Today, upon opening theStedelijkMuseum Press Release in my inbox, it suddenly hit me and I teared up a bit..
This is very monumental, not just for me but for digital art in the Netherlands. I am more than honoured to be part of it.
The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and MOTI in Breda are jointly acquiring 17 works by contemporary digital artists, amongst which 'A Vernacular of File Formats' (2010) - The digital archive. This acquisition is especially significant because it involves a rather exceptional format: an archive consisting solely of digital image and videos files (no physical materials are being acquired).
The Vernacular will of course also stay available online in all its different formats. More information on the work can be found here: https://goo.gl/iSk7xI For me it is a huge relieve know the archive will exist for prosperity.
MOTI has already been a pioneer in collecting pieces of net art in the Netherlands and although it will likely be changing course due to recent changes in management - this museum ROCKS.
This weekend, Born Digital opened at the MOTI Museum for Design in Breda, Netherlands. The exhibition will be open until the 28th of June 2015 and I think that if you can make it you definitely should!
The exhibition carries quite a few wonderful works and also a great instalment of Xilitla with custom build controller. And A vernacular of File Formats with special macroblock wallpaper. The prints and videos are installed according to compressions size and year of compression. So its kind of an infographic meets art.. I guess..
I did a couple of interviews for the exhibition and every time, I had to explain the title of the show; “Born Digital”. It seems that both journalists and critiques love to take the title as a reference to the artists exhibiting, being “Born Digital”. That is funny, because .. I am simply not born digital; I was born as a physical material (in a meat-suit ; ) and even though I use quite some Facebook I am still not (completely) digital (yet). But ok .. maybe the deal of this exhibition is to open up a discussion about art terminologies yet again…
Ever since I was invited to take part in this exhibition I have understood the title as a reference to a genre of work of which its origins can be traced back into digital cultures: software, interfaces, mediation, etc. The works on display in this exhibition find their origin or references in computer or calculation cultures in one way or another. The content of the exhibition is thus more or less born digital.
Or: post-digital Vaporwave made by digital pioneers, digital settlers and digital immigrants working with natively digital materials.
OK, that last sentence was just a joke on those who really digg that e-culture niche marketing slang.
I do not believe this is an exhibition about artists picking up their ‘digital paintbrush to paint with pixels’ or whatever nonsense a Dutch newspaper (NRC) wanted to describe it as (even after I had firmly stated in the same interview that this exhibition is not about anything remotely close to painting, when they asked me if I also like to paint... and what my connections to traditional art are)
I realise that amongst a subset of post-digital cyberpunks it has become incredibly hot (and quite humorous) to describe yourself as a digital painter (or paint printer creating lenticular paintings, digital painting or inkjet paintings Ito, Cortright, Rozendaal, etc>). That kind of choice of vernacular opens up a debate that I think should be taking place (again) quite soon, as it also comes with a whole lot of problematics and misgivings.
In any case digital painting is not the subject of this exhibition and I feel that in this case its the result of strongly conservative, misguided journalism. I would rather call it “radical digital materialism”.
Now what do you think about that?
Its hanging: A Glitch Timond! Glitch cliches for the blind, which you will(not) be able to see it during the totally dark opening this Wednesday evening at Gerard Doustraat 128, Amsterdam during the opening of PORN FOR THE BLIND™. A Glitch Timond The collage shows a collection of glitch clichés collected from popular culture. These former disturbances have gained meaning beyond their technological value; the effects have became signifiers, pointing to the presence of for instance hackers, ghosts, A.I., 'reality' and lofi or retro 'emotional' technologies. I chose the framing, the non-square, non-quadrilateral windows, in different x/y/z spaces as an example of the blindness for other possibilities caused by resolutional clichés.
I did not get around showing these images before, because I was in Mexico, but here are some of the photos of the Urban Art EFX exhibition in Amsterdam. The show had A Vernacular of File Formats (Featuring Extrafiles) and one animated gif (Áron). for more photos click here
Workshop:A Vernacular of File Formats and Extra Files Artists : Kim Asendorf (DE) and Rosa Menkman (NL) Place : Helsingør Kulturværft Date : Wednesday 2nd of May Max participants : 10 participants Time : 15:00 – 18:30 The workshops is free of admission Data bending is the creative hacking of digital data stored on disk. Similar to circuit bending in its methodology, data bending is an partially intuitive approach to exploring the nature of digital files. The hands-on portion of this workshop you will learn to use the languages of some common image file formats as a tool for creation, bending original images to create new ones. We will explore how new, often unexpected visual structures can be generated through various methods.
Moreover, the workshop will include a tutorial on creating your own file formats with the help of the ExtraFile software. ExtraFile is a software released in 2011 by Kim Asendorf and offers an escape from the officially licensed, proprietary image file formats that are under the rule of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), who authors, dictates and judges standardization laws since 1947. The participants will be exploring ExtraFile, an open source application for OS X, that allows to store image data in custom file formats. Write XF images from scratch, manipulate XF image with scripts written in Java or PHP, or for the advanced players, create your own file format.
THE INTENTIONAL FAUX-PAS Place : Helsingør Kulturværft Date : Thursday 3rd of May Time : 17:00 – 18:30 Free Admission Today it is completely normal to pay extra money for aesthetically appealing plugins like Hipstamatic or Instagram, that imitate (analogue) imperfections or nostalgic errors (artifacts), like lens flares and lomographic discolorations.
While Twitter and Facebook serve me with up to one of these “faux vintage” images per minute, this relentless flow of faux-vintage imagery is starting to look more and more like a collection of “more of the same” effects.
Is this over-indulgence in intentional faux pas a “new” phenomenon and why is it so popular? And how does the growing fetishization of nostalgic, “faux vintage” imperfections relate to the growing trend of glitch art?
Monglot works on MACOSX some 10.5s and 10.6 - We had no chance to program it for other OSs'. But I really hope some time we can.
Why make another glitch software
About half a year ago I logged into the "Glitch Art"-Flickr-pool to find inspiration for a 5 day workshop on glitching, that I was to give at the AKI (an Art School here in The Netherlands). Nothing seemed to have changed since the last time I logged in; the pool that once seemed so progressive, suddenly felt cold and boring, standardized, slow and in a general lack of inspiration. I found the images not interesting, they did not break any order and definitely not altered my state of mind or induced some kind of new thoughts. In hindsight I would summarize it as a collection of random pretty-girls-or-cats-as-subject (because that will never bore) - images, obfuscated by bright macro-blocks holding wrong luma and chroma values - further 'corrupted' by anti-aliasing, blocking, checker boarding, and other forms of distortion (yes, I could make the cool a-to-z artifact-list --- humor me).
5. Realize that the gospel of Glitch Art also tells about 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, automated by softwares and plug-ins. What is now a glitch will become a fashion.**
What I found in the Glitch Art Flickr pool were images opposing my original definitions of glitch (a short-lived fault in a system, inducing affects like surprise or shock) and Glitch Art (art that radically revalues normative knowledge, values and expectations). Instead, the pool underpinned a more ruptured discourse of Glitch. It showed an ironic, conflicted compromise between what I think of as the 'Other' form of Glitch (which is progressive or against the grain) and a commodified, superficially stylized form of glitch art (which is driven by the colonizing power of an aesthetically driven economy).
This double edged sword of todays Glitch Art has cut deep into the glitches' origins, forcing us to return back to our initial definitions. Glitch art as a style recalls Homi Bhabhas': "almost the same, but not quite" or a 'mimicry of digital slippage'; the real glitch of Glitch Art has slowly diminished into a virtual signifier, while the popular, commodified side of glitch has become a primal part of the new glitch-economy. This has left me thinking if in my Glitch Studies I should pay more attention to this 'other side of the coin'.
For the workshop at the art school I finally decided to teach about the materiality of file formats; their different languages, slang or dialects and what specific qualities, rules and rhetorics (slang poetry) can be exploited as a generative matter to create new images (a practice closely related to databending). I named the workshop "A Vernacular of File Formats" and showed different compression based artworks I have found over time while supplying the students with methods and tools to create their own format based research, and finally artworks.
One of the troubles I ran into during the workshop was that the tools I had were not ideal for such a workshop; with every other file format we set out to manipulate we had to switch softwares (which between the different OSs' on the students computers became a real *pain*). Because of all these troubles I felt it would be best that any future workshop would be accompanied with some basic visual support. I started working on the Vernacular of File Formats - a pdf that was first exhibited at GLI.TC/H and that later became a series of images. As I wrote back then, in this pdf I set out to make what once was cool, hot (think McLuhan) to emphasize the double edged sword of glitch. I hoped (wished) that in this way, the banal graphic effects that have by now (at least to me) lost all their extraordinary, revelatory potential, would be demystified and that subsequently more artists would start to think about how they can develop another dimension in their art (besides glitch just being a material research or aesthetic element). Of course, serendipitously, after releasing the pdf I got about ten emails asking me about specific technicalities of working in the different file-format cases…
Finally, during my residency in Sao Paolo, I started working on the Glitch Studies Manifesto-movie (that is still in production), of which the Vernacular of File Formats is an undeniable section. I spoke to Johan Larsby (who previously coded Swutits) about the lack of a software that can help me both in teaching and in the creation of images (and possibly movies) that would complement Glitch Studies, the Manifesto and the other work I had done in the past. This is when the Monglot project really started.
About Monglot(order and progress // chaos and destruction)
The name Monglot is a degeneration of the terms Mongrel and Monoglot (the term also references Homi Bhabha's "forked tongue" of colonialism and my idea of Glitch speak).
*/ Mongrel: the offspring of varieties of a species, mixed background, bastard, or an imperfect crossbreed
Monoglot: knowing only one language; monolingual.
*/
The Monglot software generates glitch images by mashing two languages in one final image; first of all the visual language of the image and secondly the image-data encoded in the language of the compression, that erupts over the surface of the former. This is how common glitch aesthetics like fragmentation, grain, ghosting, heterodynes, interlacing, jitter, jaggies, (…) posterization, pixelating, quantization error, ringing, staircase noise, scan lines (…) are being generated (mimicked?) and come to the surface.
Monglot aims to show the ambivalence (cool vs. hot) and the double articulation (encoding vs. image data) of (File Format-based) Glitch Art. The images generated in the software are ironically standardized by repetition and as such exist as a compromise in-between cool and hot glitches.
Monglot can be used to learn and research different file formats and their behaviors. This process of experimenting with different file types and their surprising effect are (I hope at least) part of this software. The thinking and interpreting that this process calls for (opens up) is a field that comes close to a "cool medium". Which is not the case with many other softwares that only accept one or 2 different file formats for experimentation and that actually carry a standard instead of opens the standards up for questions. (in most softwares the endproduct is the focus, not the /experimental/ generative part).
This makes Monglot exists as a glitch discourse in-between the lines, against the rules and within them, which is where I think we should look for the discourse of Glitch Art and Glitch Studies.
By normalizing (standardization through rules and repetition) the glitched states of the image the maker develops (new) knowledge of the compression language of the image. At the same time Glitch Art (as progressive and against the grain) becomes a virtual entity (a concept that is only referenced). Monglot thus imposes failure strategically, as a norm, to fork itself from the realm of Glitch Art.
The Monglot software allows you to insert random hex-data into an image, while allowing you to transcode the same image into different file formats. This will make the effect of the insertion of the same random data on the same image encoded in a different image file formats apparent.
The interface
* The Glitchspeak number is the iteration of random data you want inserted into your image data. If you re-click the Glitchspeak button with the same number inserted before you click EAffect! you will get the same random data inserted into your image and thus the same outcome (depending on if you used the same image or the same vernacular).
* Replace√ allows you to replace one value in the hex-code with another (if you want to do this, you will have to √check√ the Transgress button)
* TheProgress <-> Order slider allows you to set the amount of random image data inserted in your image. Notice that complete order and complete progress have some ironic outcomes.
* TheVernacular drop down menu allows you to choose in what file format you would like your image to be transcoded. Unfortunately there are only a few file formats freely available in the Cocoa image library and these are the ones that are available in Monglot. In the future I hope we can change these and insert more options. To get different outcomes. If you want to play with different outcomes and file formats now, you have to open an image that is already encoded in a different image file format (via for instance photoshop or preview). Try all the different encodings of for instance PNG (interlaced and non-interlaced) or TIF (compressed and non compressed) and learn about the differences these encodings make.
If you want to use the original file format encoding, choose Vernacular and open your image again.
* Batch √ allows you to make a batch process (to make a number of different glitch-iterations of the same image).
* Conserve√ allows you to save the images in a folder called Monglot. Make sure you empty this folder regularly otherwise you will fill up your harddrive (I have managed to write 70GBs of data in under a minute when I used the Monglot batch processes).
* EAffect is the button you click to make the 'magic' happen.
EAffect is an ironic reference to the discourse of glitch that has been standardized (undermined) by the abuse of words like Effect, Affect, Transgress, Politics while the theorists don't even explain (or probably know) what they really mean when they use them.
* FIT is the button that is supposed to make the image FIT, but right now it just stretches in one dimension (this is a known Bug-hug).
* GFD (Glitch File Directory - to be found in the toolbar) allows you to make animations (and movies, for instance when you use it in combination with Quicktime 7). Export your video to an image sequence and load this file directory via GFD in Monglot. Save the glitched images in another file directory and open this directory as an image sequence.
Monglot is programmed by Johan Larsby. He did a great fantastic job for the very little time we had - because unfortunately-fortunately he got a new work-contract (and now he can only code for his employer). So... Johan and I were forced to cut the production/programming on Monglot short. I worked to make the software presentable (in this beautifully difficult interface), but it is still full of little and bigger bugs (but what is a glitch software without bugs?). I hope some time in the future we can make it better and develop it further. For now it is a conceptual software.
Monglot works on some 10.5s and 10.6 - We had no chance to program it for other OSs'. But I really hope some time we can.
....My favorite podium in the Netherlands, WORM, closed its doors (to open them somewhere else in the future). I was asked to create the videos that played in a video installation during the closing party. These were the videos, which basically show the the Vernacular of File Formats. I made the videos with my Monglot Software, which is soon to be released. ....
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:
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).
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!
