The Moment(s) I Fell For Glitch(es)

Curator's Note

The following are a list of moments that broke/made me. With glitches, the breaking/making is the beautiful moment. The point were you have to open your eyes/ears and pay attention.

7. Broken VHS - For years in college we watched and passed around a VHS copy of The Wizard of Speed and Time. I lent it to someone at some point and it never came back. Upon further investigation, the tape snapped - it was worn out from overuse.

4. Wobbly Cassette - I used to make mix-tapes of records and cds and to listen to while I mowed lawns or walked around. There was a point were the really good ones started to sound like they were melting.

3. Satellite Television - We were trying to watch TV out in the country during a storm and the signal crackled apart into over-saturated chunks of Friends and choppy laugh tracks.

8. Untitled (Pink Dot) - I saw this Takeshi Murata video/animation during a screening put on by Cartune Xprez. It was in the exhibition "Animated Painting" at the San Diego Museum of Art. I saw a similar show called "Bilingual: Art at the Intersection of Painting and Video" the same year at Columbia College Chicago. Those shows were about painters making animation/film or filmmakers/animators making paintings. Untitled (Pink Dot) meant more than that to me. It let the material, the data, become as real as paint.

6. Digital Television Signals - Bad reception with old broadcast television meant a fuzzy picture/signal. With new television broadcasts, bad reception means pixel motion, jitters, jumps, and breakdowns. There is a point just before the no signal error  when your body's position in relation to the antenna effects the digital TV picture. I noticed it in our tiny apartment and I've been in love with it ever since.

5. 'Open With' - A broken image opened in my text editor by accident. The language of the machine hit me in the face, an unreadable/unknowable wall of text characters. There was something behind that mask. The image was just a string of letters and numbers that got interpreted somewhere/how for display.

10. Compression - You mean you can intentionally destroy the quality of the image/video when you save? No Way (in Bill and Ted's voice)! Its the best of both worlds. A smaller file with more artifacting!

 

 

Comments

I like this game, drawn2glitches: [mis]ordered lists really like number 10, small file size && moar artifacts! best of both worlds! ha! my own personal [mis]ordered list has some overlap, could I add a few??? here I go :) 13. poke-mon - playing gameboy late at night, hunting for 'missingno.' friends at school told me there's a glitch in the game and if you find him and beat him you'll have all the rare candy a young poke-master could dream of... but if you catch him... your game would break and you'll loose everything... make/break 43. stan brakhage - avant-garde film class introduced me to a world of media beyond traditional narrative forms... ideas/concepts/structures/materials/perspectives I never realized could be part of my practice as a video maker. If stan brakhage had been given a dv camera instead of a 16mm... what would he have done I wondered? where's the material? the celluloid? ...mayhaps the code :) 26. andy kaufman - a segment in the tv show Andy's Funhouse consisted of static and intentionally broken signals, this made the tv execs uncomfortable thinking their audience might believe the channel was in fact broken and either start banging their sets or change the channel... kaufman said that was exactly the point. context! glitch art (intentional glitch making) is something else depending on where you encounter it && it could be funny, jolting, political and call out the system all at the same time

Good Additions lists are fun(ny) i have more too... too many maybe for here, but its important sometimes to maybe pick out the few things that really changed the way we/I think. you know... there are the common ones or typical experiences, but then there are the ones that really melted your brain. and the ones that called attention to the effect/affect of broken(ness) are really important to me. if i had to maybe pick one - out of all of them would have to be when i realized that the computer was displaying an image/movie - but it was interpreting something else - a machine language - that there was no way i could comprehend. i'm super attracted i think to there being a veil or level(s) of meaning/understanding/languages that are incomprehensible unknowable to us human meatbodies. that's maybe what made me want to stick my fork in the light socket (so to speak) lolz high five

" i’m super attracted i think to there being a veil or level(s) of meaning/understanding/languages that are incomprehensible unknowable to us human meatbodies." yea, mos def many of us get caught in that tractor beam i think Art (+philosophy, +most sciences +[in_sum_wayz]religion) is often about (or at least propelled by) exploring this area of the just-about-[in]comprehensible. A distinction to make here though, is that this machine language/world/logic was designed by us meatbodies. So embedded in this [in]comprehensible world are very human (imperfect/inspiring/dangerous/brilliant) assumptions/decisions/ideas. This is one of the ways I think glitch practices can get political... we've created these complex systems (often invisible systems), therefor these complex systems are different from those found in nature in that they reflect our norms and values (deep w/in their algorithms + sometimes manifested in their outward appearance [media]) ...this is where sticking a fork in it can start to be a pretty activist/political gesture (not that it has to come down to that... just that it can is xciting + full of potential)

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