MATERIAL: BENDS AND BREAKS REVEALING MATERIAL EVIDENCE
“Materiality is reconceptualized as the interplay between a text's physical characteristics and its signifying strategies, a move that entwines instantiation and signification at the outset. This definition opens the possibility of considering texts as embodied entities while still maintaining a central focus on interpretation. It makes materiality an emergent property, so that it cannot be specified in advance, as if it were a pre-given entity. Rather, materiality is open to debate and interpretation, ensuring that discussions about the text's "meaning" will also take into account its physical specificity as well.”
- Hayles, N. Katherine. "Print is flat, code is deep: The importance of media-specific analysis." Poetics Today 25.1 (2004): 67-90.
A reflexive approach to materiality makes it possible to re-conceptualize materiality itself as ‘the interplay between a text’s physical characteristics and its signifying strategies’. Rather than thinking in the mediums’ material as fixed in physicality, a re-definition of materiality is useful because it opens the possibility of considering any text as embodied entity “while still maintaining a central focus on interpretation. In this view of materiality, it is not merely an inert collection of physical properties but a dynamic quality that emerges from the interplay between the text as a physical artifact, its conceptual content, and the interpretive activities of readers and writers.”
Reflections on materiality should not just happen on a technological level. To fully understand a work, each level of materiality should be studied: the physical and technological artifact, its conceptual content, and the interpretive activities of reader, artist and audience. [the choice of any] digital material is not innocent or meaningless. With enough knowledge of the material, an investigation into digital materialilty can uncover stories about the origin and history of the material, by others.
▁∣∖▁╱◝◟.❘╱▔▔╲̸/╲╱▔▔▔╲∣∖╱▔╲▁▁∣∖▁╱◝◟.╱▔▔╲________
How many efforts are required in order to watch?
Whenever I use a ‘normal’, transparent technology, I aim to see 'through' the actual machine. I have learned to unsee its interface and all its structural components. I am able to understand its message and use the technology as fast as possible. In a way I have learned to become blind to (certain parts of) technology.
Similar lines of development have taken place in my perception of sound. As Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer wrote: "We have no ear lids. We are condemned to listen. But this does not mean our ears are always open." Over the years I have learned to close my ear lids and even might have lost (or never developed) some of the sensitivities needed for 'deep listening' (or ‘deep watching’).
The quest to make the public re-hear certain sounds, to educate the listener and to 'open up ear lids', has been a subject pursued by many different sound artists. Acousmatics for instance, a strand of sound art developed by the French composer and pioneer of musique concrète Pierre Schaeffer, lets the audience listen to the sounds originating from behind a "black veil". The source or instrument of the sound remains unseen and unknown while the non-representational or formalist sound forces the audience to focus on active listening.
Has similar research and work been made in the visual arts? Does some form of acousmatic video or even acousmatic videoscapes exist? What would this look like and could glitch play a role in this?
While watching glitch art, the audience perceives glitches without (often) knowing how they came about, which gives them an opportunity to concentrate on their form - to interpret its structures and to learn more from what can actually be seen. In a sense many glitches follow the principle of acousmatics visually.
A videoscape should be a place where artists can create a new, visual ecology that can give playful feedback on the technological conventions that control the spectator in their everyday life. In these conceptually fueled videoscapes we can open our eyes for the unreasonable and give form to what we so often have tried to obfuscate in both audio and visual media, namely artifacts.
The main subject of most glitch art is 'critical perception'. Critical in this sense is twofold; either criticizing the way technology is conventionally perceived, or showing the medium in a critical state. Glitches release a critical potential that forces the viewer to actively reflect on the technology.
The acousmatic videoscape thus uses critical trans-media aesthetics to theorize the human thinking about technology; it creates an opportunity for self reflexivity, self critique and self expression.
The acousmatic videoscape is a space in which I can perceive output outside of my goggles of speed, transparency and usability. The new structures that unfold themselves can be interpreted as a portal to an utopia, a paradise like dimension, but also as a black hole that threatens to destroy the technology as I knew it. Here is a purgatory; an intermediate state between the death of the old technology and a judgement for a possible continuation into a new form of seeing and using, a new perspective…
︎ Videoscapes
UnResolved (2020)
8448 x 4 CM long painting
on canvas,
or
data file
to be wrapped
on hardware
8448 x 4 CM long painting on canvas, or data file, to be wrapped over hardware (a painting of 32 x 32 pixels wide, 1 pixel deep, both sides)
Inspired by the 2011 works “Beyond Yes and No” and “29 PARALLEL STRIPES”, by Beflix,
UnResolved explores the fluidity of data and illustrates how the transition from analogue to digital incorporates both vertical quantitative resolution (as seen in analogue systems like PAL, which is 576p) and horizontal resolution.
Using a bitmap image, I followed the linear organization of pixelated data. In a .BMP (raster image data file), the image's luminance and chrominance data are encoded pixel by pixel in a linear sequence, one after the other.
In UnResolved, every pixel or data point is hand-painted onto a 64-meter-long canvas strip, which is then mounted on a frame. When wrapped correctly and unrolled over hardware with the right dimensions, UnResolved reveals a double-sided image: one side shows my portrait, and the other side displays a cryptographic message in DCT (a cryptographic tool developed in 2015): BEYONDRESOLUTION.
With UnResolved I demonstrate how a bitmap file, when ‘opened’ on different hardware, can generate alternate modes of reading, writing or seeing:
the hardware defines what is perceived.
some images of the making of: 32 stripes of canvas were encoded, sewn into a very long strip, and painted.
Vernacular of File Formats (2009-2010). Photoshop RAW, JPEG, JPEG 2000, PNG, BMP, Photoshop, TIFF, GIF, Targa.
Digital Prints on Dibond (matte finish). The Vernacular of File Formats Archive is part of the Base collection of Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
Digital Prints on Dibond (matte finish). The Vernacular of File Formats Archive is part of the Base collection of Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
A Guide to Databend Compression Design, 2010.
A file format is an encoding system that organises data according to a particular syntax. These organisations are commonly referred to as compression algorithms. The choice of an image compression depends on its foreseen mode and place of usage: for instance, is the file meant to be printed or redistributed digitally, what kind of accuracy will be necessary and what software or hardware will render the image?
In some cases the maker chooses not to use any encoding at all, but instead to store the data as an unprocessed file. Images shot by professional photographers for instance, will be shot and stored in a RAW image file format. A RAW image file contains minimally processed data, which normally comes straight from the image sensor (for instance a CCD chip), in order to avoid any impurities (artifacts) that might be involved with image mediation, transcoding or compression.
In A Vernacular of File Formats, I subsequently compressed the source image via different compression languages and subsequently implementing a same (or similar) error into each file, to let the otherwise invisible compression language presents itself onto the surface of the image.
︎︎ flickr documentation
︎Polish translation by Bogumiła Piotrowska, Piotr Puldzian Płucienniczak, Aleksandra Pieńkosz
︎Download the PDF
In the winter of 2016, a 18,9GB digital archive of A Vernacular of File Formats, consisting of original pdfs, a catalogue of databend images, videos and documentation was part of a joint acquisition between MOTI and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. ︎sonification workshop
When noise becomes filter art [ or when cool becomes hot ], (2010 / edited 2017)
Glitches are hot. It is clear from what we see on MTV, Flickr, in the club or in the bookstore: while the Glitch: Designing Imperfection (Moradi, 2009) coffee table book introduced a glitch design aesthetic to the world of latte drinking designers, Kanye West used a glitch aesthetic to illustrate his broken love life.
But while glitch design fulfills an average, imperfect stereotype, a filter or commodity that echoes a medium is the message-standard, naturally, the “No Content - Just Imperfection” slogan of hot glitch design is still complimented by cool glitches.
In "The Laws of Cool", Alan Liu asks himself: What is "Cool"? He describes that cool is the ellipsis of knowing what is cool, and withholding that idea. However, as Liu writes, those who insist on asking, are definitely uncool. In an effort to answer the question that cannot be answered, and come full circle on the ellipsis, I will try to give my take on what cool glitch can be. To me, cool glitch is represented by the glitches that do not (only) focus on a static end product, but (also) on a process, a personal exploration or a narrative element (that often reflects critically on a medium). This is why cool is in a constant state of flux; it exists as an assemblage that consists of on the one hand the construction, operation and content of the apparatus (the medium) and on the other hand the work, the writer/artist, and the interpretation by the reader and/or user (the meaning). In the end, there is not one definition of cool glitch art, but many, which depend on the perspective chosen.
To make what was once cool now hot, or visa versa, and to take Designing Imperfection one step further, I hereby offer you A Vernacular of File Formats. In this PDF I describe the ways to exploit and deconstruct the organizations of file formats into new, brutalist designs.
…I am waiting for the first “Glitchs not dead“ peace of clothing in H&M. And because "fans are as bad as the ignorant", for the sake of being bad and ignorant, I will wear it!
Order and Progress. Fabio Paris Gallery. Brescia, Italy. 2010.
Vernacular of File Formats ft. Kim Asendorfs Extrafile. Expositie for Re:Visie NFF augustus t/m 30 september 2011.
Dear MR. Compression (2010)
Corrupt tango
There is not sufficient data. Please enter data
Your file has invalid markers. Enter new markers
Your dimensions do not correspond. Change dimensions
ERROR
Goto data therapy and repair your registry
Your keyframes are missing
Your codecs are not supported
Please respect the software
Now it is too little too late [system shut down]
Dear mr compression
I write a 1000 poems to you
Is this what they call progress?
Warmly yours,
the noxious angel of history
Corrupt tango
There is not sufficient data. Please enter data
Your file has invalid markers. Enter new markers
Your dimensions do not correspond. Change dimensions
ERROR
Goto data therapy and repair your registry
Your keyframes are missing
Your codecs are not supported
Please respect the software
Now it is too little too late [system shut down]
Dear mr compression
I write a 1000 poems to you
Is this what they call progress?
Warmly yours,
the noxious angel of history