Venus in Glitches: Dirty New Media and Transdiscursiveness

Curator's Note

 

***THE ACCOMPANYING VIDEO IS NSFW***

“I embrace the interrupt as a method of composition,” said Steven Hammer during his presentation Meatspace Glitch: Exploring Pre-Digital Glitch Art in Human Bodies at this year’s Gli.tc/h 20112, a conference / gathering / festival of electronic arts.

Hammer continues, “[I’m not interested] in devolve[ing] into [the] meaningless… but to disrupt the static 1:1 systems [of communication]… using bodies as a canvas for glitch potentiality.” He asks: “can [we] extract a framework that is not bound to increasingly prevalent cycles of obsolescence, and instead explore the principles that remain constant […throughout everything?]… [i.e.] the eternal interplay between signal and noise, order and disorder, flow and break…“ 

Like Hammer, I believe in the trans-discursiveness of glitch philosophy and methodology. With the essential components of Glitch tangled inside methods of deconstruction, reaction, self-awareness, interruption, and intellectual growth, can we figure out how to use these “constants” or components as ways to examine / stimulate / approach aspects of other frameworks both on and offline, academically and socially?

Dirty New Media, an (anti)genre with which I identify, is already responding: by absorbing a wide array of amateur and artisan generated media artifacts, Dirty New Media once anticipated and now brings glitch methodologies into the territory of discreet personal actions, movements, and language. This year I participated in the glitchxxxcultures panel at Gli.tc/h to speak briefly about my own work and the Dirty New Media Toolkit (developed for Notacon9 and curated by jonCates, Jake Elliot, and myself) as examples of places where these essential components are represented by a collection of found data. Each piece acts as individual artifacts of glitch-like performativity in every day life; in speaking, hearing, looking, eating, in sexual activity, and artmaking as documented by artists and non-artists alike, across all genre and aesthetics; works of Dirty New Media aim to free glitch art and other visual narratives to describe our current understanding of what we consider to be active public / private / mediated / connected / offline / social / and urbanized spaces.

The accompanying artwork A Personal Project (2012) is a work of Dirty New Media. (NSFW)

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