Slides and quotes from a talk on "Glitch Aesthetics and

1. Tim Ryan Crash Media c.2001
Glitch aesthetics and the
institutional life of video
Sean Cubitt
Exhibiting Video, Saturday 24 March 2012, University of Westminster 309 Regent Street

2. Some Starting Points
Nick Briz’s Glitch Codec Tutorial
http://nickbriz.com/glitchcodectutorial/
Mark Amerika’s Museum of Glitch Aesthetics
http://glitchmuseum.com/
the artists featured at
http://gli.tc/h/
2010 and 2011 festivals.
Karl Klomp’s devices for glitching video at
http://karlklomp.nl/
and Ant Scott {Beflix} [UK] co-author of Glitch: Designing Imperfection
http://markbattypublisher.com/books/glitch/
http://www.beflix.com/

3. Paul Herz, Shimmer, from the series Sampling Patterns
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ignotus/sets/72157626088733463/with/5408302433/

4. based on regular random distributions known
as “blue noise.” Natural phenomena such as
identically charged particles jostling for posi-
tion within a limiting boundary or a flock of
birds adjusting their mutual distances have
similar distributions. Blue noise dot patterns
have interesting visual and cognitive effects:
Their regularity seems to imply an order just
about to emerge, which their randomness ne-
gates. These and other works in my “Sampling
Patterns” series are snapshots from interac-
tive real-time animations where the geometric
points of the distribution are used to sample
functions that control color, scale, shape, and
other visual attributes. The snapshots are fur-
ther edited to produce prints.
http://paulhertz.net/factory/2011/07/cae2011/

5. Tim Head Dust Flowers, print
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/timhead/art/art2000/80dus.htm
Tim Head Scent (2009), :
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/timhead/art/art2000/81sce.htm
Computer programs for the digital projections
are written to generate unique events in real
time. The unsettled surfaces of the projec-
tions are composed of random colours, each
occupying a single pixel and filling every pixel
on the screen, and programmed to change or
move in particular ways across the screen as
fast as possible.
The programs written for flat screens select
random colours to fill (or attempt to fill) the
entire screen at very fast rates of change,
bringing to the surface the medium’s physical
characteristics of instability and speed.
The work with digital inkjet prints attempts to
redefine the prescribed role of the commercial
inkjet printer, diverting it from a sophisticated
reproduction machine into a direct primary
printing medium. Specially written programs
talk directly to the printer, generating unique
decisions in real time for all its printing opera-
tions (the colour and location of each droplet
of ink laid down along horizontal lines) to
reveal the physical grain of the inkjet print.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/timhead/texts/th_digitaldimen-
sion.htm

6. jimpunk’s #crashtxt Twitter feed of mangled text from a custom-mangled keyboard -
https://twitter.com/#!/crashtxt/

7. Glitchiness
John Cayley’s wotclock
http://programmatology.shadoof.net/index.php?p=works/wotclock/wotclock.html

8. Rosa Menkman’s Collapse of Pal (2011)
http://videoscapes.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/collapse-of-pal.html
compare Woody Vasulka’s Art of Memory

9. Gene Youngblood
In Buffalo the Vasulkas built their own imaging device, called the Digital Image Articulator. The sche-
matics are in the archive, as well as a video diary of its construction and tapes of the “artifacts”
the machine generated. Only one in 10 were released publicly. The rest were archived. Woody and
Steina say they knew what they were looking for when they began using the machine. They un-
derstood which artifacts would be historically important, but they had to build the machine to see
them. The Digital Image Articulator was the last user-built folk instrument to emerge from video’s
pioneering era
http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=179
See also analog video synthesisers developed by
Dan Sandin
http://www.vdb.org/titles/five-minute-romp-through-ip
and
Peter Donebauer
http://www.donebauer.net/manifestations/movingimages/broadband/theseventies/theseventies.htm

10. Glitchiness

11. Rosa Menkman, Glitch Studies Manifesto in Lovink and Miles’ Video Vortex 2
http://www.networkcultures.org/_uploads/%236reader_VideoVortex2PDF.pdf

12. Rosa Menkman Glitch Studies Manifesto in Lovink Tim Head, Artist’s Statement
and Miles' Video Vortex 2.
The work focuses on the digital medium's elusive
The dominant, continuing search for a noiseless material substance and on our evolving relation-
channel has been — and will always be — no more ship to it as a physical entity. It uses the medium's
than a regrettable, ill-fated dogma. physical characteristics that make it uniquely dif-
ferent from other media. Bypassing its usual role
... of representing images and texts, the work deals
directly with its basic material elements - the
Realize that the gospel of glitch art also reveals luminous fabric of pixels on a screen or digital
new standards implemented by corruption. Not projection, the flurry of microscopic ink droplets
all glitch art is progressive or something new. The laid down by the inkjet printer, and the hidden
popularization and cultivation of the avant-garde of real time calculations of the computer operat-
mishaps has become predestined and unavoidable. ing at ultra fast speeds that drive these elements.
Be aware of easily reproducible glitch effects, au- The medium's underlying material substance is
tomated by softwares and plug-ins. What is now a exposed, moving it out from its usual confine-
glitch will become a fashion. ment in virtual space towards the same physical
space that we ourselves occupy
http://www.networkcultures.org/_
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/timhead/texts/th_digitaldimension.htm
uploads/%236reader_VideoVortex2PDF.pdf