MachineMachine /blog

The feature I wrote for AfterImage Journal on the work of Hito Steyerl has found its way online! A dirty, digital replica of my dirty, digital ideas.

One of Steyerl’s more widely disseminated essays, ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’ (2009), explicitly confronts the aesthetic conditions of digital images. In a twist indicative of her work, Steyerl defines an image’s value by its ease offlow and distribution. The highly compressed, deteriorated ‘poor image mocks the promises of digital technology. Not only is it often degraded to the point of being just a hurried blur, one even doubts whether it could be called an image at all.’ The aesthetic affect of digital images thus stands in metonymically for the networks they navigate and the means by which those networks are exposed.

I visited the Photographers’ Gallery in central London for Furtherfield, and reviewed their latest exhibit One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age by artists Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied, on THE WALL. Over an eight week period (18 April – 17 June 2013) they feature a non-stop stream of video captures of what they term as the lost city and its archival ruins. A documentation of a past visual culture of the web and the creativity of its users with new pages changing every 5 minutes. The project provides a glimpse into web publishing when users were in charge of design and narration in contrast to the automated templates of Facebook, YouTube and Flickr.

Sifting through a dormant internet message board, or stumbling, awestruck, on a kippleised [1] html homepage, its GIF constellations still twinkling many years after the owner has abandoned them, is an encounter with the living, breathing World Wide Web. At such moments we are led, so argues Marisa Olson, ‘to consider the relationship between taxonomy à la the stuffed-pet metaphor and taxonomy à la the digital archive.’ [2] How such descript images, contrived jumbles of memory and experience, could once have felt so essential to the person who collated them, yet now seem so indecipherable, stagnant, even – dare we admit it – insane to anyone but the most hardened retro-web enthusiast.

On show at London’s Photographers gallery until June 17th is an extensive archival exhibit designed to manage, reveal and keep these experiences alive. One Terabyte Of Kilobyte Age (1tb) is the fifth work to be commissioned for the Photographer Gallery’s ‘The Wall’, curated by two artists long associated with the era of the web the exhibition reveres: Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied. Perhaps best known for their book Digital Folklore (2009) the artists and retro-web evangelists have, with the 1tb project, strengthened their status as archivists, an impulse Hal Foster famously argued ‘concerned less with absolute origins than with obscure traces’ [3]. In the same year that Dragan and Olia launched their guide to the folk web, Yahoo! announced they were to close one of its greatest sources of inspiration: Geocities. A vast expanse of personal webpages, many of which had long since slid into html decrepitude, represented for Yahoo! little but financial embarrassment. So ancient and outmoded was Geocities that many contemporary browsers were incapable of capturing its essence, fragmenting images and link rolls randomly across modern laptop screens in an attempt to render their 800×600 pixel aura. Scraping and downloading the terabyte or so of data that made up the Geocities universe was thought important enough by some that a taskforce was put together, made up of technical wizards and wizardesses driven by the profound notion that all existent culture is worth saving. From Olia and Dragan’s webpage:

In between the announcement and the official date of death a group of people calling themselves Archive Team — managed to rescue almost a terabyte of Geocities pages. On the 26th of October 2010, the first anniversary of this Digital Holocaust, the Archive Team started to seed geocities.archiveteam.torrent.

Read the rest at Furtherfield.org

My homage to iTunes 10 has been transcoded and extruded into another iteration!

A collaboration with Alex Myers.

You can hear, see and 3D print it at your own great expense in the forthcoming Run Computer, Run exhibition, Rua Red, Dublin.

Go to RunComputerRun for more

David OReilly is a 3D animator’s 3D animator. Embracing a stripped-back aesthetic that foregrounds the very processes of animation, OReilly—whose past short films include award-winning titles "The External World" (2011) and "Please Say Something" (2009)—is recognized as much for his astute grasp of dark, abstract comedy as for his unique approach to visual design. Drawing on glitch aesthetics, underground Japanese Manga and the most parasitic of Internet memes, OReilly forges original compositions from the debris of contemporary culture.

On April 1, Cartoon Network aired an episode of primetime television series Adventure Time that was written and directed by OReilly. Entitled “A Glitch is a Glitch,”^[1] the episode tells the story of a villain who creates a computer virus to delete all of the other characters in the show, with the exception of his love interest. The other characters must weed out and destroy this glitch in the system.

“A Glitch is a Glitch” arrived a couple of weeks before a new ‘viral’ trailer for Superman reboot Man of Steel, which also used glitchy datamoshing techniques to deliver its message. It seems significant that as glitch aesthetics take root in the Hollywood mainstream, a young animator, who has creatively embraced glitches for years, would make a television cartoon devoted to weeding them out.

Screenshot of work in progress, David OReilly, "A Glitch is a Glitch" (2013). Episode of the television series Adventure Time.

DR: How did you become involved with Adventure Time?

DO: Pen (the creator of the show) was a fan of my short films and got in touch in early 2010. At the time I was making The External World and wasn't able to jump ship, so it was put on hold. About a year later I had moved to LA and we ran into each other a few times and started talking about it again.

DR: At what stage did the music producer Flying Lotus (Steven Ellison) become involved with the project? 

DO: Steve is a friend and knew I was doing this early on. We were originally planning on doing a completely different intro that he would score, so he sent over some tracks during production. In the end we didn’t have time or money to do that intro, so the end credits sequence was born.

DR: Were there any restrictions and/or stipulations on what you could do with the show?

DO: Creatively, Pen really wanted me to do my own thing. The writers on the show are really good, and I would have been happy to animate one of their storyboards—but he really wanted me to do all that stuff myself. I can't think of a precedent for that. It may be the only animated show in history to let a total outsider write and direct an episode. As far as restrictions, there were a few because ultimately it's for children's TV. A few jokes were cut or toned down, which was frustrating at the time, but I'm proud of what made it to air.  

“But even if the internet is dead this doesnt mean it's over. It is all over.”

When we met recently we talked about the glitch as it relates to contemporary image culture, but we also talked about the glitch as something to aspire to. In your essay, A Thing Like You and Me, you retell Walter Benjamin’s parable of the Angel of History, pushed by the harsh winds of progress away from the rubble of history, its back facing into the unknown future. You say that we are the rubble, or at least, that we should align ourselves with the rubble. I’m fascinated by these allusions to excess and detritus in your writing, and I see something of the glitch aesthetic making its way into your video works. I thought we could start from these bruises and cracks; from the things we can’t predict, control or maintain. How would you relate the glitch to Benjamin’s rubble?

One of the biggest misunderstandings about digital information is that it is replicated identically, without loss or transformation. But anyone who works with such information knows that digital practice is constituted – like perhaps any technology – by malfunction. One has to constantly convert information in order to work with it across different platforms and softwares and on the way it is reformatted, translated, compressed or sometimes even blown up, it is enhanced or diminished: it changes. It changes its format or container or outlook or context.

Digital information is thus characterised by transformation, degradation, circulation, but also by its surprising ability to mutate and produce unpredictable results. The glitch, the bruise of the image or sound testifies to its being worked with and working; being passed on and circulated, being matter in action. History inscribes itself into the image in forms of bruises and scars. In their 1958 essay “Les Statues meurent aussi” Chris Marker and Alain Resnais write that the forces of heaven and earth are getting caught up in the scars of African statues. But all imaginable forces – aesthetic, political, technological, affective, social – are expressed by the scars of the digital image or sound. It condenses the tensions and contestations that constitute the image/sound and rip it open. 

I took a trip to Chicago for GLI.TC/H 2112! – A conference/festival/carnival/movement in honour (and despite) of hardware/software/wetware errors, databends and feedback blackholes.

I took a ton of photographs, you can view them on Flickr (better quality) or Facebook (dotted with comments, insights and exultations from the GLI.TC/H community).

I intend to write more about the event, but for now I will post my talk here, which I gave on Saturday 8th December. It’s title is Glitches in Things and the “Friendly Medium”, a talk expanding on an idea I have been carting around for a couple of years now. Updated with Object Oriented insights I hope it acts as a mental toolkit for artists looking to dance with objects, in all their glitchy splendour. As usual, I completely ignored my notes whilst talking, for this reason it’s worth listening to the question and answer bit afterwards.

Infinite thanks must go to Rosa Menkman, Jon Satrom and Nick Briz – the GLI.TC/H Bots at the heart of the fest. Thank you for inviting me to participate.

More on OOO, glitches, kipple and Things to come reeeeal soon…

Click to view my talk…

If a cell gets out it could imitate everything on the face of the Earth…and it’s not gonna stop!!!

On the 5th of October I took part in the ASAP/4 ‘Genres of the Present’ Conference at the Royal College of Art. In collusion with Zara Dinnen, Rob Gallagher and Simon Clark, I delivered a paper on The Thing, as part of a panel on contemporary ‘Figures’. Our idea was to perform the exhaustion of the Zombie as a contemporary trope, and then suggest some alternative figures that might usefully replace it. Our nod to the ‘Figure’ was inspired, in part, by this etymological diversion from Bruno Latour’s book, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods:

To designate the aberration of the coastal Guinea Blacks, and to cover up their own misunderstanding, the Portuguese (very Catholic, explorers, conquerors, and to a certain extent slave traders as well) are thought to have used the adjective feitiço, from feito, the past participle of the Portuguese verb “to do, to make.” As a noun, it means form, figure, configuration, but as an adjective, artificial, fabricated, factitious and finally, enchanted. Right from the start, the word’s etymology refused, like the Blacks, to choose between what is shaped by work and what is artificial; this refusal, this hesitation, induced fascination and brought on spells. (pg. 6)

My paper is a short ‘work-in-progress’, and will eventually make-up a portion of my thesis. It contains elements of words I have splurged here before. The paper is on, or about, The Thing, using the fictional figure as a way to explore possible contradictions inherent in (post)human ontology. This synopsis might clarify/muddy things up further:

Coiled up as DNA or proliferating through digital communication networks, nucleotides and electrical on/off signals figure each other in a coding metaphor with no origin. Tracing the evolution of The Thing over its 70 year history in science-fiction (including John W. Campbell’s 1938 novella and John Carpenter’s 1982 film), this paper explores this figure’s most terrifying, absolute other quality: the inability of its matter to err. The Thing re-constitutes the contemporary information paradigm, leaving us with/as an Earthly nature that was always already posthuman.

You can read the paper here, or download a PDF, print it out, and pin it up at your next horror/sci-fi/philosophy convention.

If you are interested in reading more on The Thing, check out Anne Billson’s blog, listen to Peter Watts award winning short story homage, The Things, or alternatively, wallow in my archives a bit longer…