Glitch aesthetics and the institutional life of video

Sean CubittExhibiting Video, Saturday 24 March 2012, University of Westminster 309 Regent Street

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Some Starting PointsNick Briz’s Glitch Codec Tutorialhttp://nickbriz.com/glitchcodectutorial/

Mark Amerika’s Museum of Glitch Aesthetics http://glitchmuseum.com/

the artists featured at http://gli.tc/h/ 2010 and 2011 festivals.

Karl Klomp’s devices for glitching video athttp://karlklomp.nl/

and Ant Scott {Beflix} [UK] co-author of Glitch: Designing Imperfectionhttp://markbattypublisher.com/books/glitch/ http://www.beflix.com/

Paul Herz, Shimmer, from the series Sampling Patterns http://www.flickr.com/photos/ignotus/sets/72157626088733463/with/5408302433/

based on regular random distributions known as “blue noise.” Natural phenomena such as identically charged particles jostling for posi-tion within a limiting boundary or a flock of birds adjusting their mutual distances have similar distributions. Blue noise dot patterns have interesting visual and cognitive effects: Their regularity seems to imply an order just about to emerge, which their randomness ne-gates. These and other works in my “Sampling Patterns” series are snapshots from interac-tive real-time animations where the geometric points of the distribution are used to sample functions that control color, scale, shape, and other visual attributes. The snapshots are fur-ther edited to produce prints.

http://paulhertz.net/factory/2011/07/cae2011/

Tim Head Dust Flowers, printhttp://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/timhead/art/art2000/80dus.htm Tim Head Scent (2009), : http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/timhead/art/art2000/81sce.htm

Computer programs for the digital projections are written to generate unique events in real time. The unsettled surfaces of the projec-tions are composed of random colours, each occupying a single pixel and filling every pixel on the screen, and programmed to change or move in particular ways across the screen as fast as possible.

The programs written for flat screens select random colours to fill (or attempt to fill) the entire screen at very fast rates of change, bringing to the surface the medium’s physical characteristics of instability and speed.

The work with digital inkjet prints attempts to redefine the prescribed role of the commercial inkjet printer, diverting it from a sophisticated reproduction machine into a direct primary printing medium. Specially written programs talk directly to the printer, generating unique decisions in real time for all its printing opera-tions (the colour and location of each droplet of ink laid down along horizontal lines) to reveal the physical grain of the inkjet print.http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/timhead/texts/th_digitaldimen-sion.htm

jimpunk’s #crashtxt Twitter feed of mangled text from a custom-mangled keyboard - https://twitter.com/#!/crashtxt/

GlitchinessJohn Cayley’s wotclockhttp://programmatology.shadoof.net/index.php?p=works/wotclock/wotclock.html

Rosa Menkman’s Collapse of Pal (2011) http://videoscapes.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/collapse-of-pal.html

compare Woody Vasulka’s Art of Memory

Gene Youngblood In Buffalo the Vasulkas built their own imaging device, called the Digital Image Articulator. The sche-matics are in the archive, as well as a video diary of its construction and tapes of the “artifacts” the machine generated. Only one in 10 were released publicly. The rest were archived. Woody and Steina say they knew what they were looking for when they began using the machine. They un-derstood which artifacts would be historically important, but they had to build the machine to see them. The Digital Image Articulator was the last user-built folk instrument to emerge from video’s pioneering erahttp://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=179

See also analog video synthesisers developed by Dan Sandin http://www.vdb.org/titles/five-minute-romp-through-ipand

Peter Donebauerhttp://www.donebauer.net/manifestations/movingimages/broadband/theseventies/theseventies.htm

Glitchiness

Rosa Menkman, Glitch Studies Manifesto in Lovink and Miles’ Video Vortex 2 http://www.networkcultures.org/_uploads/%236reader_VideoVortex2PDF.pdf

Rosa Menkman Glitch Studies Manifesto in Lovink and Miles' Video Vortex 2.

The dominant, continuing search for a noiseless channel has been — and will always be — no more than a regrettable, ill-fated dogma.

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Realize that the gospel of glitch art also reveals 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, au-tomated by softwares and plug-ins. What is now a glitch will become a fashion.

http://www.networkcultures.org/_uploads/%236reader_VideoVortex2PDF.pdf

Tim Head, Artist’s Statement

The work focuses on the digital medium's elusive material substance and on our evolving relation-ship to it as a physical entity. It uses the medium's physical characteristics that make it uniquely dif-ferent from other media. Bypassing its usual role of representing images and texts, the work deals directly with its basic material elements - the luminous fabric of pixels on a screen or digital projection, the flurry of microscopic ink droplets laid down by the inkjet printer, and the hidden real time calculations of the computer operat-ing at ultra fast speeds that drive these elements. The medium's underlying material substance is exposed, moving it out from its usual confine-ment in virtual space towards the same physical space that we ourselves occupy

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/timhead/texts/th_digitaldimension.htm