8/16/2011

glitch art spheres organized (graphs in collab w./ Esther Weltevrede)

Organization of glitch artists
An organization of glitch artists // bookmarkers perspective
Research Question: bookmarking on delicious is an act of curating; the organizing and including (or excluding) of links.
To what extend do the ”glitch”+ ”artist” -tagged bookmarks form (a) networked websphere(s) and what spheres are part of this glitch-artist bookmark network?


Organization of glitch art blogs delicious
The glitch blogosphere // the bookmarkers perspective
Research Question: bookmarking on delicious is an act of curating; the organizing and including (or excluding) of links.
To what extend do the ”glitch”+ ”blog”+ ”art -tagged bookmarks form (a) networked websphere(s) and what spheres are part of this glitch-artist bookmark network?


Organization of glitch artsts on twitter
Glitch actors organized // The Twitter perspective
Research Question: making twitter lists is an act of social organizing; it entails the active including (or excluding) of contacts within a particular stream or network.
But do the”glitch”-listed actors and their websites form (a) networked websphere(s) and if so,
what sphere(s) can be distinguished?


General remarks: 
- I deleted sites like myspace, twitter, flickr, vimeo and creativecommons because they distorted the graphs, while they are not interesting for the autcome. However, I do think that these nodes could have been interesting for platform focused research
- There are some bugs in the mapping software that caused some nodes to show up twice. It seemed impossible to merge the nodes automatically or by hand so I deleted the smallest ones - I do believe that overall, this did not matter much and the graphs still give a trustworthy overview of the spheres.   
- did not index the twitter lists that were based on glitch the game (this is completely trivial)
- A node will only appear if there are at least 2 in or outlinks. 

Preliminary (Cross-)spherical findings
* The Delicious graph based on the "glitch" + "artist"-tags and the Delicious graph based on the "glitch" + "blog" + "artist"-tags show two very similar, complex networks. After  observation, I recognize how the graphs reveal the location of the glitch art community in relation to other web-based/digital arts communities. The key players (or hubs) of these spheres are for insrtance tools (Processing, openframeworks, Puredata, arduino),  digital art community-blogs with (such as Rhizome, 319scholes and the NewMuseum, Neural and Furtherfield) and festivals (Transmediale, bentfestival and GLI.TC/H). 
Vagueterrain seems to function as a pre-eminent center-hub that is greatly responsible for connecting the different communities . However, the hub is also disproportionately small (which means that Vagueterrain does not receive many inlinks from the community, whereas Rhizome does - this could be a case of authority). 
The Rosa-menkmans website (my site) is both big and colored, which means that the crawler indexed both inlinks and outlinks to the blog, marking it both as an authoritative and active hub within the researched spheres. This also means that the blog is actively shaping the mapped community, which is on the one hand an important problem to keep in mind during analysis and on the other hand not very surprising since its me who is asked these questions - they are what my blog and generally all my research is centered around.
Personal blogs and artists pages such as Goto80, designingimperfection, beigerecords, Gieskes, jonsatrom and jodi seem not to link-out to the glitch community, while at the same time receiving many inlinks from their peers. This could either be a sign of status, or the crawler encountering a problem  fetching the outlinks). 
Vades website has many different nodes (syphon, Vade.info, v002, abstrakt.vade.info, etc). Because of these nodes it is not completely clear what the 'status' of the website within the network is, but it is clear that this repository/artist blog must be a key hub within the glitch sphere (given the different colors and many outlinks).  Both Vade and Pixelnoizz take an interesting place being connected between the more generative side of the graph and the more procedural side of glitch art).


* There are two independent Twitter glitch-listed actor spheres: 
the first is centered around glitch.fm, the glitchhopforum and a couple of other glitchmusic related sites. 
The second sphere is a bigger, diffused sphere that locates and maps the genre of glitch art. 
Within this sphere sites like 8bitpeoples (an chiptune/8bit/lofi community), GLI.TC/H (the glitch art festival), Vagueterrain (the Digital Art / Culture / Technology blog), slowelectronics (where the music label slowelectronics is located) and personal blogs act as hubs inbetween the different communities. 
It is striking to me how many of the personal sites are connected with multiple hubs, indicating a bigger trend of possible crossbreeding and networking between the different digital art communities.


Some more observations:
I think of all three graphs the "glitch" + "artist" graph gives the best repository of glitch art nodes for starting glitch-art researchers.   
 
Location
- I had expected the Chicago school of glitch to have a more pronounced, heavily interlinked presence. While there is definately an disproportionate amount of Chicago based artists in all of the graphs, they do link socially to other geographically nodes. 

- The presence of a Dutch community (Gieskes, Karlklomp, rosa-menkman, Jodi, Impakt, mu, v2 and wormweb) is also interesting.

- There are only western nodes in the graphs. Actos like UCNV are missing. I think this is because non-western glitch artists do not write in English and are thus not linked-into the network . However, they could have formed their own network, which also did not happen - Glitch art must (still) be a very western discourse

Many of the in IDN magazine featured glitch artists/projects (Quayola, Kimasendorf, clementvalla) who are new to the glitch scene have found a place in the delicious networks. This means that the network is fresh.

Obviously communities are often build on top of friendships. The graphs also show this - I know many people within these graphs know eachother personally.

The circuitbending 'community' seems under-represented. Possible reasons for lack of nodes could be that this community is not social within these particular glitch spheres (ie. are not linking or out), or is not tagged as glitch or as art. 

QuartzComposer does not have a node on the graphs (for as far as I can see). This must be because its 'inside' of the apple OS. It makes me wonder about where the Quartz community is based.

Music:
The 8bit/chiptune music scene is notably connected to the glitch scene. keyplayers in this interlinkage are: Goto80, Notendo, Nullsleep, no-carrier and the 8bitpeoples music label.
click and cut/microsound musicians dont keep blogs but are tagged as glitch artists. 
 
The Glitch.fm community (glitch music) is not tagged as art or artists in delicious (there is no delicious presence). 

3 comments:

What Makes Pistachio Nuts? said...

Just read the interview on Rhizome, was wondering if you were familiar with the work of Nick Land at all? Reading his recent Collected Writings (Fanged Noumena) and there are texts like 'Hypervirus' which try and employ a glitch aesthetic in text form which you might find interesting if you're not aware of them already...

Rosa Menkman said...

thanks, I will look into it because i am not familiar with it.

neurobunk said...

This is so awesome. I thought I was alone with my glitch blog. I have so much browsing to do. Thank you.