History, aesthetics and ethics of glitch
Okay today we’re talking about glitches! Up to this point we’ve mostly considered data in the ‘datapoints’ sense— bundled information about the world, usually in a dataset or something like that. BUT, of course, every digital object is just compressed data that comes to represent an image, video, file, protocol, etc.
We ran into some of this in the very beginning of this course, when we were talking about binary code, file formats, and compression. Where this might be especially relevant is in our conversations about character encoding for unicode. Thinking back to how we mathematically represent and encode lots of different letters will be useful when we are thinking about how other files are stored. In the end, everything is just numbers.
The nice thing about everything being ~just numbers~ is that we can manipulate them in increasingly byzantine and bizarre ways. Unlike a physical object, which we can only interact with through its material surface, thinkin about our digital objects as data lets us interact with them through the entirety of their material.
Obviously digital space wasn’t the first place this happened. An easy analog is textiles, which bears a lot of similarity in general to the ways we construct digital images. (Use of the pixel grid, an algorithmic construction, etc). When you get off on a knitting pattern or a weaving, it shifts the image in strange and unexpected ways. This is because the instructions are encoded, and followed step-by-step.
In general, failures are seen as undesirable until the medium becomes commonplace or stable, and then they become interesting. We see this culturally over and over again.
There are a ton of analog mediums that use their fuzzy, error-prone edges the same way. In photography, see light leaks, grain, overexposure, double exposure. In painting, see artists like Gerhard Richter who employ radical non-brushes to the canvas and says "if the execution works, this is only because I partly destroy it, or because it works in spite of everything—by not detracting and by not looking the way I planned".
This phenomenon is perhaps especially dominant in music, with the record scratch and “warm tape” sounds.
I also think it is fair to compare the glitch movement to nonwestern ideas like wabi-sabi, which is oriented around transience and imperfection as being fundamental to beauty. It is kind of hard to unpack this without all the cultural baggage of commerce borrowing from that aesthetic space right now, but this is such a different angle than like greek ideas of perfection that it is worth a mention imo.
New media artists have been exploiting the edge cases of their tools for basically ever, and it’d be a downright shame of me to skip over folks like Nam June Paik, or Chris Marker, or video synth artists, or projects like Digital TV Dinner from 1979, made by circuit bending a plug-in game console (which is incidentally also how I got into electronics a full 30 years later on).
With this era of computers, glitch art began emerging in the mid to late 90s, and found some footing in the early 2000s, with events like the Glitch Symposium and Performance Event held in Oslo in 2002. It probably peaked in this decade, with the height of the artistic movement happening around 2010-2013.
Glitch in this era was both political and philosophical, with writing from and about artists who were working in the space. In particular folks like Rosa Menkman, Daniel Tempkin, Hugh Manon, Ted Davis, Kim Asendorf, Cory Arcangel, Ryoji Ikeda, and Jodi were writing and thinking about this stuff conceptually.
Rosa Menkman’s 2011 glitch studies manifesto -> http://amodern.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/2010_Original_Rosa-Menkman-Glitch-Studies-Manifesto.pdf
Philip Galanter describes it: "Glitch is a cyborg art, building on human/computer interaction. The patterns created by these unknown processes is what I call the wilderness within the machine."
A lot of these conversations were about the politics of breakage, the anti-capitalism of rupture, power of instability and temporarily. (This movement also had/has a wide proliferation of terms, things like Dirty New Media, the algo-glitch, and minimal slippage glitch.) Maybe this is because it was a bunch of nerdy academics and general weirdos idk! But also I think it was folks really trying to push back against sleek digital futurism and commerce of the mid aughts. This was the era of the launch of the iphone - > https://youtu.be/z6PGRF0Wy_I
But really, perhaps the biggest element of all this was glitch really leaning into software’s failure to fully fail, a possible ambivalence about errors that was exploitable. Few artists were just randomly documenting errors, but were rather producing processes that introduced noisy data in algorithmically supervised ways. This was all very directed and constrained, even within the visual layers of chaos. It’s about tipping just just enough that they spiral out of control.
Maybe notably, big centers for glitch were Chicago (especially around SAIC), Amsterdam, and Mexico City- still big cities, but a little different than the general New York/LA/London/Tokyo new media vibes.
This is possibly because of the social situation of glitch, which was messy and often performative. By the 2010s, glitch software had stabilized and was available to download, but early days a lot of this stuff was physical- circuit bend, corrupted laptops, etc.
You could think of these projects a bit like a prepared piano, which is perhaps not a bad analog as glitch is very much tied to experimental noise performance. - >
This was also the same decade of glitches as a culturally dangerous idea. Y2K fears (https://youtu.be/ebdTUxBIaTY ), viruses, the flash crash of 2010 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1xqSZy9_4I )- these were all examples of computer failures of our increasingly software mediated society. It makes sense that glitch would become a point of conversation and creative impulse given the setting.
Here are some common types of glitch process (strobe warning lol):
- Circuit-bending - re-wiring or altering the circuit within the device
- Data bending - manipulating data files by opening a file of one type in a program designed to open another file (i.e. opening a jpeg in a text application, opening a video in audio processing software, etc.). Audacity,
- Datamoshing - intentionally distorting media through loss of data during a file compression process (i.e. streaming a video that is slow and pixelated)
- Z-fighting - weaving multiple competing visual layers together in a way that forms one layer (i.e. aflickering texture in a video game)
- Using or creating programs that rely on an algorithm to automatically chop up and reproduce a file's foundation
- Using analog technology that has malfunctions in the hardware
Honestly I hate a ted talk but this kid does a good job summing it all upppp - > https://youtu.be/jtIe416Twpo
In some ways, the aesthetic has come around fully to symbolize the ~idea~ of glitch, more than the reality of actual unstable glitches.
See - >
I find this boring but it indicates a successful journey of the aesthetic of errors, just like how a record scratch moved from undesirable to a fringe sound to a cliche.
So, if glitch looks like that in 2019, what’s next for glitch art?
Obviously, just because a movement has hit mainstream, it doesn’t mean it is dead forever. Using ideas with precision, meaning, and care can circumnavigate the abyss of cliche, as ever.
However, In some ways we are lucky, because we are in an era of encodings. We want ever more high quality files, including streams- and this means we have to compress our files in ever more clever ways. Unlike a record scratch (which sounds pretty much the same over time, as the technology of a record is not being updated), the technology of an image file is actually pretty unstable.
It is these encodings that produce some of the most interesting elements of glitch, and lossy compression in particular is our friend!
It is a weird a complicated field but here is a simple version - > https://youtu.be/uaV2RuAJTjQ
(I considered making you do this but we’ll just watch :) )
Here is a slightly more in depth version - > https://youtu.be/mKxlrWcvyJs
The real lecture is like 2+ hours tho.
HOWEVER, this is just jpg! Every file format is different.
Here is pngs -> https://youtu.be/Mm4pYTBGO20
(This video is a bit long but its a very good explanation. )
Why is this cool?
The Art of PNG glitch --- > http://ucnv.github.io/pnglitch/
There are thousands and thousands of encodings and filetypes. They all have different ways of dealing with data, and all produce different kinds of results when they are handed non-standard data. You just have to figure out a way to get them that weird info in a way that will make something interesting, not just a total failure or a fully corrupted file that won’t open.
We will talk about these methods and how to do this stuff on Monday!
If there is extra time today we will look at circuit sniffers~
~
For Monday -
Read Daniel Tempkin’s Glitch && Human/Computer Interaction
https://nooart.org/post/73353953758/temkin-glitchhumancomputerinteraction
Skim Curt Cloninger’s GltchLnguistx: The Machine in the Ghost / Static Trapped in Mouths http://lab404.com/glitch/
If you’re interested in more:
Give the Lossy Compression Wikipedia a brief browse, you don’t need to internalize it but it might help you think about the wild array of options available to you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossy_compression
Browse around in Rosa Menkman’s Youtube : https://www.youtube.com/user/rosamenkman/videos
http://sufficientlyhuman.com/archives/502