lecture3glitch

“For most people in the industrial world, Saturday is a day of rest. But in the not-too-distant future, one Saturday may prove anything but. That Saturday—1 January 2000—may make the sinking of the Titanic look like a minor boating mishap.

Imagine that midnight on Friday, 31 December 1999, is approaching and the problem of using truncated dates like ‘99 in computer systems—the so-called Millennium bug or Y2K problem—has been widely ignored. You’ve been spending the evening celebrating the beginning of a new millennium.... Just as you hear the crowd shown on a nearby television set chant “... two, one, zero. Happy New...,” you and your friends are plunged into darkness. There has been a massive power blackout because your local computer-controlled power generating station has just shut down.”
-Richard Comerford, IEEE Spectrum, June 1998.

net.art dies by curator/white cube

post on nettime announcing the EXTENSION competition, March 1997.

net.art autogenerated by Cornelia Sollfrank's Female Extension,1997. Click the link for the full list of prank submissions!

Screenshot of Cornelia Sollfrank's Female Extension,1997. Image from Rhizome artbase.

Cornelia Sollfrank, Female Extension, 1997

-> The Hamburg Art Museum announced a net.art competition called EXTENSION, looking for works that considered the "Internet as material and object."

-> Sollfrank submitted 280 applications by fictional female artists to the contest, creating email addresses for each, and used a computer program to scrape search engines for HTML and combine them into unique net.art submissions for each of her applications.

-> Cyberfeminist activist art that would inspire many femme hackers into the 2000s. She didn't win a prize but started a movement and made the museum look deeply silly...

Curating and Preserving New Media, at the Banff Centre for the Arts, 1998

-> Several prominent net.artists of the time attended, including Alexei Shulgin and Vuk Cosic and Heath Bunting, who had been working for the Banff Centre at the time.

-> Curators in attendance announced their intention to integrate net.art into their exhibitions and collections

-> Net.artists declared that the movement was dead, possibly directly responding to fears of institutional influence on the community

Net.Art Exhibitions:

net_condition + Net.Art Room at the Whitney Biennial 2000

Exhibition view of net_condition, Kunst / Politik im Online-Universum, September 23, 1999.

net_condition, 1999

-> Curated by Peter Weibel for the Center for Art and Media Technology (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany.

-> Featured over 100 Internet-based art objects, and combined a physical installation and a website. In the physical installation, a wall of monitors allows viewers to search through the websites in the exhibition.

-> Weibel expresses in his artist statement how “net art is the driving force, which is the most radical in transforming the closed system of the aesthetic object of modern art into the open system of post-modern (or second modern) fields of action.”

Screenshot of net_condition website, 1999. Image from WaybackMachine.

net.art at the Whitney, 2000

-> The first major retrospective to incorporate Internet Art

-> Described by Kristin M. Jones for Frieze as "largely dispiriting" and "disappointing given the medium's expressive possibilities.

-> Featured one room with a large scale projection of a computer monitor with a loop of webpages net.artists Fakeshop, Ben Benjamin, Annette Weintraub, Mark Amerika, Ken Goldberg, and ®TMark

"Internet art is already being institutionalised, as it is here in the Whitney Biennial. With the internet people are not necessarily aware that they are looking at art, it could just be a site they come across while surfing. Presenting internet art as large-screen projections in the context of the Whitney raises all sorts of questions. It is important to see web-based work in as many contexts as possible, but I also want to emphasise that my work is already available twenty-four hours, seven days a week to anyone with internet access.”
-Mark Amerika on his work GRAMMATRON, exhibited at the Whitney Biennial.

Installation view of the 2000 Biennial Exhibition (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, March 23–June 4, 2000). Ben Benjamin, Superbad website (1995–2000). Photograph by Jerry L. Thompson. Image from the Whitney.

Still image from Takeshi Murata, Monster Movie, 2005. Image from the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Data bend image, Luis Miguel Bugallo Sánchez. Sourced from Wikipedia.

-> An online art movement dedicated to the aesthetic use of digital and analog errors. The term gained popularity in the late 1990s and 2000s, beginning with the use of glitch to describe electronic music that employed computer errors, CD scratching, hardware noise and bitmap reduction to create layered and dissonant sound.

->popular methods for creating glitch art include databending, that involves the manipulation of a still image by adding or removing data to an image file, and datamoshing, which involves removing key frames, or adding extra frames to a video file.

->Glitch has in recent years been adopted as a conceptual tool to speak to the queer, trans and BIPOC experience, through an analysis of glitch as a counter-hegemonic mode of existing both in and outside of digital spaces.

Name June Paik, Magnet TV, 1965

-> Paik was a South Korean artist and a major contributor to the Fluxus art movement of the 1960s.

> Paik was known for large scale installations of television monitors, transforming them into sculptural objects.

-> This work was interactive, with the audience invited to move the magnet and transform the image.

Nam June Paik, Magnet TV, 1965. Image from the Whitney.

Jaime Faye Fenton, with contributions from Raul Zaritsky and Dick Ainsworth Digital TV Dinner, 1978

-> In the late 1970s, Fenton wrote the programming language Bally BASIC, and also created Bally Astrocade, a video game console distributed by Midway. The Bally system was unique, in that you could change out game cartridges while the power was on.

-> Fenton knew both the limitations and possibilities of the system, because she had designed it, and was able to produce glitches in the pattern sequencing through "embodied intervention" such as slamming the cartridge into the machine."

-> Represents a vital moment in the history of glitch and the contributions of queer and trans programmers in new media art history

-> This work, and in fact many examples of glitch art can be analyzed through the lens of the queer art of failure

In reading Fenton’s work, we might look to Jack Halberstam’s text, The Queer Art of Failure Here, the author conceives a queer theory based on acts of failure, or how failure can be productive for critiquing capitalism and heteronormativity. He goes on to articulate how failure refuses dominant logics of power and discipline, for a heteronormative cultural construction of success is defined by the accumulation of wealth, and “ethical conduct.” He says: “the queer art of failure turns on the impossible, the improbable, the unlikely... it quietly loses, and in losing it imagines other goals for life, for love, for art, and for being” (88-89).

Takeshi Murata, Monster Movie, 2007

-> In 2005, Takeshi Murata released the short film Monster Movie online. The film uses found-footage from the B Horror film Caveman, which depicts a swamp monster emerging from the muck, but with blocks of pixelation that seem to butt up against one another and bleed together.

-Murata is an American digital artist who for decades has been honing a datamoshing video practice. His use of psychedelic colour and interest in movement has been compared to artists John Whitney and Lillian Schwartz, although instead of using computers to build an image, Murata exploits video editing software to undo an illusion of the image.

-> The film uses the compression hacking technique of datamoshing to create a kind of painting with digital degradation, producing colourful sections of pixels interacting with one another.

Cory Arcangel, Panasonic TH-42PWD8UK Plasma Screen Burn, 2007

-> Arcangel is a digital artist and Internet artist who utilizes video, performance and video game modification in his work, utilizing the appropriation of pop culture media and the subversion of technology in his practice.

-> Similar to Paik’s Magnet TV, Arcangel’s piece perpetuates the limitations of the mechanics of technology to create an image. Plasma Screen Burn exploits a flaw in the plasma screen where an image is burned into the screen if it is displayed over a longer period of time.

-The didactic is permanently burned into the monitor, transforming it into a sculpture.

GLITCH is an archive

Pascual Sisto, “Monster,” February 28, 2009. From Nasty Nets, 2008–2012. Image from Rhizome Artbase.

Javier Morales, cover artwork for Nasty Nets (DVD), 2008.

-> The Surf Club was a blog or website run by a group of making who would share wacky and weird found images and video online, and post digital collages. The first of its kind was Nasty Nets, which started in 2006 and ran until 2012 by John Michael Boling, Joel Holmberg, Guthrie Lonergan and Marisa Olson. The groups focus was often to feature decontextualized found media, exploring the limits and potentials of how the mechanism of the web transforms information through the homogenization of data.

->Surfing the web is a verb to describe exploration and the process of creative curation and juxtaposition. Would share creative uses of the net, “cool gradients,” or a website they’d stumbled upon that was particularly beautiful.

->In the surf club, collaborative posting was an artistic practice that utilized the disparate zones of the Internet: the pornographic, the consumerist, the social, and the bizarre.

JODI, wwwwwwwww.jodi.org, 1995

-> JODI is the artist collective (Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans) from the netherlands. They met at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, but soon moved to Silicon Valley to learn about digital media. Their group has created some of the most infamous examples of glitch art, and across their practice hinges on chaos and non-functional design in net.art.

-> Their first piece is a maze of HTML code that is full of dead ends and unreadable text. Through the source code of the website, signs form a diagram of a nuclear bomb, hidden beneath the surface.

-> JODI is interested in looking at the mistakes within the code to emphasize the function of a webpage and browser.

-> JODI specializes in the infuriating and chaotic entropy of digital culture, another artwork I particularily enjoy is

Screenshot of archived view, Jodi.org's OSS, 2000. Image curtesy of Rhizome ArtBase via artsy.net.

Screenshot of Jodi.org's wwwwwwwww.jodi.org 1995.

"We made the biggest basic code mistake on the first page of our very first website. We simply forgot to include a forward slash in the first command. If you forget this, you don’t get a nice drawing. Instead of being a properly spaced diagram, the drawing was all over the place on the screen. We first thought something was wrong with our computer, but ultimately decided that the effect was quite interesting. We published the mistake online, and, as it turned out, this meant that it was endlessly reproduced. Everyone saw the exact same mistake in his or her browser, which got us quite a few angry emails. By daring to make that mistake, we made the code the subject of the piece. When you subsequently requested to view the source of that webpage in your browser, the correct version of the drawing was revealed. [...] The work included instructions on how to make an atomic bomb.That hidden layer was a very interesting way to draw attention to the code, which is inevitably behind everything.”
-JODI on wwwwwwwww.jodi.org.

Lorna Mills

-> Mills is a Canadian net artist who has been working in GIF collage since the 1990s.

-Her works feature images pulled from the Internet, sometimes brought together in a specific pattern or theme, while others create chaotic, dissonant juxtapositions between the cute and sluffy, to the surreal, to the pornographic.

-She collects from porn fail sites, as she says, “slipping something graphic or ridiculous into a large collage to “give it a spark.”