Slashdot Mirror
Electronic Glitch Artwork Made by 'Weirdos Within the Weirdos' (Video)
Jake Elliott and Jon (not Elwood) Cates are the ones who describe Glitch Art people as 'weirdos within the weirdos' in the context of Notacon 9, which was recently held in Cleveland. It's 'an annual event that focuses on people who like to build, make, break and hack stuff,' and even in the Notacon context the Glitch Artwork crowd stands out. Sit down with Jake and Jon and share their joy in working with "feral glitches... before they are domesticated," and see some of the output from artist Dave Musgrave's circuit-bent consoles.
I'd much rather see their "art" than listen to them blabber on for 7 minutes.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
I'd hope the companies that own the underlying programs that are the basis for the art see in it in the spirit of "Variations on a theme by "insert famous composer." rather than "Hey, that's a derivative of my product..." Ideally it would be a fair use similar to some sampling.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
The technical term is " GL-GLITCH ".
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
Whats up with the VHS-rip look-alike contest?
It now means dabbling in an engineering discipline... poorly. The nouveau team could probably exploit glitches to interesting effect. Although the video does an impressively bad job of conveying what these "artists" do, mostly they are shorting or breaking various connections on video cards to mess up the graphics.
I tried watching the video and Flash crashed. Talk about a real glitch!
I'm not elitest but I really expected more from /. and their videos. I got to about 3 minutes in before actually seeing anything and the stuttering and stammering of the guy with the modded PS1 and PS2 crippled any remaining interest.
For a tech site the production of the video was really low too.
Up your game folks!
I want to thank Froggy for running Notacon for 9 years. I used to help out with Phreaknic in Nashville and I know a little bit of what it takes to run a con. It's thankless work. This year was my third Notacon, always have a good time. It's a great mix of technology, hacking, and art.
The accompanying PixelJam ran flawlessly and had a lot of great entries in the competitions. Friday night there were great performances. Highlight of Friday was Morgan Higby-Flowers' performance on a circuit bent video mixer. All the audio and video was coming out of one box. He coaxed more sub-bass, fractured noise and glitch visuals out of one piece of antiquated hardware than I've seen other artists get out of racks of expensive modular equipment costing tens of thousands of dollars. More is less.
Good starting points for learning more about Glitch:
Nick Briz's site. He's been at this a while and co-founded the GLI.TC/H festival in Chicago.
http://nickbriz.com/
Nick's Glitch Codec Tutorial. Also available as a DVD ISO.
http://nickbriz.com/blog/?p=441
Evan Meaney teaches at the University of Tennessee, is a founding member of GLI.TC/H, and also works on projects at Oak Ridge National Laboratories supercomputers.
http://www.evanmeaney.com/glitches.html
For all the haters on the thread, I totally understand how this might not be your thing. That's what's great about great art: it is polarizing. Your hate makes me know I'm enjoying something special.
At least, it's not new in the long view of what art is. Art need not be representational of real life, a fact that was explored in great detail after the invention of the camera. The view that art needs to be beautiful is simplistic. Beauty is subjective, and it's entirely possible to make beautiful art out of ugly things and ugly art out of beautiful things. While I agree with another poster who said that art should be able to stand on it's own without explanation, that's just my opinion. There's nothing wrong with making something that's not understandable without explanation. Also, art has a long tradition of people not accepting new forms and media as Real Art. Maybe this form of art is a dead end. Maybe it will lead somewhere interesting. Either way is okay. And it's perfectly acceptable to admit that it's art, and still think that it's crap.
These artists mess up the graphics to represent their worldview of what is and what should be. It is obvious to everyone that this means they are Linux users.
Is this a 4/20 post? it's a 4/20 post, isn't it?
That's 20/4 for those of you on the metric calendar.
Unrelated to the noise/glitch stuff explained here, Jake Elliot also makes some really nice conceptual computer games:
http://cardboardcomputer.com/
Title: Glitch Art Made by 'Weirdos Within the Weirdos'
Description: notacon is 'an annual event that focuses on people who like to build, make, break and hack stuff,' and even in the notacon context the Glitch Artwork crowd stands out as slightly odd...
00:00) <TITLE>
The tune from 'Twilight Zone' plays in the background as the video displays the following titles over a garbled video, with the 'notacon 9' logo appearing vertically on the left:
There is nothing wrong with your monitor
Do not attempt to adjust the picture
You're seeing Glitch Art at Notacon 9 in Chicago, where brave hackers and artists explore the OUTER LIMITS of life, art, and technology
www.notacon.org
In the bottom, having spiraled into view, is the SlashdotTV logo bar reading "Your host: Slashdot Editor Timothy Lord"
00:10) <TITLE>
A view of two men in casual clothing sitting in a conference room appears. The SlashdotTV logo bar identifies them as Jon Cates and Jake Elliott.
00:10) Jake>
We first started interacting with notacon about 5 or 6 years ago.
At that time they had a demo party component that was called Blockparty.
But that doesn't run anymore, so now PixelJam [...]
00:24) <TITLE>
The PixelJam logo fades in partially, then fades out again.
00:24) Jake>
[...] is the demoparty that froggy created that replaced Blockparty after Blockparty kind of came in and brought that component to notacon - which has always been both a hacker conference and a kind of electronic art conference even before the demoparty thing was there.
So that's what made it kind of like a really fertile ground for the kind of stuff that we do, which is, like, weirdo stuff, weird art and experimental music.
00:50) <TITLE>
An insert picture fades of a man standing behind some hardware much like a DJ fades in and out of view. A small title within this picture identifies him as "Paul ``Froggy`` Schneider".
00:50) Jon>
Yeah, and it's.. so Froggy had this concept of expanding the definition of a demo party and making it more inclusive and more expansive.
As part of that, larger project of redefining what a demo party might mean, he asked us to be involved this year, in a more official capacity, to help organize this glitch artwork category - which is a category for, as Jake said, kind of 'weirdos within the weirdos';
Glitch art, bad code, bad bends, circuit breaking instead of circuit bending, all that sort of thing.
01;30) <TITLE>
The video fades out and in fades stylized black/white portrait pictures of Jon.
01:33) <TITLE>
The view changes to that of a young man standing in a room next to some hardware with other people in the background. The SlashdotTV logo bar identifies the young man as "Chicago-based artist David Musgrave".
01:33) David>
I work with hacking electronics - mainly consoles, video game consoles.
I'm here as a part of PixelJam, and I'm showing [...]
01:46) <TITLE>
The camera pans toward the hardware David is talking about.
01:46) David>
[...] some projects that I've worked on with a bent Playstation 1 and a bent Playstation 2 and a bent A5 Panasonic?) video mixer.
01:57) <TITLE>
The view changes back to the initial view of David>
01:47) David>
I'm a glitch artist, I guess.
I have a background in abstract impressionist painting.
02:04) <TITLE>
A graphic fades in partially, showing a 'glitchy' background that cycles through different colors and patterns, and two smaller inset images above each other, the top image depicting a broken document icon reading "GLI.TC/H" and the bottom image showing David and a piece of hardware with some text (illegible) below them.
02:04) David>
This is my kind of response to that history of abstraction.
02:15) <TITLE>
The aforementioned graphic fades out and the camera pans back around to the hardware and a projected video o
Just thought I'd clear that up. No, I'm not bitter, I just want to set the record straight.
- Froggy
Sorry, but this is some of the most boring, least artistically creative "art" requiring the least ingenuity and the least imagination that I've ever come across, ever. I'm not even going to do the "hip" thing and give these "hipsters" the benefit of the doubt that they're trying to be ironic. I just think they're genuinely toast.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
It's nice to see slashdotters struggle with contemporary art that hits them where they live. Having seen the work being discussed (glaringly absent from the video, I agree), these artists are eroding categories and roles like "artist", "non-artist", "hacker", "tinker", "provocateur", "voodoo witch doctor", "weirdo", etc. One person's "bad engineering" is another's thought-provoking art. . . go figure, personal taste is involved. As for my personal taste, I agree with art historians that the purposes of art change dramatically over time. I agree with John Waters that a major (if not _the_ major) purpose of contemporary art is to provoke. I also agree with infomodity below that the vehemence of many responses here demonstrates the work's effectiveness. It obviously touches a few nerves and threatened some enough to provoke fiery responses, and others enough to leap to its defense. No response at all is the kiss of death for art. Ask Georgia O'Keefe, Frida Kahlo, Artemisia Gentileschi, Judy Chicago, Annie Leibovitz, Kara Walker, etc, etc.
Why don't streaming video services hire the IT people supporting ad networks?
I've never missed an ad before the "content", but I've sure missed a lot of videos that wouldn't play after sitting through the ad.
Oh. I've just explained it. The ad makes money, while the "content" costs money. Deliver the ad, skip the content; pure profit.
Lame IMHO