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from @sterlingcrispin to @slashdot : misunderstanding as/if #glitch +/or #noise in experimental New Media Arts
// jonCates
a couple of event have occurred recently which i was unable to respond to immediately. our accelerated digitalLifestyles (accelerated not in the sense of a Virilio-style acceleration towards deadly crashes (0), but rather in the sense of accumulated momentum gained by increased connections of people to people online) prize immediate responses. these responses can become part of an ephemeral flow forward without reverse, without archive (1). but a couple recent moments / events have stayed wit me in my consciousness as i myself have bin offlines + AFK, yet continuing to move through these wwwhirlds. these recents express multiple misunderstandings (of glitch, noise, criticality, interventions, openings, etc...) from 2 sources: most recently, the well-known young artist Sterling Crispin && secondly + most previously, a multitude of voices in a Slashdot comment thread responding to an interview that i did w/ Slashdot (2). Jake Elliott + i were interviewed for Slashdot TV (3) b/c we had organized an experimental Critical Glitch Artware, Dirty New Media && Noise Music / Art event (4) as part of a hacker conference called NOTACON (5) + a demoscene party @ that hacker conference called PixelJam (6)
1rstly, in response to Sterling Crispin: recently i presented / performed an experimentalLecture / Noise Essay on Realtime Media Art at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art's event MediaLive 2012:
BOLD3RRR... Realtime: Reflections and Render-times - jonCates (2012)
https://vimeo.com/49110316
Sterling Crispin (7), whois a New Media / Digital Artist who has registered sum dissent to Glitch Art online for a couple of years nowww (8), attended + asked me in the following question && answer section:
"...I feel like there's alot of information in the world, and certainly alot of data in the world. And I wonder why we have such a need to tear it all apart. I wonder, as creatives, maybe we should be trying to take that noise and turn it into information... rather than ripping it all apart until there is nothing left. Is there something cynical or maybe nihilistic about taking poetry and turning it into... ?" (9)
i replied:
"its a great question + i dont think that there is anything cynical or pessimistic abt what im doing. i also dont think that there is anything nihilistic abt what im doing. but of course there is pessimism, cynicism + nihilism in the world, in the world of Glitch Art, Noise Music... i just dont think thats where im coming from but i understand that it could be understood that way. what im motivated by is more remixological approaches. that would suggest that when we take it apart + put it back together, we're synthesizing sum new experiences + maybe sumthin surprising can come out of that in a positive way" (10)
later on twitter @sterlingcrispin posted a couple of continued thoughts / feelings he had in response to the above, i.e.:
sterlingcrispin Jul 24, 2:18pm via Twitter for Android
@beafremderman @joncates like Dada it can be info>noise>new info, but Im skeptical & weary of this nonhuman mutant info, crippled from chaos
+
sterlingcrispin Jul 24, 2:14pm via Twitter for Android
@beafremderman @joncates the glitch/noise fetish is an inversion of humanity & symbolic embrace of death & rampant infectious nihilism IMHO (11)
to which i replied:
thnxxx @sterlingcrispin, my work is an axxxual process of: #glitch #fetish #noise #dirty #newmedia from a #humanist #perspective
+ then also replying that moar inna depth @sterlingcrispin responses are here: HTTP://GL1TCH.US, posting a link to this unstable ongoing text, that you are now reading.
when i say that my work is in fax an axxxual process of addressing issues of Glitch, Fetish Cultures, Noise (as both an Art + as a Musics form) && Dirty New Media (as experimental New Media Art forms) from a humanist perspective, i mean this most literally. i do this work as part of an ongoing activity in my theory-practice of being an artist in these worlds + their flowwws; IRL + AFK (12); online && offline. my expressions + articulations of positions, thoughts + feelings regarding these topix are informed by + expressed through my theory-practice. these works can be found online, but to highlight a few facets of this ongoing process, i will list out examples / render sum reflections of myself, cast in flawed facets, on this topix of
I. Glitch:
ᶀƦ⟲Ⱪ3ᥒ ⟒Ɍ3𐆖𐆖𐆖⟳ⱤĐƵ (AKA: Broken Records: Hystories Of Noise && Dirty New Media) - jonCates (2011)
HTTP://GL1TCH.US
II. Fetish Cultures:
jonCates talk bitcrushed EX. A. - jonCates (2011) + www┌Ø┬┼3NN - jonCates (2011)
...in 2008, i started referring to myself and my work as digitalPunk (13), an obvious reference mayhaps even in reverence to faded lipstixxx tracings of speculative hystories
including the fetish/bondage scene of the 1974 SEX shop run by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood on King's Road in London from which emerged the Sex Pistols, 80's Gibsonian Cyberpunk, Stephensonian Steampunk as suggestively rendered in The Diamond Age and the Crystalpunk aestheticonceptechnics of crashing AP / xxxxx, the former collaboration of Martin Howse and Jonathan Kemp (14)
III. Noise, as an Art form:
ᶀƦ⟲Ⱪ3ᥒ ⟒Ɍ3𐆖𐆖𐆖⟳ⱤĐƵ (AKA: Broken Records: Hystories Of Noise && Dirty New Media) ENEMY version - jonCates (2011)
https://vimeo.com/33924559
IV. Noise, as a Musics form:
Southbridge Slow Electronics - jonCates && Jake Elliott (circa 2009) + NUMBERS.FM - jonCates && Jake Elliott (circa 2011)
(a) r4WB1t5 micro.Fest remix by dmtr of an img of Celina by noisydaughter/ (2005)
Dirty New Media Art - Erica Peplin (2011)
http://chicagoartmagazine.com/2011/10/dirty-new-media-art/
KNEW GLASSES 01 - jonCates (2010)
now, all of these seem to me to be from a humanist perspective + also from a fundamentally human perspective, aka my owwwn human perspective. nowww, i will admit, of course, to stylization (as would any / many / most artists, i suspects) && to being a Haraway-styled cyborg (15). but, i disagree w/ @sterlingcrispin that i am expressing or articulating any 'nonhuman mutant info'. not that i understand what he means exxxactly by 'nonhuman mutant info' but all i can say is that i am most certainly human (16)
Sterling, to yr thoughts / feelings, as yve expressed them via twitter:
A. yes, DADA is a source for much invoked + academically legitimated Media Art Hystories of Noise Art / Music. (17) as i wrote, bax in 2009, Noise is a type of music which comes from musical traditions such as Musique concrète and Art Historically originates from Futurist, Dadaist, Surrealist and FLUXUS. (18) for sumone like myself, whois academically oriented / involved, this is a well-known Art History defined by the disciplines of Sound Art + attendant to Media Art, especially New Media Art. so it comes as no surprise to me when, Crispin, you invoke DADA to orient yrself to Noise
but i'd like to listen to sum recent noises again + share them w/ you. as it is, it is axxxually more difficult to share those exxxperiences w/ you than it is to ask you imagine them as i share pictures of those noises w/ you. here is a vry recent picture i took of a beautiful noise while offline:
this glacier is cracking + moaning. those are the terms used to describe events natural to the glacier. i am not inventing poetic terms to associate glaciers w/ Glitch Art. theses are the terms used by those who are experts in glaciers (unlike myself). that they sound like Glitch Art terms to sumone (like myself) whois an expert-participant inna field of Dirty New Media, Glitch Art + Noise is especially exxxciting to me. when these glaciers break it is called calving. glaciers moan before calving (a term intentionally chosen to relate the breaking to birthing). glaciers are also constantly moving. glacial flows of glacial rivers below the crevices (deep + deadly [to humans who happen to fall into them] cracks in the frozen glacial ice above)
so, these cracks + moans, which im nowww asking you to imagine or recall if you have heard them before, are, as i said above, beautiful noises. they are deep, loud, booming, cavernous sounds of cracks in frozen ice that proceed the axxxual breaking off, or calving, of the ice into the deadly waters below (19)
as i stood + listened to these noises + watched these glaciers break, i was reminded of all of the above. + i wondered / wandered away into the question of glitches, nature, the natural world, the technological, specific Digital Art technologies, our Arts in Technological Times (20) + what it means to be us, to be here + nowww... so, Crispin, here is a version of those thoughts / feelings in the form of a question: are glaciers glitched?
+ if so, are they natural or naturally so (glitched)? + then what abt us humans? + what of our human impact via technologized interventions in the so-called natural worlds? (21) are our human existences expressions of natural forces? + if so what of receeding glaciers + Global Warming? are these expressions of human failures + / or our failures in technological times? are we rdy to reify our own technologies in order to hold them responsible for our own human failures? do we prefer to hold reified machines / objects / technologies responsibel for our own actions despite the facts that we made those systems but then subsequently distanced ourselves from those systems + in doing so distanced ourselves from our own agency? + how does overall environmental collapse relate to the concepts of a systems crash?
can glaciers be related to Cracked Media in the sense of Caleb Kelly styled Sounds of Malfunction? (22) i was reminded of similar sounds of natural failures, that have succeeded for me in being sum of the best artworks i have ever encountered:
Rec01 - Collin Olan (2002)
as installed in the exhibition:
Embracing Winter - Curated by Astria Suparak (2007)
http://www.astriasuparak.com/thewarehousegallery/
then Chicago-based, Sound Artist Collin Olan's Rec01 2002 work in which "a stereo pair of contact mics frozen in blocks of ice that subsequently very slowly and noisily melted" (23) Olan did not process the recording or create any synthettic tonalities, sounds or noises; altho he did remove "minor digital errors" (24) in an act of unglitching / error reduction in a work that sounds to the ear as if it is very digital glitchy microsound.
Langjökull, Snæfellsjökull, Solheimajökull - Katie Paterson (2007)
http://www.katiepaterson.org/icerecords/
a number of years after hearing that art, Katie Paterson's 2007 project Langjökull, Snæfellsjökull, Solheimajökull tragibeautifully expresses sum ephemeral sounds of the slippages between melting, failing + disappearing. Paterson, created 3 vinyl-alike records, crafted from frozen Icelandic glacial meltwater. these records (which mobilize multiple meanings of the term 'record') have locked groves cut into them + playback until they have melted, running displaced glacial waters into the electronics (turntables) below. (25)
From Here to Ear - Celeste Boursier-Mougenot (1995 - present)
http://www.paulacoopergallery.com/artists/CBM
similarly crossing any perceived boundaries between categories of noise, music, natural, synthetic while creating sum of the most amazing art i have experienced is Celeste Boursier-Mougenot's project From Here to Ear. i experienced From Here to Ear in the exhibition Future Systems : rare momente @ the Lentos Museum of Modern Art in Linz, Austria in 2007. (26) my ability to describe the experience is limited by how transformative && impressive it was to be inside this work, a work made of + rendered in the natural physical world of simulated landscapes. landscaped pools and minuature pastures inside guitarcases provide water and grass to numerous zebra finches who perch on electric guitars while themselves singing, chirping + otherwise fluttering around the room which has been especially designed for them. in the process they literally made the most beauiful + articulate improvisations of experimental electronic guitar music that i have ever heard (27)
the questions above, before my recollections of those 3 works of are that are themselves all considerations / simulations of types of breaking, accompany an answer i heard recently while standing on / near this glacier:
+ hiking down to find a path without falling or breaking my relatively fragile + comparitively small human-ness in the faces of these glacial realities. on the way down from the frozen face of the glacier, i heard the answer that i should simply: follow the water, as the water has already found the easiest path down:
as far as glaciers are concerned cracks + moans are natural, if we can agree on a definition of natural (a question i will return to momentarily). this noise is natural response to us. we are also natural, as are our responses to being human + natural in environments as diverse as glaciers + Operating Systems
+ btw Crispin, thnxxx for the phrase "crippled from chaos" its a beaut && i'l def use it. my friend Blake Edwards, who plays under the name Vertonen, runs a Noise / Experimental musics label in Chicago called Crippled Intellectual Productions or just C.I.P. (28) he was once a collaborator w/ Julia Gilman, who played Noise under the name Insectdeli. they played under the name Crippled Insectual for their collaboration. Blake's considerations of a complex of relations between 'crippled' + Noise are amazingly inspiring for me artistically + theoretically. i recently asked him about this interconnections + he said: " I chose “crippled” for a few reasons... a certain amount of focus for me on both themes and materials (as in instrument sources for the latter) that were considered nontraditional at best and grotesque / deviant at worst. I was (and still am) very interested in examining material that is considered foul / ugly / damaged and finding / creating something I find aesthetically beautiful from it... Tied to this idea, when I began performing and recording, people would ask something like, “how’d you get that rhythm?” and I’d show them it was an old thrift store record find that I scratched up so it skipped intentionally--reworking a conventional playback tool by doing something that was considered by most musically “wrong” (scratching a record) to create something new. To this day, I still hand scratch records, but more recently I’ve explore in-between channels on shortwave stations to make drones which many have found appealing, yet if they heard the sound in the context of scanning a shortwave, ~searching~ for a channel, as opposed to the spaces between, it would be considered unpleasant or a “noise.” The recontextualizing is a huge point, and it definitely motivates me to this day. I really like the idea that there’s so much that people easily dismiss aurally as “unpleasant” yet, when put in a different context without the usual frame of reference,” people are more willing to view that sound, and its relationship to other sounds, differently (and potentially favorably). The same holds true for equipment." (29)
as i wrote for the GLI.TC/H international conference / publication on Glitch Art bax in 2011, (30) my forms of (in order) Dirty New Media, digitalPunk, Glitch Art, DITHER D00M && GL!TTER GLØØM are not Nihilism any more than Johnny (previously Rotten's /) Lydon's version of punk is not Nihilism: "I know there's a certain aspect in my character where I actually enjoy things falling apart..." (31) But and/or also: "I don't think anything about the Pistols was nihilistic. We certainly weren't on a death trip. Maybe it was wreck-and-destroy stupidity, but I would hardly think that's nihilistic. Quite the opposite. It's very constructive because we were offering an alternative." (32) Or like Motorcycle Boy said, once upon a Rumble Fish: "You know, if you're gonna lead people, you have to have somewhere to go." (33)
still Sterling, we humans live inna broken world. we live in a technologized world of our own making, meaning we have reconfigured whatever was pre-human so many times over as to not even be able to recognize this trick of the eye anymore. we cannot even begin to presuppose that we can accurately represent or render to be a pre-human world as we constantly filer these suppositions through our subjective human senses. we have altered everything now, from biosphere to isostatic rebounds. + sumhow we see it all in our own images
jonCates reading Douglas Kahn's Noise Water Meat in Alaskan glacial waters (self portrait) - jonCates (2012)
Douglas Kahn, in his Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, which i have been currently re-reading out here w/inna meatspace, writes, in a section called Significant Noises, that we recognize "noises in the first place because they exist where they shouldn't or they don't make sense when they should." (34) the same could be said for glitches: we recognize glitches in the first place because they exist where they shouldn't or they don't make sense when they should. this definition, offered by Kahn for noises, applies directly for glitches. Glitch Art, then, like Noise Art, is subsequently then a series of applications of these skills (as techne), investigations of these methods of recognition / acts of perception, invoking +/or integrating these occurrences into our pattern making / unmaking. later Kahn goes on to call noise that which is "either undesirable or extraneous" but which "might also be read as a person's style", (35) or in other words a person's art. again, a simple substitution of glitch for noise, in the previous statement, reads that glitch is a style or art of the undesirable or extraneous
we humans live in a noise, messy + broken world + it is dangerous, irresponsible + immoral to assume otherwise. it is perilous + unethical to assume that the technological is pure, or perfect or spiritually 'above' us. we live + learn the non-neutrality of technology through disciplines && theory-practices of Dirty New Media Art, Glitch Art, Sound Art, Noise Musics, etc... as forms of criticality. this lesson is recently reiterated through McLuhan, (36) Baudrillard + Kittler (37); re-articulated clearly by WJT Mitchell + Mark BN Hansen (38) these positions form a continuity, a conversation, a critical discourse calling attention to our predicament as increasingly technologized subjects of global capitalism and corporatist regimes. corporate logics of our consumer / consumerist computing devices rely on false promises of perfection + belie broken hopes for functionality as coercive forces
as Americans, from what is now the United States, we are inculcated to various ideas about the natural + the technological. hystorically, a supposed binary opposition is presumed to exist between the categories of the natural + the technological, however, these are socially constructed ideas, that shift + shape over times. the technological did not arrive in our worlds from outserspace unless one subscribes to Arthur C. Clark style origin myths, ancient astronaut theories or Promethean logics in which we have stolen fire from the gods. (39) aside from those sorts of belief systems, the technological must be recognized as being the work of humans. the technological is human-made. still, postmodern analysis of our assumptions about the natural, similarly state that nature is human made. in the 1800's, in what would become known as the nationstate called the United States, an American cultural definition of nature included 4 separate, discrete but graded states of Nature. these 4 states are, in this order of naturalness: 1. raw nature, 2. subdued nature, 3. humans + 4. hand made tools. the category of the technological follows after the 4th + least most natural of the categories of Nature. (40) from this perspective, a perspective that is now deeply embedded in American Culture
the machine world, a world literally machined out of the previously 'natural' world, begins in its most recent form in the 1900's. at the turn of the century (post-Civil War and into the 1900's) in what is now the United States, "steam and electricity replaced human muscle, iron replaced wood, and steel replaced iron" as Howard Zinn writes (41). this process of Industrialization was also fundamentally related to the project of nation-building in the United States, a relatively rapid, brutally violent + deeply technologized project. inventions, innovations + instruments of transformation in process include the railroads, steam engines, telegraphs, telephones, typewriters + adding machines. these systems of interconnection, communication + what will become understood as computing, establish a technological basis in the Industrial moment for the forthcoming Electronic Revolution. the railroads + telegraph lines lay a literal groundwork for basis of the Internet backbone. telephones, typewriters + adding machines, along w/ the screen influences of film, television + video, establish technosocial media modalities that are still operative in contemporary computing + Digital Cultures. these hystories are well-investigated in the fields of Media Archeologies, Media Art Histories, New Media Studies, Cybercultural Studies, Science and Technology Studies + the other related / adjacent fields of academic study. my point here is not to retell those tales but to simply point towards them as a way of stating that these are all recent developments in our understandings of what constitutes the technological, the natural, the American, etc... also i intend to make clear that these are cultural positions, philosophically informed by hystories + genealogies, socially defined + determined through contested use, reuse + resistances
speaking of resistances, the above projects were, as i said, brutally violent for many + extremely profitable for sum. the above hystorical sketch overlays w/ the genocide / destruction of the First Nations as well as the rise of the industry of slavery + the Civil War, all 3 of which are keys to understanding the nation-building project of the United States. all of which also literally sets the stage for the development of the "Military-Industrial Complex" in the United States, a term not introduced by radical outsiders, but more profoundly, a term coined by a complete insider: the President of the United States. as is well-known + often quoted, President Dwight D. Eisenhower (himself a five-star general in the US Army, who subsequently became the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces + then the 1rst supreme commander of NATO) warned us against the rise of the Military-Industrial Complex in his 1961 farewell address. the facts of Eisenhower's warning have quickly became what we now know + can better identify in more complexity as an enlarged complex, i.e. a Military-Industrial-Academic-Entertainment Complex. this complex is itself part of if not the very fabric by which we define 'the technological' (in the United States + in the consensual hallucination that is 'American culture')
so, Sterling, there is a Military-Industrial-Academic-Entertainment Complex built out of + perpetuating complexities + problems. these are attendant to + fundamentally connected w/ our conceptions of the technological + also actual technological realizations of material powers. but these hystories are also importantly formed out of resistances to those complexes. the BBC Two documentary The Virtual Revolution from 2010 (42) casually asserts these alternative hystories as if they are know commonly known / understood. since i have been involved in charting + following these paths for over 10 years, i know that during this decade, these observation were + axxxually still are far less well-known + much more contentious. the observation of these starting places for Digital Culture, in the Countercultural Movements of the 1960's in the United States was once itself a countercultural argument for the importance of alternative theory-practices, simultaneously artistic, academic + political. in 2002 i participated in the Critical Cyberculture Studies: Mapping an Evolving Discipline Conference @ the University Of Maryland with fellow participants such as Alexander R. Galloway, Richard Grusin + Fred Turner. (43) Fred Turner discussed the topix that would become the basis of his 2006 book From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, a book which is profoundly inspirational to me. i discussed my work / research on Radical Software, my development of critical artware + curriculum to address alternative Media Art Hystories in the service of artistic theory-practices. i have been teaching various alternative Media Art Histories as a basis for experimental New Media Art studio practices since 2001. similarly, i present such prehystories / Prehistories of New Media Art (a specific course that i developed in 2004) in the context of courses in our Art History, Theory and Criticism dept. my point being, i am familiar w/ many + multiple Media Art Histories in theory + in practice. as another touchstone to such considerations (i.e. the radical / alternative hystories of New Media Art in specific as well as computing in general), i highly recommend Pamela M. Lee's writing on concepts of technology, Media Art, Military-Industrial Research & Development (i.e. via the RAND Corporation) + the realities of the LAMOCA Art and Technology program (44)
we need to humanize ourselves + our systems, to recognize that we are amidst failed futures, broken tools + glitched environments made from media, mediums, mediations + filtered through failures. yes, Sterling, we can or could seek to correct sum of that broken-ness. but we must (@ least begin to) recognize + acknowledge these surroundings / situations. this is not to say that we should revel in decay as delayed deathwish (which will come true nonetheless b/c we are in fax all human + therefore on a limited timeframe here in our worlds), but rather to responsibly engage + question our own limits, boundaries + presuppositions while critically questioning the constructions / constructedness of our concepts
&& secondly, as to Slashdot, i will have to leave that to a Part II which i am currently writing b/c this Part I became longer then i knew when i began... (TO BE CONTINUED)
jonCates
Alaska Inside Passage & Glacier Bay
END of JULY - BEGIN of AUGUST 2012
HTTP://GL1TCH.US
NOTES
0. The Art of the Motor - Paul Virilio (1995)
http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-art-of-the-motor/
1. i am currently writing on the flowing forward without reverse, without archive aspects of Digital Culture, as expressed in the forms of 4chan + will be presenting + releasing these positions, thoughts + feelings soon. my upcoming talk on this subject will take place as part of the panel "You Are. I Am. Everyone Is: The Authorless as Producer" chaired by Paul Lloyd Sargent this September at ISEA 2012, Machine Wilderness: http://www.isea2012.org
2. http://idle.slashdot.org/story/12/04/19/174236/electronic-glitch-artwork-made-by-weirdos-within-the-weirdos-video#comments
3. "Electronic Glitch Artwork Made by 'Weirdos Within the Weirdos' (Video) Posted by Roblimo on Friday April 20, @08:51AM from the software-that-may-or-may-not-exist dept." AKA Jake Elliott + jonCates interviewed for Slashdot TV (2012)
http://idle.slashdot.org/story/12/04/19/174236/electronic-glitch-artwork-made-by-weirdos-within-the-weirdos-video
4. Critical Glitch Artware - jonCates && Jake Elliott (2012)
http://criticalartware.net
5. NOTACON: http://www.notacon.org
6. PixelJam: http://www.pixelj.am
7. http://www.sterlingcrispin.com/info.php
8. gltch - Curt Cloninger (2010)
http://rhizome.org/discuss/46525
9. interestingly enough due to the systemic glitches of data transfer over Skype + making recordings w/ an active Operating System of that system itself, the last word of Crispin's question is garbled in my recording. i remember in the moment feeling as though he had said "nonsense" or sum such word but now i cant be sure precisely sure what he did say but "noise" or "nonsense" would be good guesses...
10. in the next few moments of the Q&A, Jeremy Bailey continued by answering another question in terms of his own work as a study of failure in the context of various identity politics + performances of those identities. these are important issues for me as well + it was exciting to hear Bailey discussing his own work in this way: http://soundcloud.com/joncates/medialive2012-q-a-moments
11. sterlingcrispin Jul 24, 2:18pm via Twitter for Android
@beafremderman @joncates like Dada it can be info>noise>new info, but Im skeptical & weary of this nonhuman mutant info, crippled from chaos
sterlingcrispin Jul 24, 2:14pm via Twitter for Android
@beafremderman @joncates the glitch/noise fetish is an inversion of humanity & symbolic embrace of death & rampant infectious nihilism IMHO
beafremderman Jul 24, 2:11pm via Web
@sterlingcrispin @joncates hmmm, wish i got to see this conversation
sterlingcrispin Jul 24, 2:05pm via Twitter for Android
@joncates Why not take noise & render it into information? Why decend down the hierarchy of forms, -- respectfully & perhaps rhetorically sc
sterlingcrispin Jul 24, 2:02pm via Twitter for Android
@joncates Our minds desperately grasp for patterns in the noise, a testament to the need for Signal & meaning in the world,
sterlingcrispin Jul 24, 2:00pm via Twitter for Android
@joncates Once the glitch makes.visible the system of information at hand and critiques it, what else is there?
sterlingcrispin Jul 24, 1:58pm via Twitter for Android
@joncates isnt glitch art antithetical to the concept of art? The meaningful organization of material to reveal truth/beauty/the Good?
12. in April of 2009, during a trial in which the anti-copyright or pro-piracy organization The Pirate Bay was accused of assistance to copyright infringement, The Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde stated that everything is IRL (In Real Life). (12A) Sunde's comment came during an exchange in which he detailed the group's choice of the term AFK (Away From Keyboard) over IRL to refer to analog physical occurrences or experiences. he explained that the expressions communicate different meanings + he suggested, in his brief explanation, a philosophic reasoning for his choice that acknowledges that computer-mediated experiences are in fact still lived + real experiences
12A. The Pirate Bay Trial transcript, Day 05, Part, as transcribed by The Purple Flagship (2009) http://purpleflagship.wordpress.com/2009/03/07/the-pirate-bay-trial-transcript-peter-sunde/
13. http://gl1tch.us/digitalPunk.html
14. http://www.1010.co.uk/indexwiki.html
15. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century", Donna Haraway (1985)
16. while presenting at the The Society for Literature Science and the Arts SLSA 2009 Annual Conference: Decodings in Atlanta, Jake Elliott + i encountered an amusing / exciting situation.during our presentation "0UR080R05 - Noise, Live Coding, Art Hacking and Realtime Audio Video Performance" my humanity was questioned as if mayhaps it was an artistic / performative fiction, as if i was an an artificial intelligence / lifeform rendered in artware, coded to collide in prescribed ways with an external world. we gave a talk, on a panel organized by Katherine Behar, which Jake Elliott attended physically + i attended via Skype (as i did during the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art's MediaLive event that Sterling Crispin attended). Skype was less stable then, as were the networks we were on, so i glitched in + out a few times, responding to comments / statements made by Jake + other participants @ times that were more or less in sync w/ the panel discussion. so @ sum point, as this panel was in the context of a discussion of Performance Art && technological forms, Jake was asked if i (jonCates) was or was not 'real'. Jake responded that i was in fax 'real' + that i was Skyping in from Chicago, not a prerecorded or triggered video nor a Buadrillard-style simulation deceptively rendered in realtime. (16A)
16A. 0UR080R05: Noise, Live Coding, Art Hacking and Realtime Audio Video Performance - jonCates && Jake Elliot (2009)
on the panel:
Performance: a Method of Decoding / Decoding: a Method of Performance - Katherine Behar && Frenchy Lunning (2009)
http://www.litsciarts.org/slsa09/program.php
17. Dirty New Media is an idea i developed in 2005 as a part of the (A) r4WB1t5 festival project, which i initiated && organized w/ Jon Satrom, Amanda Gutiérrez , Jake Elliott, Jason Soliday, Arcangel Constantini, Juanjose Rivas and many others Dirty New Media artists, mainly in Chicago + Mexico City. my interest then + now was on a dirtiness that could embrace glitches w/ + w/in grammars of pornography, New Media, Web Art, Realtime Audio Video, Noise Musics, Free Cultures, Open Source, Piratical Practices, etc... we conceived of the r4WB1t5 project as an an instantiated, open and copyable format for raw bits of Digital Art and Dirty New Media. (A) r4WB1t5 micro.festivals involved an expansive group of artist-participant-organizers over the years from 2005 – 2007. explicitly focused on these intersections, i articulated the Media Art Hystories basis of r4WB1t5 as: "(A) r4WB1t5 micro.Fest extends out of + feeds back into DaDaist, Situationist, Fluxist, punk, digital art + New Media theorypractices, hystories, posibilities + positionalities. (A) r4WB1t5 micro.Fest is an [open project/conceptual {platform|framework}] available to anyOne interested in self-organized DIY digital arts + dirty new media." (17A)
17A. axxually, lookn bax rite nowww into the end of 2005 / begin of 2006, i reread that i also wrote then that this series of (now-known-as) Glitch Art events that i developed were explicitly rooted in + intended to produce "complex overlapping digital, analog + _humanistic_ systems." (emphasis mine on mine) (17B)
17B. http://r4wb1t5.org
18. openness - jonCates (2009)
http://systemsapproach.net/2009.11.04/openness_talk.pdf
19. apparently an improperly clothed human can only survive a few minutes before paralysis resulting from hypothermia sets in && humans in such cold waters will lose the ability to move themselves. apparently, this is also an attractive form of suicide for sum, as a few ppl consistantly travel to these waters each year to throw themselves in
20. i use the phrase 'technological times' in reference to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's exhibition titled "010101: Art in Technological Times" + in the way in which the phrase is mobilized by Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook in their 2010 book Rethinking Curating: Art after New Media
21. i was educated into the Postmodern. or as one of my students said to me when i began teaching in the late 1990's, Postmodernism is simply a way of life, a mis-en-scene, having a taken-for-grantedness that is part of a common experience of everyday life. still, for me, questioning the concepts of Mastery, Authorship, Master Narratives + Objective Truth claims were massively mind altering + exciting possibilities presented to me by my teachers. specifically, i have to thnx Scott Rankin, who taught me Video Art + whose projects, in particular his video artwork entitled The Pure, stays w/ my thinking / feeling always. if you have not yet seen The Pure, i strongly recommend that you do: http://www.vdb.org/titles/pure
22. Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction - Caleb Kelly (2009)
23. http://www.machinefabriek.nu/releases_-_solo/ijspret
24. http://www.discogs.com/Collin-Olan-Rec01/release/228323
25. http://www.katiepaterson.org/icerecords/
26. http://www.lentos.at/en/45_1275.asp
27. Céleste Boursier-Mougenot interview - "from here to ear (version 15)" - videorize (2011)
https://vimeo.com/33157611
this is another case of direct lived human exxxperience that cannot be clearly translated w/ out having these exxxperiences ones-self. youtube videos pale to the point of being barely meaningful as only slight shadow indicators or only marginally legible traces. + btw, considering caged birds as the best minimal experimental guitar-based jazz +/or electro-acoustic musics is not a lighthearted assertion on my part. i actually take all this quite seriously && have listened to a great deal of live + recorded musics && noise of these kinds. these birds, as instruments +/or musicians, + the artist-composer, Boursier-Mougenot, collaboratively created an amazingly complex work of Music Art. + as i said in this note, the lived experienced of being in this living experiences is amazing in + of itself
28 C.I.P. (Crippled Intellect Productions) - Blake Edwards (1988 - present)
http://www.cipsite.net
29. Blake Edwards interview - jonCates (2012)
HTTP://GL1TCH.US/Ssm8RMSL.html
30. http://gli.tc/h/READERROR/GLITCH_READERROR_20111-v3BWs.pdf
31. Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs - John Lydon with Kent Zimmerman (1995)
33. Rumble Fish - Francis Ford Coppola (1983)
34. Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts - Douglas Kahn (1999)
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=4764
35. Kahn lists out relative links between Noise in the avant-garde + sounds from various sources including those of "military combat, the specter and incursion of technology and industrialism... nature and the sounds of other species, religious and occult activities, psychosis and drug-induced experiences, the music and languages of cultures outside reigning cultures..." among other connections that give signifying meanings to Significant Noises. i <3 Kahn's concept + description of Significant Noises to be considered in Noise Art / Musics. i would propose a similarly inspired set of Significant Glitches to be considered in Glitch Art / Musics. but that is for another time, another txt
36. McLuhan is sumtimes invoked by Rosa Menkman, the consummate theory-practitioner of the ever moving/flowing experimental Media Art known (as i have written previously) as Glitch or Glitch Art or Noise or Noise Art or Error or Disruption or Corruption or Loss or Failure or Obsolescence or Disappearance or a not so subtle dance between all these possible poles of existence in, of and between unstable categories... in anycase, Menkman has said: "The artwork can be understood as a struggle against the technological determinist attitude of the consumer, which McLuhan already described in the 60s. To McLuhan, technological developments were the most important reasons for cultivation. He states that not the content, but the medium itself should be the subject of study… In digital glitch art, a void is often used not only as a means to perceive, it is especially a lack of meaning, often a place where a medium is used in a subversive way and where the expected, conventional message of the medium is destroyed. Through means of the void, the medium can be redefined as a platform that doesn’t follow the conventions and triggers the user to reflect upon his conventional frames of reference and criticize the flow, which is often taken for granted and even constitutes our Zeitgeist. The void, created by a glitch obliges the viewer to start making sense and meaning more actively and to consider the computer no longer just as a device of standardization but instead as a technology that functions within a social reality. The ‘techniques of the void’ and systematically distorted communication (glitches) are helpful because they open up possibilities for discussing technologies and their internal politics." (36A)
36A. In the midst of the serene world of ɥɔʇılƃ - Rosa Menkman (2008)
http://rosa-menkman.blogspot.com/2008/10/in-midst-of-serene-world-of-l.html
37. in the introduction to Friedrich A. Kittler's Gramophone, film, typewriter, Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz refer to Jean Baudrillard's Requiem for the Media in which Baudrillard argued against the neutrality of media/technologies (37A)
37A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter - Friedrich Kittler (Author), Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Translators) (1999)
38. "Media can no longer be dismissed as neutral or transparent, subordinate or merely supplemental to the information they convey." (38A)
38A. The introduction to Critical Terms for Media Studies - W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen (2010)
39. for the records, i, for 01, am sumone whois into conspiratorial theories related to reverse engineering alien technologies; wondering often about an interventionist god/gods; + performing experimental lectures && creating projects that suggest / propose / manifest slippages betwixt computer witchcrafts + glitchcrafts. but even so, the idea that technologies are human-made + that human-making is a definitive feature of the technological is not far from anyOne's experience or understanding. we are surrounded by the assumption that the technological is materialized human power made material by human hands. undercurrents of various sorts still connect this experience to other + earlier ideas of invocation, majik, religion, etc... && we operate on a daily basis in ways that co-mingle these assumptions + expectations about 'the technological'
40. A Social History of American Technology - Ruth Schwartz Cowan (1997)
41. A People's History of the United States - Howard Zinn (1980)
42. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00n4j0r
43. http://otal.umd.edu/amst/cwg/cwg3schedule.html
44. Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960's - Pamela M. Lee (2004)