Text we could read here is one more example of Rob's extraordinary gift to wrote clear and deep at the same time. One who never herd for *glitch art* after that text could say than he know what's that all about :) That text, also, inspire us to think about our position in 'never-ending-now' which most people call time. Isn't it our / almost / duty to find our personal and intimate GLITCH (?) because assuredness that war and violence must be and stay only and irreplaceable way to keep world in 'living amplitude' mean keep up with attitude that ''mistake'' as aesthetic category must be or ''cultivate fake ignorance'' ( we are witnesses of new fashion who insist on ''childish'' painting and false naivety ), or it's '' no doubt '' corporativ art who serve only to make things bigger and more expensive, to make *spectacular* things! Instead of church, now corporativ ideology and their institutions take care about Anish sculpture, Koons work, Marina performance and Hirst butterfly ... This is sort of mega mental glitch without chance to became human art again and we 'mortal' people have nothing to do with that, even without irony - it's divine intrigue. So what's glitch art ? Its our right to find dark corner in our brain and see what's there without fear of consequences. Temptation's are horrible. Put on side of main-stream, without influence, money and always in mistrust we must exept our glitch not as ''I don't fucking care'' excuse to make stupid things, we should acccept our glitch as safe point in dark, point we could put our leg to make next step. Most of other calculation's are, actualy indulgence to post - neo - liberal butcher store and ideology who became day by day, more and more base for totalitarian society. ...MANIK ... MAY ... 2013 ... ----- Original Message ----- From: "Rob Myers" <[email protected]> To: "NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity" <[email protected]> Sent: Saturday, May 04, 2013 8:27 PM Subject: [NetBehaviour] Glitch As Symbolic Form
Glitch as an aesthetic signifier of technological presence dates back at least to the 1980s. Look at The Vaught-Kampf machine in Blade Runner (1982) or the titular character in Max Headroom (1985). The use of Glitch use as an artistic aesthetic in itself has accelerated with the democratisation of technologies that make technology that prodcues glitches obsolescent. When a technology becomes redundant, its previous technical inefficiencies become available for aesthetic recuperation and appreciation. The hiss and crackle of vinyl records, to be ignored or reduced as far as possible by the mid-20th century audiophile, became signifiers of historical authenticity in 1990s Trip Hop. The lens flare, light seepage and colour shift of cheap mass-produced chemical film-based cameras have been turned from annoyances to fetishes with Lomography and Instagram. And the glitches of poor video connections or corrupted floppy disks have followed a similar path in Glitch art. This is a process of ironisation. Irony changes or inverts content without altering form. Meaning is introduced into systems by ironising non-signifying forms. It is modified and modulated by further ironising those forms. The glitches that once frustrated media professionals and home users of electronic meadia are ironised into aesthetic form in Glitch Art. Glitch Art sits in the historical tradition of process art and chance art. Automatism and chance acts in Dada, Surrealism, Situationism and the Oulipo. Scatter art. Generative and algorithmic art. And action painting, which provides the useful concept of "all-over composition" as a way of avoiding a requirement of specific, localisable intent in aesthetically evaluating an image. Glitch art also sits in the historical traditions of remix art,detournement and décollage. The knowledge that the image has been altered is key to its aesthetic reception. It's tempting to talk about the creative destruction of capitalism and to damn Glitch as neoliberal apologia, but that's too easy and would leave the speaker too comfortable. It is also very tempting to try and place Glitch Art within the traditions of anti-aesthetics or of nominalistic/found art, or to compare the use of image corruption to artistic outsourcing or crowdsourcing in terms of artistic abrogation of authorship. But Glitch is at least curated by the artist, and its generation requires an engagement with the specificity of digital media that they are not supposed to have. The Glitch artist is artisan, not manager, and Glitch art is sublime, not trial. Panofsky's extension of the idea of symbolic form to perspective can be applied to Glitch as form. Glitch is effect (a body of effects) that generates *critical* form. The patterns of noise or confounding signals that result from analog or digital image corruption and the effects on displaced sections of the corrupted image are form, presented for positive aesthetic evaluation rather than removed to avoid negative technical evaluation. This complicates Shannon's diagram of information transmission. The smooth running of inhuman systems is disqueting. Glitch reasserts their physicality. To the extent that it did so to generalise specific failings to a general system in order to make them appear fallible and human this would be kitsch. To the extent that it did so to remind us of older technology, it would be Cory Arcangel-style leveraged nostalgia. And to the extent that it generationally positioned itself against the previous generation's perception of value in its own culture it would be adolescent social positioning. Glitch art avoids these failings by producing tension and contradiction rather than jouissance and confirmation. It is disquieting in a way that disturbs the new without allowing a return to an idealised earlier social and aesthetic order, and it is aesthetically creative in a way that does not hide the destruction involved. The 8 and 16-bit console software beloved of some Glitch artists is comprehensible to them and to their audiences in a way that 64-bit cloud-based network software is not. The former is therefore a useful artistic proxy for the latter. Defamiliarising the one familiarises the other, and provides a way in to critique its unseen operation through visible means. Art makes invisible order tractable by making it visible. Glitch aesthetics are all-over irruptions of the hidden technological order that reveal its operation through its failure. They assert not a reactionary nostalgia but a potential challenge to closure. Engaging with Glitch aesthetics allow us to exercise and develop our regard in a way that increases our fit to the smooth operation and to the catastrophes and contradictions of our post-digital environment. _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
