Bending and Breaking.
Published by Nick February 27th, 2009 in Uncategorized.
Readers of this blog probably don’t need me to tell the about Glitch-Art. However, we haven’t sunk so deep into post-modernism that we don’t feel the need to describe, understand, and assign narratives to stuff that probably would resist the idea. So in that spirit, here are some thoughts I’ve been thinking about the subconscious genesis of Glitch-Art, and then some ramblings about what it is for those of you who want a little bit of background.
American culture has been marked for nearly a century by a propensity toward luxury, corruption, apathy and violence. It is a culture of the Ugly. We have thrived on the spectacle of violence and degradation. We sooth the pangs of our conscience with the salve of superficial action. Millions starving in Asia? Join a Facebook group and call it a day. Millions dying of AIDS in Africa? Sign a petition, you good Samaritan. And why should we do anything? It’s boring and hard, and doesn’t pay very well. It is however, wildly entertaining to watch, whether you’ve admitted it to yourself or not.
American Art, on the other hand, seems to have perpetually been a reaction to this apathetic love for the Ugly. The Romantics, Cubists, Photo-realists, pop-stars, folk singers, and slews of other tried to showcase the beautiful in the face of an Ugly world.
However, a new generation of artists is coming of age. They’ve grown up watching society crumble around them. They’ve seen the genocide, war, famine and disease that define our condition. They’ve seen how hard people have worked against it, and noticed how little good it has done. They tell artists of times past, “Your flowers and pears and portraits and abstracts and protest-songs are not beautiful; they glorify an ugly world. They delude people into thinking that those flowers will not wilt, that those pears will not rot, that those people in your portraits do not think greedy thoughts, that those abstracts won’t become irrelevant, and that those folksongs will ever make a difference.”
In the face of this oppressive ugliness, these artists reject this futile chase after an ephemeral ideal, and embrace all that is broken and misused and wrong. “In a world of ugliness,” they seem to be saying, “we must define Ugliness as Beauty if we want any beauty at all.”
These artists are also the first to grow up with computers and video games; childhoods of digital pets and friends. The saw their computers crashing and thought, “that looks cool.” They heard the hiccoughing death-knells of their obsolete video-game consoles, and though “That sounds kinda cool.”
While experimenting with broken equipment has been going on in music for years (the Kinks cutting their Amps’ speakers with razors, the Beatles experiments with stretching their masters, scratching in Hip-Hop, etc…), the digital age has made Visual, Video, and Audio glitch art both easier to produce and manipulate, as well as more pervasive.
One genre to embrace the glitch aesthetic and run with it has been electronic music. Turning a few knobs, boosting a few levels can turn the tamest recording into a cacophony of beeps, cascades of fuzz, and thunderous crashes.
Another rising trend in glitch media is Circuit Bending. Practitioners go out to their favorite thrift store and buy up all the Speak-n-Spells, cheap keyboards, and talking toys they can find. They bring them home, crack them open, and get to work connecting circuits that were never meant to be connected. Sometimes this melts something or otherwise ruins the instrument, but more often than not it produces unique, disturbing, and dare I say beautiful sounds.
There is very little method involved; it’s basically trial and error connecting random points in circuits until an interesting sound is produced. Also, virtually no expertise is needed. Indeed, last week I went to Salvation Army, and armed with a tiny screwdriver, a fear of electrocuting myself, and a friend’s soldering iron, turned a toy keyboard into a screaming machine of shrill peaks and sheets of melodic fuzz.
That is not to say, however, that circuit bending enthusiasts are all hacks (get it? Hacks?). Armed with an actual working knowledge of how circuits work, people have turned out toys bristling with knobs, switches, and all sorts of crazy stuff (even a synth that runs on Light) that regulate pitch, tone, volume, and a host of other cool features. In this tradition, artists who spent their childhood glued to their GameBoy have developed mods that allow them to manipulate the sounds of the handheld machine. This has bred an entire scene of 8-Bit music, that is frankly both hilarious and really fun to dance to. (If you’re are as clueless about electronics as I am, these Mods periodically pop up on eBay, but they’re not cheap.)
Taking a little while to catch up, glitch photography and video are rapidly gaining ground and prestige in the artistic community. Inspired by corrupted image files, crashing computers and the like, glitch images are usually anything but ugly. Actually, one of the coolest images I’ve ever seen was a picture message sent to my phone that clearly got garbled in transit. I’m glad it did.
Like glitch music, it’s easy enough to get into. Swap around a few random bits of binary till something cool happens to the image (or upload your picture to Corrupt, and let them do it for you. For free!). Like circuit bending, this is based in trial and error, combining a feel for the medium with the blind accident of chance.
Video is little different, only that crazy stuff moves around! Capable of producing elegant landscapes of color, or frenetic, maniacal visual screams, glitch video is possibly the only interesting thing to come out of Avant-garde film-making since the boundaries of Film had been stretched thin in the ‘60s. (I’m sure all my filmmaker friends will be up-in-arms about me saying that. But how much of technique has really changed? Advancing theories of narrative structure and signifiers is all well and good, but you can only burn and stretch and contact-print negatives for a few decades before all that stuff gets boring.)
See what i mean?
Whether or not glitch-media is here to stay has yet to be seen. In our (for lack of a more appropriate or accurate word) post-modern artistic landscape, distinctions between glitch, analog, digital, music and visual are bound to fall soon enough. My advice though, would be; Who cares? Go out, break something, and make it beautiful.
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Nick, that dude Corey finally gets a little exposure on here and you have to go and write a novel on circuit-bent gadgets? Wow. You’re unbelievable, man. If I was that kid, I’d kill you. Kill you.
Hey Corey, try and grow up a little bit, huh? If yoou’re gonna try and hurt my feelings using an alias, at least use one that i dont know. Even if you did that, the joke would still be on you; how could you hurt my feelings when, like dreams, i havent had one in years? Are you going to heckle me every time I post? If you ever get that book published, i’m telling your editor that you’re a closet junkie who’s an ex-con (for insider trading: you never could make a good deal).
I mean, but did you like the article?
Commenting usually isnt my thing, but ive spent an hour on the site, so thanks for the info