Glitches in Art

story © Michael Betancourt | published January 20, 2013 | permalink |  |  

This is an excerpt from a new article (slated for publication in Hz no 19) on the use of glitches in art, and how that use related to a critically engaged media practice:

The term “glitch art” is an attempt to distinguish between the specific use of glitches in an artwork as opposed to those happening spontaneously in non-art contexts/works: it is also a term that describes a particular media practice identified as being critically engaged. However, the distinction between an unpremeditated technical failure, unstable and transitory, and the use of audio-or-visual artifacts that coincide with these incidental errors, stable and repeatably a part of a finished work may be difficult to identify when encountered in a work since they can (and in artistic practice often are) indistinguishable; the ontological origins of any particular glitch are not necessary apparent in the form of the glitch itself. Various writers on ‘glitch art’ have proposed terms to identify this ontological distinction between a transitory technical failure (always called “glitch”) and other variants that are then given a different designation, but which may have the same form—“glitch-alike” (Morandi), “domesticated glitch” (Menkman). These distinctions are problematic in art, as theorist Curt Cloninger has observed: “The term ‘glitch art’ might apply to all domesticated glitches and all wild glitches that have been ‘captured’ and recontextualized as art.” The “might” opens the potential scope of ‘glitch art’ beyond simply those glitches “captured” in a recording to include “wild glitches” orchestrated to occur on demand within a specific performace. Digital technology itself, based in sampling, enables the apparently ‘perfect’ reproduction that is the hypothetical ‘norm’ which allows the identification of the glitch. What is produced by the immaterial processing of digital technology is an always perfect new example of the work in question, made specifically for the moment of encounter; it is an “original.” This human-readable form is a pure product of the digitized samples (data) transformed by the decoding protocol. ‘Glitch art’ is a reflection of how artists have engaged with this underlying structure by looking for, producing or exploiting the “errors” emergent in any complex system.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published March 3, 2011 | permalink |  |  

I was looking at the newest Adobe Photoshop software the other day and noticed that it does not seem to support the Adobe file format known as "FLM" or film strip. I guess Adobe only wants people to make video as video, (the ability to make video changes in the same way you can with a film strip isn't video enough I guess), and all the weirdness that the .flm format offered were just too non-commercial. Too bad. I'm glad I still have my obsolete software.

Once again this shows how the obsolete just has more options and abilities than then most recent, top-of-the-line pro software: afterall, the pro software is set-up so you can do things weird.

story © Michael Betancourt | published January 16, 2011 | permalink |  |  

The Experimental TV Center has announced they will close some of their programs later this year. I enjoyed being a resident there and got a lot out of my time in the studio. They will be missed. Full announcement:

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story © Michael Betancourt | published October 4, 2006 | permalink |  |  

"In contrast to [film], you're not sitting and watching from the beginning to the end in a dark room with other people," Mr. Biesenbach said. "It's basically always gallery-based. It can be moving pictures. It can be beautiful sound installations, like the Janet Cardiff piece we had here at MoMA. It can be performance pieces. They're all time-based, and they're all moving in some broad sense."

NY Sun reports on the new department. Since they're keeping the Film department rather than making it be part of this new thing, Media, I guess we can see the difference in how they separate them: being time-based is a good candidate. Apparently film isn't "time-based" because you don't watch "it" in a gallery. Now we know the difference. Film isn't time-based, video art is. So what happens when you watch a film?

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story © Michael Betancourt | published September 28, 2006 | permalink |  |  

The Guardian has this to say:

The factory in Lausanne, Switzerland, that processes Europe's supplies of Kodachrome - grainy, colour-saturated frames of 8mm film that have convinced a generation that their 60s and 70s childhood and adolescence was spent leaping through flowers in a Technicolor haze - is shutting its doors on Saturday.