It’s true that taking leaps instead of baby steps and working under pressure helps us to learn, and so Gregory Sporton, the course leader, explicitly only gave Pushkin a week to devise this piece, with only a one-day tutorial with myself.

After GLI.TC/H had ended I caught up with Pushkin to see how she approached this task. The first step in teaching her was to find out exactly what she knew about glitch art:

I didn’t know what [glitch art] was. I did know what a glitch was.

I’ve got the impression that the coding side of things and the software side of it, in that respect, is considered key [in glitch art].

Pushkin had done some experimenting with video editing in the past and had, although unintentionally, come into contact with glitch aesthetics through feedback loops. Due to the short time allocated there really wasn’t much of a chance to explore the somewhat hazy history of glitch art.

I went on a couple of glitch artists’ websites and they didn’t work on my computer and I couldn’t tell if that was a big joke or if actually my computer just couldn’t handle what it was doing.

In trying to understand and describe what she had found, Pushkin says:

What I thought glitch was was very much the kind of very modern looking bright colours [...] Moving visuals that have abstract content and are quite lurid.

Although the debate still rages on about what glitch art is or isn’t I feel this description is really quite accurate. Although she has described glitch art and the processes as very digital-looking and relying on computers the content she chose to use somewhat surprised me.

Reproducing pixelation using a disco ball

Pushkin had chosen a lot of content that had a very analogue feel to it. The glitches present represented the types found on VHS tapes and old records rather than compression artifacts or digital errors. She utilised her own Super 8 film footage together with attempting to replicate compression artifacts using analogue techniques.

I tried to replicated [the pixelation effect] using a disco ball and my webcam.

Putting the pixelation effect on the organic pixelation of the disco ball. That’s the sort of thing that, if I was going to take [glitch art] further, that’s the sort of thing I’d be into.

Considering that I had mostly shown her glitch art that had a very digital feel to it (databending, datamoshing etc) I was somewhat surprised by her choice of content. Nonetheless, I’m very pleased that she was able to find a style that she was comfortable working with.

On producing her content Pushkin faced several challenges. As we’ve seen she used analogue methods to produce her footage but she still wanted to make something that could integrate well with the festival and have a digital feel to it.

The first thing that Pushkin did, in order to try and glitch her videos was to “Download stuff wrong”:

The very first thing that I did was downloading stuff wrong. Downloading things [...] But then saving it before it was finished in order to see what the results would be

What Pushkin had unknowingly come across was what happens when you remove I-frames from videos, or what is more commonly known as Datamoshing. For Pushkin this was a very much a hit-and-miss operation, with most of her clips being unplayable. To assist her I took some of her content and ran it through the What Glitch? scripts, but it was clear that she was after a more analogue feel.

Below is a sample of some of the content that she produced, together with the audio from her performance:

The other challenge came from the software. Pushkin was more akin to using software such as Final Cut Pro to produce videos, but for GLI.TC/H she would be faced with the task of performing live. As a user of Pure Data for nearly all of my performance work I attempted to teach her the basics of this. Although it is a somewhat complicated program, under the right supervision it is very easy to get a video player that has a few basic effects. I gave Pushkin a short tutorial and then later provided her with some abstractions that I use in my video mixer. The resultant patch looked like this:

Click to embiggen

As a tool for manipulating videos Pushkin found Pure Data inspiring, but time constraints prevented her from delving further into the software:

I really wanted to be able to make my own patch for my own effect, and I found it quiet frustrating, but at the same time I did give up relatively quickly because it became obvious what is going to possible in the time, given that I’d have to do something other than just make an effect for 20 minutes of entertainment.

Also technical problems sometimes arose that threatened her performance:

I had a lot of trouble with crossfading and my computer. And every time I’ve ever done it except the actual performance my computer crashed when I first faded too much. But I learnt how to get it running again in 35 seconds, so that’s a good lesson for life!

Despite all of this, it all came together on the day of GLI.TC/H. You can watch her whole performance below:

(The other videos from the event are also available online)

I’m really very pleased with her performance. Pushkin is by no means a novice in producing artwork, but to tackle a whole new style of art in a few days and then perform in front of nearly 70 people is quite an achievement.

I wonder, is glitch art (and circuit bending) something that could/should be taught at art institutions?

Glitch Safari (from myself and noteNdo) and Dataface both receive a mention in the gallery, along with other awesome works.

Out of all of the notes there were a couple of points that stood out to me, which I’d like to add my own thoughts to.

24. At the same time, because glitch artists may optionally “save a copy” before making alterations, there is something disturbingly low-stakes about any particular attempt at glitching. One wishes this were not so, since the appearance of glitch is highly untame. Driven as it is by limitations of all sorts, many of the most agitating examples of Modernist art—works which, in Susan Sontag’s terms, “overstrain” the medium7—would never have existed with an undo button at their creators’ disposal. Indeed the art historian of the future will recognize the rise of unlimited, one-click “undo” as being on par with the most major technological and phenomenological changes in the history of representation.

At GLI.TC/H 2010 Riley Harmon introduced me to the game lose/lose from Zach Gage. In this game destroying an alien results in a random file being deleted from your computer.

lose/lose from zach gage on Vimeo.

It's this kind of risk that I feel is missing from the process of making glitch art. If a glitch artist only had one copy of an image/file to work from would they glitch it? If something of great importance or value was at risk would it result in "better" artwork? It's exciting and scary to think about...

My first proper discovery of glitch art was the result of such a risk. In 2008 I was attempting to photograph AAS:

My intention with this shot was to document the day accurately but instead I got a glitched photograph (the error occurred within the camera). Luckily, I received a positive response from AAS and others, so I decided to keep it. Had the photo been of more importance – for example, a picture of a wedding – then greater emphasis would be placed on producing clear, error-free photographs, and there would be greater disappointment and distress if any errors did occur.

So, intention comes into it quite a bit…

49. Glitch has embraced the open-source mentality of sharing knowledge, which is rooted in the DIY tradition of punk. When a glitch artist refuses to reveal how work was made, it not only raises a question of whether it is “really” glitch—as opposed to a Photoshopped simulation—but also whether the artist is selfishly hiding their technique in a refusal to contribute to the collective knowledge. This all reflects an anxiety over authenticity and the underlying politics of glitch—something not strictly defined, but which favors cooperation and community over the proprietary motivations of any individual auteur.

My practice is deeply rooted in open source software and collaborative practices. As such I always endeavour to share the source-code to all of my work. This doesn’t always happen immediately, but I eventually often write a tutorial, explain the process behind the artwork, or package the code that created the artwork into something reusable. As a result, I don’t look favourably upon (glitch) artists that are very secretive about their methods.

With that said, I do not want to become a help-desk for those wanting to do glitch art, which unfortunately has happened a lot in the past. Circuit bending and glitch art are very much about discovery, and I feel that holding someone’s hand and taking them through the A-Z of glitch wont result in an artist discovering their own style or reasons for doing glitch art. Tutorials that I write on my site aren’t meant to be a definitive guide on how to glitch, more of a starting point for the artist’s own personal discovery.

There’s more I could say about many of the other notes in that paper, but I’ll save that for discussions over dinner

What is your glitch? 1bitgifavibmpbmpcmykbmprgbjpgmpgpcxpixpngppmsgisvgtgawebp was shown alongside a host of really awesome glitch videos at Leeds International Film Festival last November.

I'm on the bottom-right, first page

Thanks to John McAndrew for organising the screening and for sending me to catalogue.

The second catalogue comes all the way from Connecticut! I Am Sitting in a Room was shown at a celebration of Alvin Lucier’s life and work last Novemeber (it was a busy month):

OMFG an autograph!

Thanks to Andrea Miller-Keller at Wesleyan University for curating that part of the show and to Alvin Lucier for signing the booklet!

January

January was pretty slow and saw me mostly carrying on with my studies at Birmingham City University.

February

Although it was a slow month I did finally meet Rob Myers at the Furtherfield show opening in London. I was also asked to join BiLE as their visuals guy. After initially being hesitant, due to my lack of experience in performing live, I accepted the offer.

March

What Revolution? appeared in Libre Graphics Magazine (you can still buy a copy).

I uploaded the What Glitch? scripts to the interwebs and showed off their capabilities in this video:

I still think I’m probably the only person to use these scripts. Someone please prove me wrong! Although the scripts are very rough, as one of my first attempts at writing someone functional I was happy with my achievement

BiLE also had their first performance at SOUNDkitchen:

Whilst it didn’t blow the socks off of everyone in the audience it represented how we were going to progress as a group

April

I became a regular VJ for SOUNDkitchen, and also joined Laternist, minuek and Chromatouch to form the Freecode collective. We played our first gig at the EXZYT space:

I then stayed up for nearly 24 hours to support Film Division in the Sci-Fi-London 48 hour film challenge:

The finished competition entry, Internalised, sadly didn’t win but did go on to be shown at Cannes in a Van later in the year.

I also had the pleasure of meeting Rob Canning of GOTO10 whilst they were in residence at Grand Union. Pure Dyne, which is made by them, was one of my first positive experiences with Linux so it was great to meet those who have inspired my work!

May

BiLE performed at We Are Birmingham (RIP) on May 1st, the day of the Royal Wedding. Videos from the performance are available here

I did slip in some footage from the wedding itself, but it did seem no one noticed. We then played our first gig outside Birmingham at the Electroacoustic Compostion Forum in Liverpool.

I made available for download my general purpose video mixer:

Has anyone else tried using it?

It lacks a lot of features found in many VJ applications but it worked for me for most of 2011. I think I’m still he only person to use it…

June

I traveled to Brussels for a short trip to meet OSP (Open Source Publishing) (more photos are here.

Some of team OSP

They’re one of the few design agencies that focus on producing work made entirely using open source applications. What more proof do you need that open source tools are more than capable of producing design that is indistinguishable from work made with proprietary tools.

I’ve been an Ubuntu user for a number of years and whilst I’ve faced many problems I’m now at a stage where I can produce work quite easily.

A day later BiLE performed in Wolverhampton

July

I’ve been helping to organise Birmingham Zine Festival since its inception in 2010 and in July we expanded to fill the We Are Birmingham shop.

I (still) don’t make many zines, but it was really great to see such an active DIY/zine scene in Birmingham

A day later I jetted off Venice with BiLE to perform at the Laptops Meet Musicians Festival. Whilst there I met rukano IRL and the band he’s part of, Benoît and the Mandelbrots.

Like a boss!

(More photos from the event are here.)

Throughout my time in BiLE I’ve mostly been learning about the whole electroacoustic music scene. Being mostly a fan of heavy metal and the like, this is all new, and at times, just plain weird! Events like this, where people are able to talk freely about their motivations and approaches to this type of work, have really helped me to understand it better.

BiLE also performed at SOUNDkitchen’s SONICpicnic (more pics here).

August

Freecode performed at the hexagon theatre at the mac.

This was quite a special gig for me as I performed alongside Modulate and Scree (Catweasel and DJ Sir Real. Back in 2007 when I was looking for local digital arts groups/artists it was these that I came across that then went on to inspire my work.

Did I mention that I met Richard Stallman?

September

I finally completed my MA in Digital Arts in Performance. Whilst my final piece for the course was criticised for its shallow storyline it was a great learning experience of using digital technology in a performance:

Despite it being 90% finished earlier in the year, in September I finally finished Skin Cells.

Straight after that it was time to get started on GLI.TC/H. With only two months to go things were getting a bit hectic. A (successfully funded) Kickerstarter was launched to support GLI.TC/H in Amsterdam and Chicago, whilst Birmingham opted for support from other sources.

October

I curated a screening of some great glitch videos as part of Flip Festival in Wolverhampton. This acted as a preview to GLI.TC/H, which by this point, had eaten up most of my free time.

A video for local Jazz-Metal band, Meatfeast, went online. I provided some effects for it:

Meanwhile, Birmingham Zine Festival held a stall and small zine exhibition at Supersonic Festival in Birmingham.

Myself and Lizz Lunney, one of the organisers of the zine festival

November

November was all about GLI.TC/H!!! The festival kicked off in Chicago at the beginning of the month, then went to Amsterdam before finally setting down at VIVID in Birmingham.

GLI.TC/H, for many reasons, was definitely the highlight of my year. Although I had organised art and tech events for awhile (most notably fizzPOP), I had never done anything on this scale. I’m thankful to the GLI.TC/H bots for allowing me to curate GLI.TC/H Birmingham and to the various people and organisations for supporting all of it! srsly, thanks!

I really liked how GLI.TC/H brought together many like-minded artists, many of whom had never met before in real life and were more likely to know their username than real name! Here’s some of the GLI.TC/H superstars hanging out after some good fuuuud!

Enough waffling, just look at the photos and videos from the event

Also, this month I Am Sitting In A Room, a piece inspired by Alvin Lucier’s work of the same name, had an extra-special showing at a celebration of Alvin Lucier‘s work in Connecticut in the US. I never would’ve thought that this video would’ve been seen by the guy who inspired it!

Elsewhere, What is your glitch? 1bitgifavibmpbmpcmykbmprgbjpgmpgpcxpixpngppmsgisvgtgawebp was shown at Leeds International Film Festival and I did a micro residency in Coventry.

December

Practically nothing happened, and for that I’m thankful! With most major things in my life over bty this point (my studies and GLI.TC/H) I used December as a period to reflect and think about where I could attempt to take my practice next.

2011 was definitely a year that took me by surprise. Here’s to 2012 being just as awesome!

As the curator of GLI.TC/H Birmingham I’d like to give my own set of thanks:

• Arts Council England for supporting GLI.TC/H Birmingham.
• Birmingham City University, in particular two staff members:
  • Gregory Sporton, for supporting the event, even if he doesn’t quite get what it all is!
  • Lorna Hards, whose course, Methods and Models of Curatorial Practice, gave me the confidence to curate GLI.TC/H Birmingham
• VIVID, for accepting the proposal for GLI.TC/H Birmingham to be part of their “The Garage Presents…” programme and for providing an amazing space to hold this event in as well as technical and programming assistance
• The GLI.TC/H Bots (Rosa, Nick and Jon) for being great friends and for allowing me to curate GLI.TC/H Birmingham. Moar thanks to Jon Satrom and Nick Briz for traveling to all three GLI.TC/H events (Chicago, Amsterdam and Birmingham)
• Flip Festival, for hosting a great night of GLI.TC/H video previews. Photos/programme available here
• Leon (Chromatouch), Pete and James and Sarah, for being great assistants and filling in gaps that I overlooked.
• fizzPOP, for being a great hackerspace and providing assistance in the workshops
• All of the artists that gave workshops, delivered lectures, performed or had videos/bumpers screened at GLI.TC/H Birmingham.
• All of my friends that attended GLI.TC/H Birmingham or supported it in another way. I know that a lot my friends don’t quite understand glitch art, so it was great to see them at it!
• And last, but not least, thanks to you, the audience, for traveling from the far reaches of England (and in some cases the world) to attend GLI.TC/H Birmingham. I hope that the day gave you a better insight into the world of technological failure!

  I was personally pleasantly surprised by the turnout throughout the whole day, to the point that we ran out of seats! So, thanks for making it a great success

Videos of all of the performances and lectures are available, thanks to Pete Ashton, on this YouTube playlist. Here’s the video of Jon Satrom’s prepared desktop:

Pete also took photos for the event and many more are available in the GLI.TC/H Flickr group. If you have any photos please add them to this group! Here’s one of my favourite photos, featuring Nicolas Maigret from Art of Failure:

I can’t personally comment on what is next in store for GLI.TC/H (GLI.TC/H 2012???), but I’m already planning future, much smaller, glitch art events to take place locally. I’m always up for collaborating on this, just get in touch.

Now time for sleep.

Extrafile, by Kim Asendorf, is a great response to this. The application allows one to convert standard image formats to ones that he has created (4bc, bascii, blinx, cci, mcf, uspec, xff), each with their own properties that sets them apart from standard image formats.

Kim asked myself and a number of other artists to mangle, hack, reconfigure and exploit these file formats, the results of which are quite unlike any “standard” glitches, if such a thing exists.

The program can be downloaded for Mac OSX NOW! (Linux port plzkthxbai)

Yo dawg, I herd you like badges...

A limited amount of glitched badges featuring stills from this video are now available for £2.25 plus postage and packaging. Sold in packs of two randomly chosen designs. Can also be exchanged for beer</joke>

Click to buy

Original song: Fade to Daft by Look What I Did (download for free from here.) I had to record this by placing my headphones on my microphone for reasons that I’ll explain later.

You may not be able to hear it but it sounds like one of the channels is being muted, whilst the other sounds like it has an echo effect. Also, it sounds as though the bitrate has been reduced to about 24kbps!

At first I couldn’t understand why this was happening so I consulted fizzPOP (who have just started hack sessions again) and it’s apparently due to the rings on the headphone jack.

Wikipedia, which is so obviously a reliable source, informs me that this is a TRRS plug, the extra ring being used for the microphone/control button. This extra ring is obviously interfering with the devices and making it sound glitchy. Naturally my first instinct was to record it, but this presented many problems.

First, in order to record the output of the player I needed a male to male 3.5mm cable that uses TRRS plugs. A quick Google search revealed that these don’t exist so I had to make my own.

Some of thinnest wires in the world evar!

As I had discovered earlier, the headphones capable of reproducing this glitch are iPhone headphones so I soldered two of the cables for these together, essentially creating a male to male 3.5mm cable with TRRS plugs. Happy times!

Or so I thought.

The problem I now still face is that the socket on my laptop is obviously capable of accepting TRRS plugs without glitches so the audio comes out clear when recorded via Audacity (well, it would be clearer were it not for my crappy soldering skills!).

This is where I require help from those more adept with audio than I. Is there a way to record the glitchy sound in the same “quality” as it is output from the mp3 player? The recording above was made by holding my headphones to my laptop microphone, which doesn’t faithfully reproduce the truly weird audio experience (though does produce a lo-fi aesthetic).

Photo by Minuek

Fierce has written a great overview of the evening and other events that happened at the Burningham space:

The evening saw the first live performance as a collective who were complimented by the sounds from Andy Sax (recorded with plan b) who improvised a live saxophone performance that included an injection of musical tweakery and an audio that responded to the atmosphere and vibe within the space.

This performance enabled non programmers to become absorbed in the audio and visual elements from a group of individuals who have collectively transcended their developing experimentations. The evening provoked a sense of intrigue and an exchange of dialogue between an audience that was exposed to the interactions and tools that are becoming instrumental for a new generation of artists.

And for those more visually inclined Minuek shot some footage throughout the night:

More code jamming to come soon!

six sevenths of BiLE performing in Liverpool

BiLE (Birmingham Laptop Ensemble) are a collaborative group of composers and performers of instrumental and electroacoustic music. Six artists were brought together through their shared interest in live performance and desire to perform and improvise together in an interactive ensemble.

BiLE’s core team of performers are: Julien Guillamat, Charles Céleste Hutchins, Shelly Knotts, Norah Lorway, Jorge Garcia Moncada and Chris Tarren.

BiLE regularly perform with glitch artist Antonio Roberts.

My role in the group (the supersecrit seventh member) is, where necessary, to provide visuals for their performances. Up until now I’ve been using various versions of a video mixer built in Pure Data to do my visuals. This has worked and I’ve used it to create this video for Electroacousitc Sonata No.1 for Cello by Julien Guillamat:

For future performances I want to compose visuals in the same way that they do with audio. For example, for some pieces each member is able to control certain parts of the software being used by another member by sending messages via OSC over a wireless network. I’ve recently figured out how to join this network so now I’ll be using their data to affect the visuals. I also want to use a Wiimote and Kinect in some way, but I’ll have to work on that.

BiLE will be performing next at NIME in Oslo, Norway (without me) on 31st May 2011. After that we have an easer-to-get-to gig in Wolverhampton. More on that soon…