Digital ate the cassette tape

 ∆  Gli.tc/h ∆ 

Daniel Wilsons asked me to help him with the practical part of his master thesis graduation.
The final work was Digital Ate The Cassette tape, an VHS commission for the practical part of his master thesis graduation. The work was exhibited as a VHS, playing in a video recorder. It also came with an typewriter label. The Final video shows signs of digital and analog compressions, to show that both realms possess noise artifacts. The video also has a piece of glitch studies manifesto. 

Sound mix by Daniel Wilson (he sampled the sound of a test tape/card, the eurosignal \\which I used to wake up with many mornings when I was young// and generation loss). Video is by me. 

//Reviews Refresh exhibition at Axiom Gallery.

Boston Globe. Everything old is new again. Artists degrade technology to find fresh content. By Cate McQuaid, Globe Correspondent | August 4, 2010.

The exhibition "Refresh" (and my work Demolish the eerie ▼oid) got a review on Dinca and in the Boston Globe. 

                                                         
//Dinca:                                                         

"Spanning from 8bit and ascii animations to manipulated digital video, this exhibition creates an aesthetic and conceptual dialogue that allows us to question conventions of digital media in our society as well as our relationship to new and past technology.  The artists included in this exhibition evoke notions of nostalgia, document unintended artifacts, and push the boundaries of the ↓field by experimenting with new technologies.  In doing so, these artists create a refreshingly alternative digital practice that functions outside of the mainstream aesthetic."

//Boston Globe:

"Some of the art here simply looks grainy and low-tech. That can work when you push it far enough: Rosa Menkman has reduced a digital self-portrait down to a blipping code of colored dots, which at one point coalesce into an actual picture of her."

//Playlist exhibition at iMAL, Brussels.

Tomorrow is the closing day of Playlist in iMAL, an exhibition curated by Domenico Quaranta. The exhibition gives an inclusive overview of artists working with ubiquitous technologies, (mis)using them as raw material to develop new works  concepts and understandings out of them.

Playlist gives us a sample of the way musical and visual artists asserted this freedom by taking the time to reinvent the specificites of the computer medium (code, computation generation, machine glitches,...) pushing obsolete game and computing technologies into new directions, far away from expected usages and established aesthetics, far away also from the pressure to consume the next generations of digital products launched on the market. Playlist highlights also the continuum of researches and practices based on reinvention, recycling and repurposing, active not only in mainstream cultures (game, hackers and demoscene, 8-bit and chiptune music) but also in contemporary media arts. This reinvention process is often one of the first steps that leads to innovation and renewal, a collaborative and open process shared by open communities and indivuals with rich, mixed and hybrid profiles.

For who did not get to go to Brussels, VjVISUALOOP made a nice overview-video. Around 1:44 you can see my video piece Radio Dada that is also part of the Playlist exhibition. I also made some photos during the opening night, which you can see here

gli.tc/h blog is up!

Pixelnoizz and Rosa Menkman live visuals @ Satta Outside 2010

After a day of heavy video glitch/compression-discussions and building 5 Quartz Composer patches in the sun, me and PXN (Pixelnoizz) did an improvised  "No Signal VJs" set, at the beach stage at Satta Outside Festival last weekend. We had a lot of fun, and I have lot of respect for PXN, he is a great artist and we really worked well together.

This is just 5 minutes of footage of our 3 hour filled-with-laughter improvisation.

Music by Lapti and DZA from Russia.

Video edited and shot by Tomas Ramanauskas, Vitalis Mika, Antanas Stasiunas and Darius Silenas 
(thank you guys and Vytautas, Ignas and the whole Satta crew!!).

Monocromo Artfanzine 11 (Mexico)

MONOCROMO 11 has just been released, and has my video "Compress Process" in it (music by extraboy; unfortunately they forgot to mention that). More

"MONOCROMO emerged from Morelia México as an open art-collective without any barriers, where the art-works of its members & other creators that share the spirit of the project can be promoted, creating links of communication through the graphic media. We hope this can be a space of art-spreading, but also an experimental place where the ideas of the 'monocromers' flow freely and they can use wathever they want for the creation of their works. The whole material created for MONOCROMO (art-works themselves & packing/presentation) is all made by our own bloody hands !!"

??RE:pOst! I have been remixed! or something.... twice!! By NIck Briz

An overview // Critical Glitch Artware Category a .doc[umentary] by Nick BrizBy Nick Briz, at 24fps

A Vernacular of File Formats (2) - Workshop

go backwards to navigate forward  or download the pdf!
This pdf describes part of the workshop "A Vernacular of File Formats" that I gave at ArtEZ, (Enschede, NL. April, 2010).                                                                                                                 

I will also give this workshop in the coming months:                                                                  

17->18-09-'10 – IN/OUT Festival, The Tank, New York, US.                                                         

29-> 3-9-'10 - gli.tc/h, Chicago, US.                                                                                         

Download in lofi quality here (7 mb) or hifi quality here (118 mb, yes its very big but it allows to zoom into most of the textures as close as you want).                                                                     

  

A Vernacular of File Formats

Learning from mr. Compression                                                                                                          

                                                                                                                                                                           

                                                                                                                                                                              

Noise Art > Filter art > when Cool becomes Hot >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Glitches are hot. It is clear from what we can see on MTV, Flickr, in the club or the bookstore. While the "Glitch: designing imperfection" coffee table book introduces the glitch design aesthetic to the world of latte drinking designers, and Kanye West uses glitches to sing about his imperfect love life, the awkward, shy and physically ugly celebrate under the header "Glitched: Nerdcore for life".
Glitch has become hot. A brightly colored bubblegum wrapper that doesn't ask for much involvement, or offers any stimulus. Inside I find gum that I keep chewing - hoping for some new explosion of good taste - but  the more I chew it, the less tasty and more rubbery it gets. Glitch design fulfills an average, imperfect stereotype, a filter or commodity that echoes a stabilized "medium is the message" standard.

Naturally, the "No Content - Just Imperfection" slogan of this kind of hot glitch design is complimented by cool glitches.
In "The Laws of Cool", Alan Liu asks himself What is "Cool"? He describes that cool is the ellipsis of knowing whats cool and withholding that idea. Those who insist on asking, are definitely uncool.
Cool glitches do not (only) focus on a static end product, but (also) on a process, a personal exploration or a narrative element (that often reflects critically on a medium). This is why cool is in a constant state of flux, as is the genre of "cool glitch art", which finally exists as an unstable assemblage that relies on the one hand the construction, operation and content of the apparatus (the medium) and on the other hand the work, the writer/artist, and the interpretation by the reader and/or user (the meaning). There is no one definition of cool glitch art.

In an effort to make what was once cool now hot, or visa versa, I made this Vernacular of File Formats, in which I studied ways to exploit and deconstructed the organizations of file formats into new, brutalist designs.

…I am waiting for the first "Glitchs not dead" hoodie in H&M. And because "fans are as bad as the ignorant", for the sake of being bad, I will definitely wear the hoodie. Hoera!