// Cimatics / NIMK / Pixxelpoint / Blip //

Busy month! You can find me here:
* lecture @ Video Vortex (22/11/2009) Atomium, Brussels, Belgium.
* Visuals for Cimatics opening party (23/11/2009), Beursschouwburg, Brussels, Belgium. And a nice 'short' review @ the Cimatics website :)
* Presentation of my research @ Montevideo (NIMK), Amsterdam (12/12/2009)
* Pixxelpoint Workshop/Lecture (06/12/2009), Nova Gorica, Slovenia.
* Blip Festival (17-18-19/12/2009), The Tank, New York, USA.
* Public Embassy with Paris and JYK. Visuals for Anamanaguchi
starPause, Magic Hammer, IAYD and 8bk-ok. (20/12/2009), Brooklyn, New York, USA.

Glitch Studies Manifesto (6/7/8/9/10)

Glitch Studies Manifesto
[short, first version]. Longer parts can be found here.

1. The dominant, continuing search for a noiseless channel has been, and will always be no more than a regrettable, ill-fated dogma.
Even though the constant search for complete transparency brings new, ‘better’ media, every one of these new and improved techniques will always have their own fingerprints of imperfection.

2. Dispute the operating templates of creative practice by fighting genres and expectations!
We are all stuck in the membranes of knowledge, governed by social conventions and acceptances. As an artist I strive to reposition these membranes; I do not feel locked into one medium or between contradictions like real vs. virtual or digital vs. analog. Fight the techno religion! Surf (tube- ride) the vortex of technology, the art of artifacts.

3. Get away from the established action scripts and join the avant-garde of the unknown. Become a nomad of noise artifacts!
There are three occasions when the static, linear notion of transmitting information can be interrupted. These instances often result into noise artifacts, sub-divisible as glitch, encoding / decoding (compression) and feedback artifacts.

4. Use the glitch as an exoskeleton of progress. Find catharsis in disintegration, ruptures and fractures.
Manipulate, crack and break different actors: bend them towards the point where they become something new.

5. The gospel of glitch art sings about new models implemented by corruption.
The popularization and cultivation of the avant-garde of mishaps appears to be predestined and unavoidable. Glitches have often shown to be the early development of a next fashion, or the creation of a new archetype. These new, enchanting forms seem to be inevitably connected to the creation of new filters. Moreover, in contemporary culture, we are so used to data fraud that the ‘right way of using' does not exist anymore; instead, misuse and abuse have become new commonalities.

6. The ambiguous contingency of the glitch technotext depends on its constantly mutating materiality.
The materiality of the glitch art is not (just) the machine the work appears on. The glitch exists as an unstable assemblage in which on the one hand the construction, operation and content of the apparatus (the medium) and on the other hand the work, the writer, and the interpretation by the reader and/or user (the meaning) influence its materiality.

7. Glitch artifacts are critical trans-media aesthetics.
They are not only used to show any kind of medium in a state of hypertrophy, but also to criticize the inherent politics. I bring any medium in a critical state and while criticizing it!

The role of artifacts in critical trans media aesthetics is two fold:
* They show a medium in a critical state (ruined, unwanted, not recognized, accidental and horrendous state)
* They critique the medium (genre, interface and expectations)
Accidents transform the way we see the normal. Every accident transforms the normal
Political: they challenge the established template of creative practice and the production of theory and reflection.

8. Translate acousmatic noise and soundscapes into acousmatic video and videoscapes to create conceptual synesthesia.
The obfuscated box of technology is the new veil that shrouds the source of the output.
When artifacts from both the aural and the visual realm are used as criticial media aesthetics, they form the opportunity to create a conceptually synesthetic artwork. An artwork where synesthesia is not just a metaphor for transcoding one medium upon another, but a conceptually driven meeting of the visual and the sonic (or maybe even other senses).

9. Speak the totalitarian language of disintegration
Glitchspeak is a vocabulary of unknown rhetorics. It is not just a new, unknown form, but also an exoskeleton of progress: a new generativity.

10. Study what is outside of knowledge and teach Glitch studies! Theory is just what you can get away with!
Just like Foucault stated that there can be no reason without madness, Virilio described that there is no technological progression without the inherent accident and Gombrich describes noise in terms of breaks from patterns, we cannot understand flow without its interruption, noise without order, transparency without artifacts or glitch without a presumed function. This is why there is a need for Glitch Studies.
Glitch theory is just what you can get away with!

// Blip Festival NYC // SOTQ

HELLO. The video above is a little render of a part of the set I did for Apparat and DjSkate last weekend. It was a success!

Now the news. I am very happy to play at New York's Blip Festival this year (17/18/19 December)! It will be my first time in the US so I am extra anxious too! It will be a great opportunity to meet some people I have not had the chance to meet (yet). And to see my old mayo friends as well.
I will know only later for who I will do my visuals and when I know, I will put the information up.

For the people who are around Amsterdam this weekend, I will be blogging the Society of the Query conference (over at their blog), which will be very interesting as well! The home-style of the conference is glitchy. I am not sure where the design comes from but it is (ambivalently) funny that glitches permeated the logo of this "stop searching, start questioning" conference.
Maybe glitches and searching have both become virals in our daily lives.

// Tivoli: No Mans Land // Video Vortex //

Tomorrow (8/11) I will do some visuals at the Born Digital No Mans Land party, to celebrate the fall of the Berlin wall 20 years ago, in Tivoli de helling, Utrecht. I will do the visuals for the dj set of DjSkate vs. Apparat (De). I made a special set for it, full of destroyed territories (or something like this).

Also, the Video Vortex (20-21/11) website is online! The Video Vortex conference will take place as part of Cimatics Festival (where I performed last year), in the Atomium, Brussels. I will be presenting the Glitch Studies Manifesto I am still working on. It will be part of the 'system flaws and tactics' panel. The first 5 point of my manifesto can be read here. More to come, and feel open to critique/suggest things!

Glitch Studies Manifesto (5)

5. The gospel of glitch art sings about new models implemented by corruption.
The popularization and cultivation of the avant garde of mishaps appears to be predestined and unavoidable. Glitches have often shown to be the early development of a next fashion, or the creation of a new archetype. These new, enchanting forms seem to be inevitably connected to the creation of new filters. Moreover, in contemporary culture, we are so used to data fraud that the ‘right way of using' does not exist anymore; instead, misuse and abuse have become new commonalities.

Like in poetry, in glitch art one perception immediately leads to a next perception. Glitch art is all about relaying the membrane of the normal; to create a new protocol after breaking the earlier one.
The perfect glitch shows how destruction can change into the creation of something new, while at the same time this creation annihilates an otherwise infinite realm of possibilities. Once the glitch is understood as an alternative way of representation or a new language, its tipping point has passed and the essence of its glitch-being is vanished. The glitch is no longer an art of rejection, but a shape or appearance that is recognized as a new form (of art). Artists that work with glitch processes are therefore often hunting for a fragile equilibrium; they search for the point when a new form is born from the blazed ashes of its precursor.
The procedural essence of glitch art is therefore often opposed to conservation; the experience, perception and understanding of what a glitch is at one point in time cannot be preserved to a future time. The beauty of creation of a glitch is uncanny and sublime; the artist is trying to catch something that is the result of an uncertain balance, a shifting, un-catchable, unrealized utopia connected to randomness of idyllic disintegrations. The essence of glitch art is therefore best understood as a history of movement and as an attitude of destructive generativity; it is the procedural art of non con-formative, ambiguous reformations.

Some artists do not focus on the procedural entity of the glitch. They skip the process of creation-by-destruction and focus directly on the creation of a formally new design, either by creating a final product or a new way to recreate the latest archetype (that is not yet by everybody recognized). These works help by the creation of, or sometimes even create are a plugin, a filter or a new 'glitching' software. This form of 'conservative glitch art' focuses more on design and end-products then the procedural breaking of flows.
We can voice an obvious critique; to design a glitch means to domesticate it. When the glitch becomes domesticated, controlled by a tool, or technology (a human craft) it has lost it enchantment and has become predictable. It is no longer a break from a flow within a technology, or a method to open up the political discourse but instead a (new) cultivation. For many actors it is no longer a glitch, but a filter that consists of a preset and/or a default, it has become just a new commodity.
But for some (mostly the actors that take part on the receptive end), these designed glitches are still experienced as breaks or errors in a flow. Glitch art consists of an assemblage of perceptions by multiple actors. Therefore, these new filters that come to existence after the momentum of glitch cannot be excluded from the realm of glitch art.
Even so, the utopian fantasy of 'technological democracy' or 'freedom' that glitch art is often connected to, has little to do with the colonialism of these new glitch art archetypes, designs and glitch filters. If there is such a thing as technological freedom, this can only be found within the procedural momentum of glitch art, -when it is just about to relay a protocol.

Glitch Studies Manifesto (4)

4. Use the glitch as an exoskeleton of progress. Find catharsis in disintegration, ruptures and fractures.
Manipulate, crack and break different actors: bend them towards the point where they become something new.

The glitch is a wonderful interruption that shifts an object away from its ordinary form and discourse. For a moment I am lost, in awe, asking myself what this other utterance is, how was it created. Is it perhaps ...a glitch? But once I named it, the momentum -the glitch- is no more...

The glitch has no solid form or state through time; it is an ephemeral, unexpected, abnormal mode of operandi, a break from (one of) the many flows, a grinch. As my understanding of the glitch changed and I named it, so did the equilibrium of the (former) glitch itself: it has vanished into the realm of new conditions.
Determining what a glitch is, is often misunderstood as a subjective act. We have to realize that the glitch depends on more than just a personal or even a social definition. The glitch involves different levels of reading at the same time: it is a form of micro-politics that causes breaks within technological, social, political and many other (flows within) systems. As semantic terrorism within an irrational matrix it temporarily voids all possibilities for understanding. But somewhere within these constructed ruins of meaning a feeling of triumph exists; a hopeful feeling that there is something more than just destruction. The negative feeling makes place for an intimate experience of a machine (or program), a system showing its formations and its flaws – as a holistic celebration rather than a particular perfection it reveals a new opportunity, or a spark of creative energy. A feeling that something new is about to be created.

The derivative art form, conveniently called 'glitch art', moves like the weather; sometimes it evolves very slowly while at other times it can strike like lightning. The art works within this realm can be disturbing, provoking and horrifying. Beautifully dangerous, they can at once take all the tensions of other possible compositions away. These works stretch boundaries and generate new possibilities: as an avant-garde of mishaps they break up previously sealed politics and force a catharsis of conventions, norms and believes.
But the word 'glitch' within 'glitch art' means more than just the technological definition of glitch. Glitch art does not just take place on a surface, and does not just disappear after its tipping point. This art form is also about what happens after the tipping point, how media transgress into a new mode and even what happens after this transgression (the normalization). This mode can be continuous, or exist just as a reflection (a memory) in our mind. Furthermore, it can choose to focus on the procedural, or more on a final design. One way or the other, the choice to 'accept' the glitch by naming it (glitch art) and to welcome it as a new form, means to accept change and to welcome a new dialectic.
Glitch art is therefore not always (or by everyone) experienced as an art of the momentum; many works have already passed their tipping point and are now created by a new method and exist as a new, recognizable form, the design of glitch.
Glitch art not only depends on its system but also on the different actors within these systems. Not only the artist who creates the work of glitch art is 'responsible' for the glitch. The 'foreign' input (wrongly encoded syntaxes that lead to forbidden leakages and data promiscuity), the hardware and the software (the 'channel' that shows functional? collisions) and the audience (who is in charge of the reception, the decoding) can also be responsible. All these actors are positioned within different (but sometimes overlapping) flows of which the final product can be described or recognized as glitch art.
Another reason to call these works of intended, controlled glitch art 'glitchy', is because these works exists within different systems of perception; for instance the system of production and the system of reception. While the artist might not call his production method glitchy, the audience could still believe in the glitchy-ness of the result. This is why an intended error can still be called erroneous (glitchy).

Glitch Studies Manifesto (3)

3. Get away from the established action scripts and join the avant-garde of the unknown. Become a nomad of noise artifacts!
There are three occasions when the static, linear notion of transmitting information can be interrupted. These instances often result into noise artifacts, sub-divisible as glitch, encoding / decoding (compression) and feedback artifacts.

Etymologically, the term “noise” refers to states of aggression, alarm and powerful sound phenomena in nature ('rauschen'), such as storm, thunder and the roaring sea. But when we approach noise within a more social context, noise is often used as a figure of speech and as such has many meanings.
Sometimes, noise stands for unaccepted sounds, not music, not valid information or what is not a message. This negative definition also has a positive consequence: it can help by defining its opposite (the world of meaning, the norm, regulation, goodness, beauty and so on). Moreover, noise often helps to contextualize information.
Noise is thus paradoxical. It is the source for new patterns, anti patterns and new possibilities. Noise functions as a positive, generative quality (that is present in any communication medium) and exists on the border (the membrane) of language.
I use the concept of noise to refer to an (often undesirable, unwanted, other and unordered) disturbance or addition to the linear signal of useful data; a void of meaning.
This void can not only be used as a lack of meaning, but also as a power that forces the reader to move away from the traditional discourse around code, and to open it up, to understand the politics behind a text or technology. The void can bring the fundaments of communication that are normally obfuscated or the elements that we don't want to see to the surface; it can expose hierarchies. Through the void, artists can voice a critique towards the digital media.

Glitch Studies Manifesto (2)

2. Dispute the operating templates of creative practice by fighting genres and expectations!
We are all stuck in the membranes of knowledge, governed by social conventions and acceptances. As an artist I strive to reposition these membranes; I do not feel locked into one medium or between contradictions like real vs. virtual or digital vs. analog. Fight the techno religion! Surf (tube- ride) the vortex of technology, the art of artifacts.

The quest for complete transparency has changed the computer system into a highly complex assemblage that is often hard to penetrate, or sometimes even completely closed off. This system consists of layers of obfuscated protocols that find their origin in ideologies, economies, political hierarchies and social conventions, which are subsequently operated by different actors.
I elucidate and deconstruct the hierarchies of this system of assemblage. I do not work in (binary) opposition to what is inside the flows (the normal uses of the computer) but practice on the border of these flows. Sometimes, I use the computers’ inherent maxims as a façade, to trick the audience into a flow of certain expectation that the artwork rapidly breaks out of. As a result, the spectator is forced to acknowledge that the use of the computer is based on a genealogy of conventions, while in reality, the computer is a machine that can be bent or used in many different ways. With the creation of breaks within politics and social and economical conventions, the audience may become aware of the preprogrammed patterns and a distributed awareness of a new interaction gestalt can take form.

Glitch Studies Manifesto (1)

1. The dominant, continuing search for a noiseless channel has been, and will always be no more than a regrettable, ill-fated dogma.
Even though the constant search for complete transparency brings new, ‘better’ media, every one of these new and improved techniques will always have their own fingerprints of imperfection.

In the beginning there was only noise. Then we moved from the grain of celluloid to the magnetic distortion and scanning lines of the cathode ray tube. We wandered the planes of phosphor burn-in, rubbed away our dead pixels and eventually watched performance art created by cracking LCD screens.
The elitist discourse of the upgrade is a dogma widely pursued by the naive victims of a persistent upgrade culture. The consumer only has to dial #1-800 to stay on top of the technological curve, the waves of euphoria and disappointment. It has become normal that in the future we will pay less for a device that can do more. We have to realize that improving is nothing more then a proprietary protocol, a deluded consumer myth about progression towards a holy grail of perfection.

Publications -- some self shame/shameless selfpromotion

I am never sure if I should post these publications that I am somehow involved with, it seems a bit self aware or something. However, there is some good stuff, so here we go.. full on...
# In the begin of the summer Eva Sancho interviewed me for Nisimazine. The resulting piece is a small but good introduction to (some of) my work.
# Accidents in Celluloid and Pixel lost the Celluloid Remix competition at the Dutch Film Festival (NFF), but did get some feedback on a diploma signed by Dutch-Remix-Whizzkid-Guru Eboman: Starts annoying, becomes nauseating/rotten (free translation by me). Apparently in some Dutch slang (I am not familiar with) this means something positive. The comment works perfect for a glitch film anyway. hehe.
# Nick Briz is organizing periodical glitch events in and around Chicago. He used some of my films for the Eye and Ear Clinic (we need something like this in Amsterdam). He also wrote a piece for the student paper fnewsmagazine in which he used an image by me.
# It seems that Rafolio has finished his master thesis on digital decay. The pdf download is put together with a lot of effort and features some works by me (an honor to be part of that, really). It was especially nice to see that he picked the 404void.iq project (that I did in 2007) as one of his research subjects. I have actually been considering to do a 2009 sequal of the project, to see how much the Iraqi web has evolved in the last 2 years.
# Last Friday, Richard Rogers presented the IPbrowser at Impakt online festival in Utrecht. A project I worked on at DMI (together with oa. Alexander Galloway) and that later received support by Impakt.
# Kind of late and therefore less interesting: Radio Dada was part of the Intermerz program and screened at LEV Festival (Gijon, Spain) and TERRITORIOS DIGITALES 2009 (Sevilla, Spain). The video was also part of the Pixel Project collection. Performative Fail is part of the persuit of rejects project >> something will happen with this but I am not sure what.
# Second last and weirdest, I found a rather old interview of me and Goto80 at HAIP festival for Open Source Radio FRO in Ljubljana. Its awkward to listen too (at least for me). But now we got that out of the way too!
# Last but most interesting: I will be presenting my Glitch Studies Manifesto at Video Vortex, Brussels (20 November 2009) in the panel `System flaws and tactics`. The conference takes place in one of the spheres of the Atomium Funny how my latest glitch presentations take place in highly ordered places like the Hilton Hotel and a molecule structure.
# oh I cheated, one more small thing, I started my PhD last week at the KHM. It is a practice based PhD on artifacts. An outline and presentation will follow soon!