Defining the Critical Glitch

story © Michael Betancourt | published December 17, 2015 | permalink |  |  

“Glitch” may be best known from its role in electonic music and digital composition, but it is equally—and more commonly—a part of the everyday visual engagement with computers. The technical aspects of digital technology—pixellated images that re/compose reality as a juxtaposition of discrete fragments—suggests a translation of visual space into a virtuality, cyberspace, that instead of being continuous is instead shot through with errors and failures of various types. Transfers between this digital technology and art have been a continuous part of its history, but the prominence of digtial imagery and digitally-derived forms has become an insistent part of contemporary media since the opoular embrace of the Internet in the mid-1990s. These visual forms of glitch, unlike its musical counterparts, have consistently been grouped with a variety of other terms, prominent among these are post-digital, post-internet and the new aesthetic; in academic contexts visual glitch will often simply identified with new media art, or occasionally video art.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published December 15, 2015 | permalink |  |  

Compression glitches have become the most common type of glitch encountered, not only in art, but in our everyday uses of technology. These technical failures are usually transitory, a momentary breach in the continuous datastream; we notice that they happen as quickly as we forget they were there: once they have passed, they vanish not only from the screen but from memory.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published December 3, 2015 | permalink |  |  

The music video produced for Sa’eed Ali’s song of the same title, Helios | Divine is 4 minutes long, organized into four sections of approximately equal length. It is designed to act as a “posthuman landscape” where what we believe we see is not entirely the same as what is actually visible on screen: a complex network of squares and rectangles that ‘twinkle’ and contain a continually shifting field of colors that combine into larger blocks only to break into smaller, more discrete units. The imagery presented is emergent—what can be seen when looking at a still image is radically different than the encounter with the movie—but is also composed from uniform squares of color, an effect of the glitching process that stripped recognizable, high definition imagery from the “raw” footage. This visual development follows the sequence of imagery common to the revelatory experiences described in the 1930s by German psychologist Heinrich Klüver. A summary of his imagery describes the progression of Helios | Divine: in a continuously transforming shot (rather than a series of individual, discrete shots), the initial ‘parting of the veil,’ becomes by degrees a beautiful landscape, then a figure that merges into a large, circular disk with light rays stretching out, followed by a second, darker landscape.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published November 30, 2015 | permalink |  |  

The particular dimensions of a physical engagement with immateriality in motion pictues depends on the fragmentary nature of the digital medium itself: everything “inside” the computer exists as numerically encoded data: the fragmentation and digital organization of information that when ‘replayed’ for a human audience appears continuous via discrete units (commonly called “samples”) is a given when considering any product of digital technology. These discrete fragments of reality enable the transmission, reproduction, and reassembly that are the common features of any digital technology, and the apparently ‘prefect’ reproduction originated precisely in the actuality that what is encountered through the immaterial production of the digital work is not a copy so much as a new example produced specifically for the moment of encounter; it is an “original.” This reassembly from fragmentary samples may not have been an invention of the late nineteenth century, but it was in this period where sampling, coupled with new developments in photography, introduced the essential foundation for the digital transformation of reality into data that enables the digital to function as a perfect ‘reproduction.’

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story © Michael Betancourt | published November 26, 2015 | permalink |  |  

I have an Instagram account with stills from my movies and movie-tests.