Glitch: Investigations into the New Ecology of the Digital Age
Glitch: Investigations into the New Ecology of the Digital Age
Curated by Nick Briz
jonCates + Jon Satrom in person!
Monday, November 9, 2009
6.00-8:00pm, FREE and Open to the Public
Flaxman Theater (room MC1307), 112 S. Michigan Ave
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
"The genre [of glitch] has no recognizable center. No handle. It keeps moving, shape shifting. It blurs when it’s recognized and then only sharpens for brief periods. It is not a genre so much as a tactic for subversion that has become a fashion statement.” - Kim Cascone
Glitch art is aetheticized and fetishized technological [human] errors or anticipated accidents that can produce unintended [desired] results. It functions as a microcosm for new media art, forgrounding a critical relationship to the digital culture in which we find ourselves mired. This program initiates a conversation between glitch artists from all over the world with common concerns. These artists demonstrate the diversity of ways in which glitch can be used to address pertinent issues within digital culture, and in culture at large.
The artists in this program take the otherwise irritable and undesirable erroneous occurrences and malfunctions and embrace them as form. In their practice, as well as in many of their writings and research, errors and bugs are reshaped at times into elegant painterly digitalism, at others into a poetic and essayistic discourse, and often into spastic abrasive assaults of visual/audible noise. These works critically address issues of time, deconstruction, memory, and chance with regards to society’s relationship with technology. They attack the media systems that have been assimilated by popular culture and subvert the slick, sterile, and seemingly perfect surface of technologies propagated by special interests.
Glitch lends itself to pedagogy as much as it serves as a ruse to traditional modes of artistic instruction that codify random acts of creativity. Thus, glitch art is not exclusively technical: the most basic methods utilized by glitch artists can be easily taught, learnt and executed. Methods such as datamoshing and wordpad glitching have opened a potentially democratic space for conceptually and aesthetically exploring our amorphous identities in our new digital ecology.
As technology exponentially evolves and naturally occurring ‘glitches’ are being phased out, the natural aesthetics of digital technology are at risk of obsolescence. A mutual threat is currently being posed between the new technologies/upgrades which seek to nullify glitches and the glitches which attempt to expose these technologies/imposed systems. This program is an attempt to address this threat and generate dialogue about the critical importance and potential of glitch." - Nick Briz
Artists included:
Achim Stromberger
Evan Meaney
Jimmy Joe Roche
Johnny Rogers
jonCates
Jon Satrom
Karl Klomp
Nick Briz
Nick Salvatore
Rosa Menkman
Takeshi Murata
and Tatjana Marusic.
trt. approx 80 mins
The Eye & Ear Clinic is a free bi-weekly film series run by SAIC graduate students in Film, Video and New Media; Art History, Theory, and Criticism; and Arts Administration and Policy. Contact us at eyeandearclinic@gmail.com and be our friend on Facebook!
posted by joncates at
9:04 AM
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