“When I was your age, we didn’t have links. We had to walk !”

“Every so often an artist makes a work of art by doing almost nothing. No hours of torturous labor, no deep emotional expression, just a simple discovery and out it pops” [1].

Glitch Art, aesthetic in an erroring way of life

The word glitch comes from the German glitschen, that means ‘to slip‘. Considered as a very short fault, the term is used in the computing and electronics industries, as well as in video games, and circuit bending. Exploiting electronics glitches has been very current in the musical world. It even became a “genre” that was experimented with by artists such as Achim Szepanski, Oval, Pan Sonic or Pole, in the 90’s.

Behind the word Glitch is now also emerging a digital art movement that explores imperfection by producing or saving unwanted images. Made with a digital camera, a printer or a scanner and based on an accident or a malfunction in a program causing a computer crash, a glitch can be defined saying that it is the on-screen output of something not working properly.

According to Tony Scott making glitches do not seem to be the end of the world and these are the type that intrigue him. He worked out a 4 step pattern that will take you to glitch notoriety. The extended version can be found here : www.beflix.com/tech.html, we can summarize it as follows :

– Wait for something to go wrong, or force something to go wrong.

– Capture it.

– Use digital imaging software to crop the image to select the best of it.

– Upload your glitch on the internet.

Maybe it is the aesthetics or the experience of capturing pure glitches that make them seem so apealing. Like chasing rare butterflies and pinning them down once they are captured. There also seems to be a certain amount of fetish involved, regarding that there is such an obsession around the Glitch process and discovery of it, and making of it; glitch artists use or provoke digital “failure” to enlarge the artistic possibilities of these momentary accidents.

Glitches are becoming more widespread in our media dominated surroundings. Glitch artist/theorist Iman Moradi distinguishes two categories of glitches the pure glitch (“the result of a Malfunction or Error.”) and the glitch-alike (“produce and create the environment that is required to invoke a glitch and anticipate one to happen,”). The glitch-alike has been seen to serve throughout our merchandised world, as in adverstising or in movies.

The infiltration of glitches in different communication modes, points out the subversive nature of it.

“In a recent project (initiated in April 2003), the Telematic Channel of the US department of Art and Technology, has proposed an ambitious remixing and deconstruction of publicly broadcasted video material, in an attempt to reclaim control over mass media for politically active artists [2].”

Not to mention, but, as we commonly know, even the words “net.art” are glitch based. The term comes from a software incompatibilty that had [url:http://www.ljudmila.org/~vuk]Vuk Cosic[/url] read the words “Net.Art” in the middle of unreadable ASCII.

We can also find some glitches in video games, playable glitches such as [url:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch_City]Glitch City[/url]: a glitch in the game Pokemon. Artist such as JODI have taken over these breaches, glitching a map of well known games such as Quake Arena or [url:http://www.untitled-game.org]Wolfenstein[/url].

Glitches can alos be seen as digital trash, “discarded artefact of communication technology only appreciated by technology fetishists” [2].

“Dump your trash” by Joachim Blank and Karl Heinz Jeron (www.blankjeron.com) is an artpiece that materializes glitches, being fed the by content it finds on your webpage, it tweaks it and the produced glitche-alike can be ordered carved in stone.

Cory Arcangel’s “Data Diaries” Fed with computer memory files read with Quicktime software. Here the inapropriate use of software produces a subversive way of pointing out that even the files you don’t use or can’t read can be re-evaluated. A radically new way of re-using useless accumulated digital scam.

Visual artists such as Angela Lorenz, Dimitre Lima, Patrick O Brien, PBenjamin Fischer, Tony Scott, and lots of others, have been or are working for the development of this artistic practice trying to find new ways to produce aesthetic out of an erroring way of life.

Quotes:

1 Alex Galloway, introducing Cory Arcangel’s “Data Diaries” http://www.turbulence.org/Works/arcangel
2 “Glitch Aesthetics” written by Iman Moradi in 2004
http://www.oculasm.org/glitch

url o graphy

http://www.alorenz.net
http://www.beflix.com
http://www.blankjeron.com
http://www.dmtr.org
http://www.flickr.com/groups/glitches/pool
http://www.jodi.org
http://www.ljudmila.org/~vuk
http://www.neuromirror.info
http://www.oculasm.org/glitch
http://www.TransFatty.com
http://www.turbulence.org/Works/arcangel
http://www.typedown.com
http://www.untitled-game.org
http://www.usdat.us/tel-span
http://www.wikipedia.com
http://www.worshiptheglitch.com