Sara Cwynar, is an artist from Canada. She uses images from encyclopedias, biology textbooks, featuring sexy pinups, children, politician-on-TV subject matters, but each gives off an air of american antiquity. Then search the glitch effect she wants by using a scanner; moving the image while that is being scanned, the results are distorted figures. “By mashing up these two technologies, I want to highlight the obsolescence of the old one and the future obsolescence of the new one”. She thinks that the most stylish pictures are the kitchest ones.
Datamoshing is the practice of intentionally using compression artifacts in digital video and animated GIFs that is sometimes to referred to as “glitch art.”
According to the tech blog Bit_Synthesis published a post titled “Datamoshing – the Beauty of Glitch,” the practice of datamoshing had been used by digital artists since at least 2005. In 2006, a technique created by artists Betrand Planes and Christian Jacquemin transcodes one lossy video format into another was demonstrated with the modified DivX video codec DivXPrime.
On August 2nd, 2007, YouTuber Michael Crowe uploaded a video titled “Takeshi Murata,” which featured a montage of datamoshed videos (shown below).
On February 24th, 2009, YouTuber datamosher uploaded a datamosh instructional video (shown below). On June 16th, rapper Kanye West released the music video for his song “Welcome to the Heartbreak” (shown below), which featured many datamoshed video artifacts. Within the first four years, the video gathered more than 10.3 million views and 11,400 comments.
On May 16th, 2011, YouTuber Yung Jake uploaded a music video titled “Datamosh,” which included a variety of compression artifacts (shown below). On March 25th, 2012, the /r/brokengifs subreddit was launched, featuring animated GIFs created using datamoshing techniques.
(The original source of this article is: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/datamoshing#fn4)
The data is used today to make political and social satire , not to mention the artistic aspect . As the leading exponents of street art . Below some example.
The Vaporwave is a music genre born around the 2010s among the internet community as Bandcamp, Tumblr and Soundcloud.
It’s rooted in the sub-genres of electronic music such as 80’s pop, lounge, smooth jazz, and synth pop. The Vaporwave is visually characterized from retro charm for the typical digital aesthetics of video games, technology, advertising and Japanese culture of the 80’s, 90’s and early 2000s.
This style is focused on the satirical critique of consumer society and popular culture through the use of sampling that is often pitched, layered or altered in a classic “chopped and screwed”. It combines music and images of classical sculptures,1990s web design, computer renderings and VHS, presenting itself as a degrading of commercial music in an attempt to reveal the false promises of capitalism.
The founders of the movement are both James Ferraro, with the albums Far Side Virtual, and Chuck Person (aka Oneohtrix Point Never) with Eccojams Vol.1. However the first album that gained popular recognition is Floral Shoppe by Macintosh Plus (aka Vektroid).
Vektroid describes her album as “a brief glimpse into the new possibilities of international communication” and “a parody of American hypercontextualization of e-Asia circa 1995.”
Others see this genre as the answer of digital age to punk. In an interview for the magazine Dummy, Liz, co-founder of SPF420 site, explained:
“Vaporwave, in my opinion, is our current ‘punk scene’. The digital rebels. The ones who ‘steal’ others’ music, just to manipulate it and chop it up a bit. That is so fucking punk…It’s like how punk bands only knew how to play power chords. It’s brilliant. Vaporwave isn’t lazy, and neither is punk. I think that these two genres of music are parallel: short tracks with messages that are very literal, made with minimal intent (for the most part).”
“The work deFacebook by Indian artist Nandan Ghiya consists of a series of portraits made from images taken from popular social networks and physically printed on canvas. The selected photos are classic half-length or full-figured portraits, (partially) set up according to the classical canons of the family portrait. The wooden or golden frames are thick and heavy. Together with the hue of the pictures, which often changes to sepia, they give the images a nostalgic antique mood. This aesthetic vintage effect is functional, engendering a sense of disruptive irony. Some parts of the pictures (often the faces) have been modified using very apparent and colourful glitch effects. This is underlined by a subtle but crucial characteristic: the frames of the paintings retain their classical rigor in the colours and materials but they follow every whim of the glitched pixels which overflow the profiles, breaking the hardness and regularity of the classical frames. With this refined aesthetic expedient, the artist looks to disrupt the style of the classic portrait. The transition to digital of the public representation of the self (once the family portrait) became engrained after Facebook. The subjectivity, so fixed on canvas, is represented in all its fragility, creating effective effigies of the modern portrait – even more impressive because of the errors in the unstructured faces.”
“Glitches are the uncanny, brutal structures that come to the surface during a break of the flow within a technology; they are the primal data-screams of the machine. In the digital these utterances often take form following the “vernacular of file formats” (the encoded organizations of data). A file format signifies what protocols (formal descriptions and semantic rules) are used to structure or encode the information. Many different file formats exist, for different forms of information and every one of these formats possesses its own encoding structures, which can be understood as a grammar or idiom. When this idiom is broken, for instance by a glitch or a wrong encoding, the data in its basic/primal structures of encoding comes to the surface. Visually glitches show themselves through organizational structures like rasters, grids, blocks, points, interlacing vectors and frames and therefore often look complex, repetitive, discolored, fragmented and flickering”.
You know, sometimes the glitches are a very big annoyance, expecially in videogames. You can’t pick up an important weapon or you can not reach an hidden treasure. Anyway The “CorridorDigital” two American youtubers, have been ironical about this problem with this video.
“YouGlitch is a website created by Martial Geoffre-Rouland and Benjamin Gaulon, based on Corrupt, their web-based Glitch Art Software. Corrupt, built back in 2004 with Proce55ing, enables the corruption of image files through repetitive replacements that can lead to numerous corrupted versions. The process is simple and clear: after users download and install the software, they can use it with webcam videos or ones they have stored on their hard disk. A 10-second video and an animated GIF is saved locally and also automatically uploaded to the new website. YouGlitch is a user-generated collection of glitch creativity. It is based on re-using, recycling, creatively destroying and sharing. It is a collective glitch art project but on its own terms and in accordance with our social media reality. At first sight, YouGlitch doesn’t seem to present accidents or failures as part of a flow or circulation of images. It looks more like a tool for helping users demystify glitch art, opening it up to popularization. It appears as a user-generated aesthetization of interruption that proves (as Rosa Menkman wrote in her Glitch Studies Manifesto) that what is now a glitch is destined to become a fashion. But to my eyes, YouGlitch succeeds on deeper levels: it connects to the present while referring to the past. It correlates the digital with the analogue era by correlating YouTube channels with the TV. It raises questions regarding potentially deliberate failures in the stream of videos and the exercise of control. Could it be that YouGlitch allows for collective play with corruption while at the same time suggesting a form of sabotage? If glitch art can also constitute a form of subversion, couldn’t this project possibly also be about the formation of an anti-apparatus that is unreadable, profane, glitched, out of control?” Source: http://www.neural.it
See also this: http://beautifullyimperfects.net/2012/02/20/youglitch/
“Artists have always been fascinated by imperfection. A little failure, a small mistake, an unexpected behaviour can be perceived as more meaningful and intriguing than the perfect artwork. This is even more relevant in the computer world where pushing the breaking point of technology is common practice, as shown by a renewed interest in glitch aesthetics over the past few years. A recent example of an art project intrigued by software malfunctions is Extrafile by Kim Asendorf. It consists of a native Mac OS X image converter application with the ability to open, preview and save the most common image file formats in seven different new formats: 4Bit Components, Block Ascii, Block Indexed, Channel Compressed Image, Monochrome Collector File, Uniform Spectrum and the ExtraFile Format, each one with its own properties. With this new set of formats, the aim is to “wiggle the static system of image file formats” and give the artist complete control over their digital artwork. Formalising the visual aspect of glitches in new fictitious ways outside the commercial formats allows the artist to exercise control and to not be at the mercy of the computer. It also provides exclusivity for the artists, so they’re not just using the same old formats as everyone else. As Asendorf puts it “ExtraFile is a pioneer art project in storing image data. The process and the resulting bytes, regardless of content, become the artwork itself”. Being a software art project, Extrafile’s potential as a process is increased by its open source nature. The source code is indeed available on GitHub under the Artistic License 2.0, making this piece conceptual software art with practical usage – quite a rare quality in the online art scene”.
by Valentina Culatti
YouGlitch is a website where the Corrupted GIFs created with Corrupt.Video are displayed.
The Software (Corrupt.Video) allows its users to glitch videos stored on their computer, videos from their webcam or their desktop in realtime. When a clip is recorded, a 10 seconds video and an animated GIF are saved locally and automatically uploaded to uglitch.com.
GLI.TC/H 20111
AN INTERNATIONAL NOISE && [DIRTY] NEW-MEDIA
EVENT/CONFERENCE/FESTIVAL/GATHERING
Now in its second year, GLI.TC/H gathers a variety of participants + works + ideas from within glitch/dirty/experimental-new-media art communities into a multi-day & multi-format happening consisting of video screenings, real-time performances, workshops, lectures, panels, a gallery exhibition and on-going online components.
Thinkers and artists; Makers and breakers converge to celebrate technological catastrophe. A glitch is a moment known to everyone but enjoyed by few. GLI.TC/H brings together those inspired/curious/provoked by glitches and provides a platform to break things, share thoughts, and develop ideas.
GLI.TC/H will include works from over 100 participants from more than a dozen countries and will be taking place in virtual-space at http://gli.tc/h and in real-space from Nov 3 – 6 in Chicago, US; Nov 11 – 13 in Amsterdam, NL; Nov 19 in Birmingham, UK.
“A glitch is a mess that is a moment, a possibility to glance at software’s inner structure, wheter it is a mechanism of data compression or HTML code. Altough a glitch does not revel the true functionality of the computer, it shows the ghostly conventionality of the forms by which digital spaces are organized.”
Olga Goriunova and Alexei Shulgin, Glitch, in Matthew Fuller (edited by), Software Studies: A Lexicon, Cambridge, MA: Mit Press, 2008, p. 114.
“Systems Fail. Errors Happen, Computers don’t know whats going on. We see interesting and unusual visuals artefacts and glitches, We capture them!
At other times we provoke them!
This book presents a really colorful and vibrant variety of unusual visual glitch artwork from some very talented people.
This book was 4 years in the making, and received over 900 contributions! The book is a must have for anyone with an interest in Glitch Art & Aesthetics. With interviews and introductions for those who want to learn more.”
