Dirty New Media will be making its way to The Barber Institute of Fine Arts on 21st March as part of the University of Birmingham’s Arts and Science Festival. Over the week I’ll be providing an overview of the upcoming event.
Lectures | 4-6pm
Jon Cates – WTF?! is D1RTY N3W M3DI∆?!
Dan O’Hara – An Irregular and Spasmodic History of Glitches and other Systemic Stutterings
Glitches interrupt the smooth realism of our mediated experience of the everyday world, from malfunctioning train announcement boards to distorted video streams and white noise in our phone calls. But is it only machines that glitch, or does ‘glitching’ exist in nature too?
We’ll look at the way Glitch art occupies a peculiar space inbetween the crafted and the unintentional, opening up a new view of ‘natural’ anomalies, as well as an aesthetic of the artificial. We’ll also take an historical tour of artists working with broken systems, artefacts, and technologies from across the world – from dirty new media in Europe and Asia to Gambiarra traditions in the Americas – to ask, what (if anything) does malfunction mean when we copy or reproduce it?
Meta
Dirty New Media // REVOLUTION 02
THURSDAY 21 MARCH | 4-10PM | THE BARBER INSTITUTE, BIRMINGHAM
An engaging day of performances and interactive installations from digital artists, hacktivists and new media explorers from the West Midlands, Chicago and beyond. Artworks take the form of hacked and customised hardware, accessories, demos, lectures, data-mangling, projection and more!
This eclectic, expectation bending event is presented by Vivid Projects in association with artist/curator Antonio Roberts and The Barber institute of Fine Arts.
Free admission, no booking required. Dirty New Media. For further information and times, please contact 0121 414 2261 or email education@barber.org.uk. Facebook event link.
> Applying reality safeguards…
Data. It’s all around us. Much of what we do on a daily basis leaves digital records of our activity behind us.
Cityscape #46 image is from a series of GIF based images that are made to resemble city skylines, the images are created using digitally broken image files
Harbinger Variations consists of five disassembled, reprocessed, and remixed versions of a track entiteld Harbinger Bit that I posted to my Soundcloud in early 2012. Harbinger Bit itself is comprised of disassembled, reprocessed, and remixed audio from various live performances in late 2011.
These 3D printed models of the Twitter hashtag ‘#arthistory’ rendered here in plastic and in gold-plated stainless steel are a playful way to think about what art history might be in the age of social media and crowd-sourcing. The entire artwork comprises both the creation of the ability to render this piece of digital text in 3D form and its ownership/use by anyone. There is a dedicated website (http://hasharthistory) that explains the project and points to how the tags can be obtained. It also features links to places where you can see the hashtag in use and join in (i.e. tagging real world items as ‘art history’), these include a Flickr gallery, a Tumblr blog and of course the #arthistory Twitter stream. The project is also a three dimensional and/or practice-based rendering of an argument made by Charlotte Frost in an online art history article entitled: ‘Is Art History Too Bookish?’ In this article which is deliberately offered online, rather than in print Frost asks after the extent to which the format of printed books have contributed to the way we think about art. In this sense, the tags ponder the physical nature of textual objects and the future of art discourse. The work is also closely related to Myers’ series of ‘Sharable Readymades’ which is the creation of 3D printable models of iconic works of art.
Tracert (pronounced trace route) is an examination of how traditional craft ideas translate into the modern multi-media networked world. A sampler has been cross-stitched by hand from a transposed graphic of a tracert DOS command.
The Aesthetics of Planned Obsolescence / Readymades Glitch Art.
The 16bit Edition Glitch Scarf is a continuation of the exploration of glitch imagery as a new paradigm in textile design. Beginning in 2001 by preparing video game systems with wires to alter their function, textile renders of 8bit glitch patterns began with the 1st edition, 8bit glitch scarf in 2007. Limited to 20 pieces, the pattern was created with a prepared Nintendo Entertainment System then, rendered as a wearable glitch knit at a 1:1 pixel to knot ratio. The 16bit Edition Glitch Scarf pattern was created with an Atari ST emulator running a classic demo scene release at a different resolution than it was coded for. A read error glitch result was then chosen and rendered as a glitch textile again at a 1:1 pixel to knot ratio.