exhibition JODI: Street Digital at the Museum of the Moving Image

2. Origins

Story (1)

Music can be a nuisance. Much in the way many of us are now annoyed by people texting at crosswalks or in movie theaters, the radio, as its presence spread in the first half of the 20th century, was experienced by some as intrusive, offering unwanted distraction from the simple sounds of the everyday.

The composer John Cage, who built a near-religion out of being attentive to quotidian humdrum, building new strategies for listening to the unstructured noise of life, was not necessarily fond of radios. People were being confronted everywhere with popular music: its irresistible hooks, thrumming repetitions, and familiar 4/4 time signatures, signaling when and exactly how to listen.

Cage’s response was to incorporate radios into his compositions. In Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (March No. 2) (1951), he wrote a “score” for radios, assigning 24 people to 12 “instruments,” one for changing stations and another controlling volume and tone. In Radio Music (1956), Cage layered eight radios, with the score determined by the kinds of chance operations he was exploring at the time. The pieces used the legible patterns of pop and the calming banter of talk radio as mere sonic elements within a disruptive cacophony. The hooks were there, along with the pat simplicities of advertising and corporate news, but these were now presented as swelling pitches and fading static: irreducible sound. This strategy had serious consequences for music, not just in the realm of experimental composition, but for popular musicians such as Brian Eno, Sonic Youth, and, to an extent, all the punk rockers.

In a 1967 conversation Cage and fellow composer Morton Feldman discussed the recent spread of portable radios: the newest assault. “This weekend I was on the beach…and on the beach these days are transistor radios,” griped Feldman with obvious disgust. “You know how I adjusted to that problem of the radio in the environment?” replied the mischievously cheery Cage:

I simply made a piece using radios. Now, whenever I hear radios—even a single one, not just 12 at a time, as you must have heard on the beach, at least—I think, “Well, they’re just playing my piece.”

Cage compared his Promethean theft to Paleolithic cave drawings. Animals were, among other things, a threat lurking in the environment of early man, and by reducing them to angles, shades, textures scraped along a wall, one could make the animals less threatening, somehow conquerable. Instead of an animal, a shape, something even potentially beautiful: “Hey, it looks like the drawings in the cave!”

Story (2)

In 1993, Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans, artists-in-residence at San Jose State University, became interested in the corporate culture booming all around them in the area south of the San Francisco Bay: Silicon Valley. Apple, Adobe, and Netscape were nearby, and everyone was psyched about this hot new thing: the Internet.

Trained in the progressive genres of installation art, live performance, and electronic experimentation (Paesmans had studied with pioneering video artist Nam June Paik; both had graduated from San Jose State’s CADRE Laboratory, an institute for what would come to be called “new media”), Heemskerk and Paesmans immediately recognized that the Internet could be used not only for business ventures and hassle-saving wonders but…for what else, exactly, was the question.

Their first website, wwwwwwwww.jodi.org, offered the visitor a sprawl of aggressively oblique ciphers. Neon-green slashes and dots abutted lines, arrows, commas, apostrophes, fives, sixes, and zeros. The site turned HTML inside out, almost literally: on the surface was chaos, but if you viewed the source code for Jodi.org—that is, looked at the programming language determining the bizarre jumble your browser offered—you saw something more ordered, and yet unsettling. With the characters allowed by HTML—with numbers, letters, and other symbols contained on a standard keyboard—Heemskerk and Paesmans had graphically arranged directions for building a hydrogen bomb. It was the browser attempting to read these directions that produced the sprawl of neon nonsense. The page displayed “properly” was incomprehensible; behind it lay something comprehensible to anyone familiar with the shape of a warhead. In that reversal, and in the image of the code-drawn bomb, was an entire aesthetic manifesto.

Since then, Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans—who make art as JODI—have developed a body of work built around indecipherable code, “browser-crashing,” hacked video games, and other screeching machinations.

JODI’s http://404.jodi.org/ presents a series of 404 errors, letting you click through pages and then more pages that the browser never seems able to read.http://globalmove.us/ uses icons from Google Maps to imagine the entire world consisting of some sort of bustling cosmopolitan Atlantis; smashed together in the middle of the Ocean are all the residences, stores, and various destinations. And for the description of each, cryptic techno-hieroglyphics.http://maxpaynecheatsonly.jodi.org/ takes the video game Max Payne and layers “cheats” (or shortcuts) in such a way that the figures disintegrate; the motions become stunted; characters are caught repeating the same actions over and over again.

The website http://asdfg.jodi.org/ offers a tour through a seemingly never-ending assault of flashing characters. YouTube user Morshu9001 has uploaded a video-capture of that site, which he’s titled “The Most Retarded, Messed Up Site Ever.” This would not necessarily displease the artists. Cognitive dissonance is definitely a goal in JODI’s pieces, and I imagine the artists would be amused, as well, to findthis question about the original Jodi.org on Yahoo! Answers, in which a user named Ryan complains, “Explored the site, got freaked out can you help me?”

As a longtime fan of JODI—and I’ve heard others mention this same habit—I have a joke I tell myself whenever my computer glitches out and I’m faced with jumbled code, collapsing programs, the neat parallels of computer windows ghosting traces of themselves, forming congeries of jutting, disordered diagonals. Even if, or especially if, I’ve lost changes to an important document or been frustrated mid-email, I can always calm myself somewhat by thinking: “Hey, it looks like a JODI piece!”

3. Precursors

In purely visual terms, JODI’s work owes a big debt to the line of 20th-century art driven by a disgust with rationality and a desire to debase the ordered world of commodities: art collective Ant Farm’s orgiastic destruction of fetishized cars inCadillac Ranch (1974) and Media Burn (1975); Robert Rauschenberg’s “combines” of the 1950s, delicately discomposed arrangements of thrift-store curios; Kurt Schwitters’s collages of the late 1910s and ’20s, snatches of ads and text glued together with the impulsiveness and gleeful malice of a child smearing crayon. All of these works, like Cage’s radio collages, knit the alluring and elegant symmetries of popular design into a larger chaos. JODI’s http://g33con.com/, which juxtaposes a wide variety of web tropes (a comic, a YouTube video, a collection of sound files, a video game, a host of corporate logos) is, like Schwitters’s Das Undbild (1919), a violent pastiche of contemporaneous media elements driven by some sort of amorous hatred of media.

But significantly, JODI’s work also looks back to a very different tradition in 20th century art, one concerned with the essence of things. In one politicized retelling of modern art, Rauschenberg and Schwitters were artists who wanted to challenge the standard narratives of consumer culture by doing violence to their visual manifestations. Other artists tried to offer not this sort of frontal attack but counter-narrative, one based around “materiality” or the essential facts of things in the world: this was abstract art. Looking at a Jackson Pollock, in this line of thinking, meant comprehending the lineaments of paint as paint, not a representation of something else; this perhaps could mean comprehending in a flash the world stripped of the contingencies of capitalism or consumer culture or whatever.

What is the essence of the Internet when stripped of contingency? One answer could be: the interaction between code and the programs that decipher that code for us. It is this interaction between code and program, certainly, to which JODI perpetually draws our attention, in a way similar to how many Modernist painters drew our attention to paint and the canvas on which it was placed and the museums in which these canvases were displayed.

In revealing what is hidden in plain sight, JODI are invoking this Modernist discourse, but never simply. Heemskerk and Paesmans are always updating and modifying their websites because the code and programs involved are alwaysthemselves being updated and modified. Code is a human language—just one most of us can’t read—not commensurate in its contingency with the facts of matter.

It’s as if some essential truth about these technologies, then, is not contained within but provocatively suggested by cracked code; as if you can keep burrowing ever more toward essence and never reach it; as if you might glimpse that essence between the crazed angles of a crashing browser; as if the blinking parentheses and glowing arrows are not instances of but rather directions for building some combustible thing to explode the fictions of contemporary life.

4. The Present (Part 2)

The works on display in “Street Digital” seem to me less dense, less enjoyably and problematically confusing, than the best of JODI’s earlier work. The new work is purer, but easier. The primary method of these pieces seems to involve a kind of angular intensification of the guiding logic behind various technologies.

From the exhibition JODI: Street Digital at the Museum of the Moving Image

LED displays are ubiquitous visual noise; we learn to tune them out on one level, but they remain in the background, interfering with our theoretical serenity. LED Puzzled (2012) sets these displays haywire to literalize the omnipresent static they give rise to, making the screens furthermore serve as a metonym for all the electronic displays, both commercial and merely functional, that so often infiltrate our consciousness unwanted. Every moment of LED Puzzled is everything unbearable about Times Square instantaneously.

Twitter presents itself as the ultimate live feed: your life, updated. Tweets are meant to be, or at least seem, more persistent in their impulsiveness and indexicality than more traditional forms of writing. SK8Monkeys on Twitter(2009/2012) takes Twitter’s self-presentation and skewers it by rearranging the terms involved. The SK8Monkey account, determined by the patterns of feet on a keyboard, becomes not a record of stray thoughts but stray actions; not an index of consciousness moving through the world but of the body in time.

From the exhibition JODI: Street Digital at the Museum of the Moving Image

Untitled Game (“Arena,” “A-X,” “Ctrl-Space,” “Spawn”) (1996/2001) is the earliest piece in the show and was well chosen for the way it presages these later works. What makes video games addictive is often the texture of the interaction offered, the way the particular game allows identification with the actor or actors in the game-world that tickles us with its immersiveness. JODI has rendered Quake in bizarre lines, numbers, and shapes, but preserved interactivity. The controllers produce effects in these strange worlds, but the nature of those effects is obscure. Figuring out what exactly you might be able to do—what kind of control the controller might finally enable—offers its own kind of absorption, a bizarre rearticulation of the addictive qualities of the medium.

YTCT (Folksomy) (2008/2010), a four-screen panel of YouTube videos, is in some ways the least visually striking work on display, but it might be the most important, at least in terms of JODI’s career as a whole. Folksomy seems to me to summarize JODI’s status in contemporary art—in contemporary culture—offering a hint of what they might leave in their wake.

5. Aftershocks

In an article posted only last week on the popular website BuzzFeed titled “The Joys of Breaking Facebook,” John Herrman writes about a Facebook page called Glitchr that’s gaining cult status:

We’ve gotten used to… cleanliness, and now take the rigid borders and ordered structure of Facebook and Twitter for granted. They’re utterly predictable, which is why it’s so much fun when someone finds a tweet that breaks Twitter, and why Glitchr, a Facebook account devoted to collecting posts that break or distort Facebook, is so fucking satisfying.

Does any habitué of the Internet not know the pleasures of malfunction? The odd joy of watching something neatly arranged derange itself? What about when a boring television show suddenly becomes more interesting as the figures are momentarily broken apart by a slow connection? And then there’s the annoying but fascinating psychedelia of the damaged phone screen.

JODI’s Folksomy consists of YouTube videos in which people do “strange things with computers,” per the artists. Much of this involves smashing. There seem to be hundreds, possibly thousands, of these videos. Each recalls the scene in Mike Judge’s Office Space in which the harried workers take a perpetually disobedient fax machine into a vacant lot and viciously beat it to death with baseball bats: a hate crime most of us can relate to. We’re all JODI now! Monster truck drivers in a land of the frustrating and the obsolete! Gallaghers of cyberspace and slick contraptions! In our heads, sometimes, at least.

The culture enthralled by Glitchr is the same culture that worried, a little over 12 years ago, that some errant binary code was on the cusp of clearing our bank accounts, crashing our stock market, rendering international trade infeasible, and so causing starvation, drought, all-out war!

All systems are fallible. The fallibility of computer systems is particularly scary to us because the behavior of machines, like that of animals, can never be satisfyingly assimilated into the intuitive realm of human motivation. The fearsome—things like loss, physical and emotional violence, apocalypse—is always the domain of art.

JODI’s work exists partly to help us gain traction on our fears—by enacting destruction, like the YouTubers in Folksomy; by rendering the result an abstraction to be appreciated with aesthetic distance, like Cage with his radios—but it exists also to open up possibilities for turning that fear to productive ends.

The most immediate precursor to JODI wasn’t Dada or Abstract Expression but the strain of early video art concerned with processing-effects. Artists like Nam June Paik, Woody and Steina Vasulka, and Dan Sandin took the video signal as the sine qua non of the medium. They focused their artistic interventions on this electric pulse, seeing how they could modify it with jolts and crossed wires and what images might be produced.

Art historian David Joselit has argued that for early video artists, messing around with the inviolable video signal carried political implications. The electronic transmissions of TV, in particular, were politically charged. The signal was conceived of as omnipresent and unidirectional—our TVs are thought to be passive receivers and so, in a sense, are we—and this conception was an embodiment of and a model for the corporate and political messages the TV brought into our homes. Interfering with this electronically was thus an act of and a model for political activism: rendering invisible relationships visible and creating the potential to effect change in a realm where we once thought ourselves powerless.

HTML code is also, perhaps, an embodiment of and a model for something. Its seamless integration into our lives, its hiddenness, is eerily reminiscent of the hidden or seamless colonization of the web, and the rest of everything, by special interests, Big Money, in the form of data mining and a thousand other strategies. BuzzFeed, the site that posted the story about Glitchr, finds its content by feverishly monitoring social network activity and is underwritten, in turn, by what’s called “branded content,” which Business Week describes as “story-like units that live among a publisher’s editorial products and share the same underlying aesthetic, tone, and technology.” The advertisers paying to sneak onto the site might not be so excited were BuzzFeed readers to discover what other “rigid borders and ordered structures” feel “so fucking satisfying” to break.

Special thanks to Nick Briz and Jon Cates, the noisiest and most irrational, respectively.

“Please join me Thursday April 12th (6 to 8 pm) for...

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 00:39:41 -0400

“Please join me Thursday April 12th (6 to 8 pm) for the opening of my art exhibition “nOise anusmOs” at Galerie Richard 514 West 24th Street NYC. Further information here: http://post.thing.net/node/3586

Following the opening, I will present the world premier concert of the immersive surround-sound re-mastered version of my “viral symphOny” at 9:30 pm at Harvestworks 596 Broadway #602 (between Houston and Prince).

“nOise anusmOs” and “viral symphOny” are being presented in association with the recent publication of my new book “Immersion Into Noise”.

Please feel free to post and circulate.

Joseph Nechvatal

http://www.nechvatal.net”

maxcapacity: sweet!

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 00:38:26 -0400

maxcapacity:

sweet!

systemsapproach: JØ!N .US: for the_ PixelJam demoscene party...

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 13:18:29 -0400

systemsapproach:

JØ!N .US: for the_ PixelJam demoscene party _at: NOTACON, April 12 - 15, 2012, Cleveland, USA !

or/err… 3NT3R R3MØ73: PixelJam accepts remote entries in the following:

* Combined Demo: a combined new school and oldskool demo category

RULES: http://www.pixelj.am/?p=1

* Freestyle Graphics: hand drawn, rendered or digitally manipulated camera images

RULES: http://www.pixelj.am/?p=22

* Freestyle Music: WAV, MP3, OGG or FLAC or, for tracked entries, a format compatible with MODPlug

RULES: http://www.pixelj.am/?p=29

* Glitch / Artware: Glitch Art (executables, videos, etc), Wild glitches + feral crashes, noise-prods, bad code, conceptual/speculative Software Art, etc…

RULES: http://www.pixelj.am/?p=191

* Textmode Graphics: ANSI, ASCII or XBIN format (XBIN preferred)

RULES: http://www.pixelj.am/?p=25

* Video Game: Maximum size of all program components no more than 64 MB (67,108,864 bytes) uncompressed.

RULES: http://www.pixelj.am/?p=210

// jonCates

⚡ Critical Glitch / Artware

http://criticalartware.net

http://www.notacon.org

http://www.pixelj.am

systemsapproach: Dirty New Media Glitch / Artware Dungeon Party...

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 13:18:00 -0400

systemsapproach:

Dirty New Media Glitch / Artware Dungeon Party Environment Party!
@ NOTACON 2012
http://www.notacon.org
FRIDAY APRIL 13

Colorforms
http://www.colorforms.net

Morgan Higby-Flowers
http://morganhigbyflowers.com

Missile Command
http://www.missile-command.net

+
_node

with dj sets by:
BAD NEW FUTURE CREW
http://badnewfuture.us

&& DJ Interventions
http://djinterventions.tumblr.com

and dj sets by artists:
Theodore Darst
http://theodoredarst.net

and Dave Musgrave
http://davemusgrave.com

Hilton Garden Inn
Downtown Cleveland
$5
9 PM DOORS

CO-ORGANIZED BY:
⚡ Critical Glitch / Artware
http://criticalartware.net

FOR NOTACON 2012 && PixelJam:
http://www.notacon.org
http://www.pixelj.am

leetusman: Last night we held Little Glitches in conjunction...

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 02:30:30 -0400

leetusman:

Last night we held Little Glitches in conjunction with Flash Fl00d at Little Berlin. Here’s a few photos. The night operated as a salon, with performance, talks and videos. Participants included JD of Fauxtronics showing circuit bent video and handmade modular synthesizers (using repurposed electronic CMOS parts), artist John Dingler’s moviettes, a discussion of glitches within collective consciousness by Joshua Becker, performance art concerning McDonalds and Teletubbies by The Great Quentini, video and projector hacking by Jason Hsu, and moving gifs and a virtual reality game by Patrick Quinn and Alfredo Salazar-Caro, as well as a discussion of Mayan New Media or Dither Doom.

Good times.

Thanks to the Little Berlin members for providing food and drinks and to the roster of participants.

The Diacritics of Glitchr LOUIS DOULAS | Thu Mar 29th,...

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 21:00:51 -0400

The Diacritics of Glitchr

LOUIS DOULAS | Thu Mar 29th, 2012 12:28 p.m.

on Rhizome.org

ABOVE: noteNdo installation of RESET v2.0 For 2 Prepared...

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 23:15:00 -0400

ABOVE: noteNdo installation of RESET v2.0 For 2 Prepared Nintendo Entertainment Systems at Playlist @ iMAL Bruxelles, BE 2010

in conversation w/ the GLI.TC/H organizers, i (jonCates) interviewed noteNdo AKA Jeff Donaldson who has been glitching in realtime since 2001. His hardware modifications of 8bit NES and 16bit SEGA Genesis/Master Systems have shown all over the world in the contexts of Glitch Art, Art Games and New Media Art. noteNdo is based in NYC and this interview took place primarily over the internet via email in 2011.
// jonCates, CHICAGO, 2012, COPY-IT-RIGHT

jonCates: when did you 1rst become excited by glitches +/or involved in Glitch Art?

noteNdo: The very first time I remember becoming excited by a glitch was in the late 80s - sometime in 1987. I remember it vividly - I was at a friends house playing Metroid on NES late one night and while ascending the golden tunnel in the Fortress Of Zebes, the screen suddenly rearranged itself into a beautiful geometric pattern. I remember staring at the screen, captivated, not upset in the least about the game crashing. It was like an intelligence that wanted to be seen, that old ghost in the machine.

It wasn’t until 2000 while studying music composition at university did I become involved in Glitch Art. A friend of mine, who was also a guitarist in my rock band, turned me onto Mego records and audio bending. Mego led to Mille Plateau which led to groups like Pan Sonic which in turn led to buying cheap electronic toys to audio bend. Since I was planted firmly in 20th century classical music and extended guitar techniques, audio bending was a logical progression for me.

Not long after, I actually had a dream and in it I was making abstract, glitchy video with a NES. At this time the only computer available to me was the same NES I had had since I was 12 so I went about glitching it by bridging solder points with aluminum foil and recorded hours and hours of footage to VHS tape. The original impetus for doing this was of course this dream I had but also my friends Michael and Dawn’s blocky flash animations. I was operating from the memory of NES game crashes and intuited where to short the system. It was really quite logical, as everyone who grew up with the NES remembers, blowing on the game cartridge helped get the system to read better so interrupting the signal between to cartridge and the NES was rather obvious. Then reading Wire magazine one day I came across a review of Nanoloop and Little Sound DJ and decided to work on creating abstract audio/visual works using re-purposed Nintendo hardware.

jonCates: this raises the issue of performance, musicality + instrumentality. you use your bent consoles as musical instruments, can you talk a bit about them in that context? is there a relationship to extended guitar techniques in your use of the consoles? the term ‘prepared’ is used similarly to refer to ‘extended’ instrument techniques. do you consider your consoles to be ‘prepared’?

noteNdo: Yes, absolutely. I prefer to refer to them as prepared systems in homage to John Cage’s prepared piano. Just as the prepared piano has had different objects added to it - inserting things like nuts and bolts between strings to transform the timbre of the instrument - I am adding wiring to my consoles in order to transform them into new audio/visual instruments. So in this case I would say yes, this falls under extended technique inasmuch that by adding wiring, the video game computers function is extended in an unintended and unforeseen way.

As instruments, it’s really all about the interface and that is something I’ve been refining throughout the past 9 years. The systems I’m using really are prototypes. Over time, I’ve tried different designs - one system has potentiometers and switches which I use to trigger and dial in different effects and the other two have patch-bays. It’s been a matter of finding out what works best and learning this in performance settings has proven to be best for me.

To create an instrument out of, for example, a prepared NES, the first part of the process is finding different usable effects. Some are extremely unstable and last for only a very short amount of time. Others are generative loops which can go on indefinitely. The next step is creating the interface which can be anything from wiring each effect to either a potentiometer, switch, banana jack, etc.

jonCates: the prepared consoles you describe are performance instruments for your live preformances + are optimized + customized to your needs as a performer. how do these considerations (of instrument building) influence your work in the context of installation + exhibition?

noteNdo: It varies. My early installations were quite simple. The first one, “Patch Me” for Bent Festival 2005, utilized my SEGA Genesis prepared with a DSUB breakout box which was affixed to the front of the monitor enclosure. The breakout box was the same interface I used at the time for live visuals. What this did was provide a way for people to interact with my system and view it in real-time. I had the video output to 5 television monitors which were all fed the SEGA output. At the time, “video bending” was not as prevalent as it is now and “Patch Me” seemed to me a nice way to present the concept in an interactive way that was very easy to grasp.

As I acquired the means to digitize footage, I recorded and created DVDs for use as installation video loops at group shows as well as for screenings at events.

Then for Bent Festival 2009 in NYC I decided to do something a bit more challenging and began the RESET series of installations. The concept behind RESET is taking a room or open space and turning *it into the interface, creating what I refer to as an audio/visual Glitch Environment. To realize this I used effects developed over time while VJing but instead of interfacing with control boxes and/or traditional pots and switches, effects were controlled by laser lights and photo-cell resisters that were installed on or in adjacent walls. Viewers become participants by walking through the installation space, their movement interrupts the laser beams which therefore trigger different audio/visual effects.

So far I have done four iterations of RESET: Bent Festival NYC 2009, READY>RUN at the Esther Klein Gallery, Philadelphia 2009, Playlist at LABoral in Gijon, Spain 2009, and again for Playlist at iMAL in Bruxelles, Belgium 2010. The series has been as simple as one prepared NES system wired to one photo-cell and triggered by one laser which was beamed down a hallway via a series of broken mirrors and as complex as two prepared NES systems wired to a total of seven photo-cell/laser arrays. At LABoral I also had printed wallpaper of one of my noteNdo patterns and at iMAL I had a smoke machine set up so the laser light could be seen in order to be played like an instrument.

jonCates: what directions are you interested in taking these projects or approaches or collaborations now or in the futures?

noteNdo: Currently, I am producing textile renders of patterns generated with the prepared NES systems. This is something I’ve been interested in doing since I started the work in 2001. It’s been a long road to figuring out the best way to realize this; printed vs knit or woven fabric, direct image transfers vs illustrated/composite compositions. I am dedicated to this as a new paradigm in design and see applications for it everywhere. I’m hoping to one day see cheap knock-offs in Chinatown so that I know I’ve succeeded (;

I still have interest in mining the NES and SEGA for new effects as well as working with other systems. There are expanded iterations of the RESET series I would like to realize as well.

I’m also very interested in collaborations. So far I’ve been fortunate enough to collaborate with incredible artists like Melissa Barron and Phillip Stearns and I have some new projects I’m beginning with Laura Wickesberg, Rolf van Gelder, Carmin Karasic, and Nina Wenhart.

http://notendo.com

gli.tc/h/wiki is bax!!!

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 16:49:09 -0400

The GLI.TC/H WIKI-WEBRING is bax in full-force! Though it’s still plagued by spam-bots we’ve put up a new Main-Page (behind a decoy Main-Page… d0n’7 t3LL 73h 5p4m-b075) linked here. A link to the wiki is also on the main gli.tc/h page.

the gli.tc/h/wiki is full of glitch art research + resources + links including tutorials && essays && online groups && etc !!! Plenty of folks contributed to the wiki the first time around (before it was attacked by bots) which is (why it’s) awsum! now that we’ve spent a while getting things up to date + organized we want to re-invite every1 to join + contribute!

//n!ck.bot

Spinning Beach Ball of Death, Improv Everywhere at...

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 17:55:01 -0400

Spinning Beach Ball of Death, Improv Everywhere at TED

//n!ck.bot

prostheticknowledge: Glitch For Dummies English translation of...

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 18:06:56 -0400

prostheticknowledge:

Glitch For Dummies

English translation of article by Rosa Menkman, one of the key voices in glitch art, offering an introduction to the practice:

Technically, a glitch is best understood as an unexpected, unexplainable consequence of an interruption within one or more (digital) information flows. All these flows of digital information are encoded, often with the help of compressions, to store or transfer data as easy and fast as possible - a technique that is normally obfuscated. However, when you break a flow of data, it will quite possible be corrupted.
When the data of an image is corrupted, this can reveal the language of the compression that breaks through the surface of the image. A technological event that is sometimes used as a tool in art or as a style in design.

More Here

FailFest 2012 @Hampshire College

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 17:31:55 -0500

Noah Eisenbruch (who’s piece Glitch Shirt Composition we exhibited in the gallery component of GLI.TC/H 20111) has organized a pretty exciting day’s worth of…

Sharing Glitch and Glitch Art Knowledge through conversation and skill-sharing. Join us for some of the day or the whole day.

over at Hampshire College, check it out!

//n!ck.bot

The design team at Bloomberg Businessweek have shown a passion...

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 10:47:29 -0500

The design team at Bloomberg Businessweek have shown a passion for observing the glitch, error and disruption of graphics by recently publishing their printer errors, entitled Printer Tragedies as a batch of artwork on Flickr. This light hearted look at digital errors reveals a deeper attraction for ‘wrong’ graphics.

via Robert Urquhart

//n!ck.bot