On Friday May 30th come to Arebyte Gallery, Hackney Wick, for an evening of GLTI.CH Karaoke! Sing with people present and telepresent, near and far in a raucous party at the edge of London. Invitation to Telepresent People Can’t make it to the gallery in person? Want to join or even host your own GLTI.CH Karaoke Portal on May 30th? Hook into the real-time live crooning fun via our Tinychat page: http://tinychat.com/gltich (For step-by-step instructions to join us: http://glti.ch/host-a-glti-ch-portal) All you’ll need is an internet connection, a webcam and a set of speakers/headphones loud enough to keep your feet moving and your vocal chords vibrating. Bio GLTI.CH is a collaborative mess between Kyougn Kmi and Daniel Rourke that breaches hopeless distances with cultural and technical make-dos. Our work brings people together in glitchy karaoke fests, broken DJ mix-haps, and other kludged-together happenings. Since April 2011 we’ve exposed the course of accidents, temporal lyrical disjoints and technical out-of syncs between, among others, London/Seoul/Kumamoto with Meanwhile Space, Liverpool/London with MercyUK, Amsterdam/Chicago/London with glidottcslashh, Amsterdam/Berlin/Seoul/Manchester as part of ANDfestival, and with The White Building, Hackney Wick. We’ve made the mishmashed world of GLTI.CH through play and we hope you’ll join us.  

Washing Machine Magazine is an independent, multimedia publication that showcases projects by creative professionals working in sound and image.   It is presented through two connected platforms: a printed publication and a website that integrates the print content through video and audio supplements. Every featured project reflects the contemporary age in its multi-faceted reality.   Art and media are explored where artists and designers communicate concepts, re-configure ideas, collaborate and combine different elements. Washing Machine Magazine features interviews with artists , multimedia content and examines the impact of innovative, digital tools and new processes on creative media today.   Issue 1 showcases emerging artists’ and designers’ projects that represent basic natural elements through digital media. In some projects visuals describe sounds, in some others sounds describe physical objects.   The first issue’s title ‘White Wash’ indicates not only purity, energy and freshness but also a starting point – a blank space to interact with.     info@washingmachinemagazine.com www.washingmachinemagazine.com facebook.com/washingmachinemagazine

You don’t need to leave the house to belt out your favourite karaoke tracks—with strangers. Two Skype-friendly artists have founded glti.ch karaoke, an online karaoke project which anyone can partake in. You literally sign into Skype and sing karaoke duets (or quartets) with fellow fans. Imagine chat roulette was entirely musical and you get how things are matched. The artists Kyoung Kim and Daniel Rourke started this without any plans. Three years later, they’re still singing to Belle and Sebastian on YouTube. Strangely, they’re not alone. As they continue to synchronize singers in different time zones, they also do these GLTI.CH Breaks event where DJs located in different parts of the world mix together in a basement, a bedroom, or a pub full of drunks (from New York to Seoul, they’ve done it all). Last month, glti.ch karaoke opened a show called Tactical Gltiches at the SUDLAB gallery in Italy. They spoke to us about tinkering with Ustream, avoiding crappy bandwith, and how acapella saves the day.

NOISEY: How did Glti.ch Karaoke come about? Kyoung Kim: We were swapping stories over a few pints—Daniel of his experiences living in Japan, and I of my time in Korea, and got to talking about missing karaoke in these respective countries. Unlike your average karaoke bar in the US or the UK with a conspicuous stage and spotlighting for the singer, karaoke in Korea and Japan generally consists of piling into a room with a bunch of friends, food, and drink and singing in a raucous mix of solos, duets, and group numbers eventually belted while standing on the sofa. It’s more about sharing fun with people than claiming your theatrical moment, and all in all, you get a lot more bang for your buck. For me, karaoke with my sister trumps all, but at the time she was living in Seoul. I confessed to Daniel I’d been getting my karaoke fix by singing YouTube karaoke videos with her over Skype. Daniel Rourke: We were astounded to find that nobody had given a name to ‘singing karaoke over Skype.” (We did a lot of Google searches). It seemed so obvious to us to hook up two locations, buffer a YouTube rendition of “Livin’ on a Prayer“ on both sides of the Atlantic and click “play.” That got us thinking about the possibilities. A good friend works at Meanwhile Space, a non-profit organization in London that transforms empty properties into community projects, and mentioned to us that they were about to start working in an old shoe shop in Whitechapel. The challenge to make karaoke happen in a dusty basement with no internet access at four o’clock in the afternoon spurred us on. We had our eye on the amazing stuff the GLI.TC/H community was doing at the time, and setup our website Glti.ch as a kind of homage to them. The rest is less easy to explain. How does it work? Rourke: We have done it a few different ways over the years, but we try and make sure the basic setup is accessible to anyone who wants to repeat it. Using free software like TinyChat or Google Hangouts we link up at least two disparate locations and orchestrate karaoke duets over the internet. YouTube is stuffed full of fan made karaoke versions of pop tunes. If you want to sing it, chances are, somebody has already uploaded it. Then it’s just a case of scrambling to get things to work on both sides. Kim: To prepare for that scrambling, we test and design a bunch of back-up plans that only work about 30% of the time in attending the actual glitches that manifest. In emphasizing the GLTI.CH of the karaoke, the scramble is something we both warn and invite others to join in on. So how things work is not just contingent on computer software, hardware, cables, and broadband connections, but also on the mix of curiosity, patience, and enthusiasm for making-your-own-fun-through-convoluted-ways that people bring with them to our events. Rourke: That’s where the “art” of the project begins: a sincere desire to dance with failure. The most exciting elements of the project come out of realizing how many variables there are in organizing something so simple, especially if you have a group of drunk karaoke enthusiasts at one end, say in Liverpool, and an old pizza restaurant in a London shopping mall at the other. The thing that remains stable—getting people to sing duets—is surrounded by all this other stuff that we, as the hosts, have to juggle. Let’s just say we are both very adept at keeping a crowd entertained.

How do you combine DJs in different time zones together? Kim: A lot of planning. Hosting a party in London on a Friday night means you get a DJ during the work day in San Francisco. So we work with our DJs’ schedules accordingly. There is constant managing and coordinating during the event. We dedicate one computer and the best internet connection in the house to connecting with the DJs with (so far) Skype, but also usually have one or two other computers open with Google Hangouts, again Skype, Tinychat, Facebook, Twitter, Kakao Talk, our phones, smoke signals, pigeon… both for backup and because different people have different preferences for interfaces. We avoid as much as we can set-ups that require others to register or sign up to any new social media outfit, download more software, or buy equipment they don’t have. With the last Breaks, we tinkered with Ustream, and the chat in there ended up being the key for making things go. What is GLTI.CH Breaks? Rourke: Originally, it was a project we instigated with Christina Millare. We wanted to take some of the stuff we had learned while glti.ch karaoking and translate it into another format. The result was the first GLTI.CH Breaks event, where we had three DJs—Tramshed, Sahn, and WaxOn—all located in different parts of the world, mix together in the basement of Power Lunches, Dalston. It was a blinding success, apart from the computer crashes, and crappy bandwidth, but that means success to us. Karaoke is a ridiculous phenomenon. Anyone who has watched the X-Factor will know how kitsch and mediocre karaoke can be. But those of us who love it embrace that, and the social outcome of that kitschy quality is what makes it so wonderful. Our projects inhabit that crappiness, and take it somewhere else, so the technical components of the work also echo the social, and hopefully the two really fuse and amplify each other. With GLTI.CH Breaks I think we stumbled on something like that. DJ mix culture is based around a beloved, but antiquated medium – the vinyl record – that is prone to skip, and jump and crackle and hiss. Ironically though, it is those very qualities that make vinyl perfect as a medium of expression. Building a series of technical, network, temporal and spatial layers on top of that in GLTI.CH Breaks we felt as if the creative element of DJing was heightened even further. Plus, drunk people get really excited when they realize that a DJ based in a bedroom in San Francisco is mixing tunes just for them. Kim: They get excited by it when sober too!

Enlighten us. What is “social glitch?” Kim: A phrase we’ve batted around since the beginning. To describe what we’d both been thinking about and working through in our separate research and practices. Rourke: Social glitches are at the heart of all the projects we have done. They are what you might call, “desirable unintended effects.” We go hunting for them, we try to set up the conditions to make them happen, but we never know when they might arise, or what exactly they might look like. For instance, in summer 2012, we took part in AND Festival, Manchester. We were asked by curator Christina Millare to host a GLTI.CH karaoke event in one of the bedrooms upstairs in a pub. We hooked the room up to our online chat room, and invited anybody with a webcam to join us from wherever they were in the world. The event in Manchester was raucous, full of people singing at the top of their voices from 8 PM until 2 AM. The HD television was lit up all night with new people logging in from London, Seoul, New York, and who knows where. At one point the computer in Manchester completely crashed—mid-chorus—and everyone in the room let out a huge groan of despair. The social glitch came when I logged back into the chatroom, because even though our side of the party had crashed, the participants online were still there singing their hearts out. It was an amazing moment, and the crowd in Manchester whooped with joy and began to sing along, even before I’d had chance to hook the music back in. It was improvized acapella karaoke and a beautiful unintended social effect. Nadja Sayej would like to sing “More Than A Feeling” with you. Follow her on Twitter - @nadjasayej   

From Friday 24th January we will be running a GLTI.CH Doom WAN Party as part of the Tactical Glitches exhibition. You can join in, play, explode and explore from wherever you are in the world! It’s 20 years since the original DOOM was released. Let’s remember in glti.chy style. We are running the game through a chain of servers and remote software to create a glti.chy soup for viewers playing at Tactical Glitches. Your involvement will help make that soup even glti.chier – how will the players evolve their Tactics to cope with your onslaught? Play Instructions It is SUPER easy to join, but you will need a few bits and pieces. Here is everything you need to get started. Don’t give up:

Download the PC or MAC version of Zandronum (a freeware program for playing Doom). Install Zandronum on your system (make a note of exactly where it installs on your computer e.g. C:\Program Files\Zandronum). Download our GLTICH WAN PARTY MAP pack. Unzip the MAP PACK you downloaded into the Zandronum directory (e.g. C:\Program Files\Zandronum). Now, if you open up the Zandronum directory you will see another directory called ‘Doom Seeker’. Go into there and load the Doom Seeker application. First up, it is worth checking your settings are correct. Go into the ‘options’ menu then click ‘configure’. Got to the ‘File Paths’ setting. Make sure your Zandronum directory is listed here (e.g. C:\Program Files\Zandronum) - add it if it isn’t. Save and go back to the main Doom Seeker screen. You will now see a long list of servers. Our server is called TACTICALGLITCH, it has a British flag. Scroll down until you find it, or alternatively click the ‘Servers’ column header to arrange the list anti-alphabetically. It should be near the top. Double click the server to join!

At this point Doom will load. You may need to press the ‘ESCAPE’ key, go to the game ‘Options’, ‘Set Video Mode’ and fiddle around with how the game looks until you are happy. Fullscreen high resolution is obviously the nicest
Controls (you can change these too in the Options menu) Mouse = move your head around, (or you can use the <-left and right-> arrow keys to look around) W = forward A = strafe left S = backward D = strafe right CTRL = fire SPACE BAR = Open doors T = Type a message and press ENTER to broadcast it! As well as killing innocent players in SUDLAB Gallery, Naples, there are lots of secrets to discover on the map. The monsters WILL KEEP ON COMING! The body count WILL KEEP ON RISING! Have fun! Invite your friends, and get Tactical. Massive thanks to curators and collaborators Nick Briz and Rosa Menkman, as well as SUDLAB Gallery, Naples, and Domenico Dom Barra!

Moody is ready for the next GLTI.CH Breaks happening this Friday (=tomorrow!) 10PM – 12:30AM GMT. Join him and us to celebrate the opening of Tactical Glitches, curated by Nick Briz and Rosa Menkman, at Sudlab with

SAHN+JAMES spinning in from San Francisco (US), followed by DJ WAX ON in from Derby (UK) followed by TRAMSHED in from London (UK) ending the night

We’re excited our original crew is back for this second GLTI.CH Breaks! Working with our kludgy ways they’ll be sending real-time beats and breaks from their various locales to the party-makers and -shakers inhabiting the Sudlab gallery space in Portici, Italy. Can’t corporeally make it to Sudlab? No problemo! Join us online in the GLTI.CH Tinychat room (http://tinychat.com/gltich) wherever you are in the universe!

On Friday May 24th we will be turning our back on Karaoke for a special, probably-not-one-off, event: GLTI.CH BREAKS Join us for unexpected beats and breaks in the first ever transglobal experiment to fuse vinyl scratches, Ethernet delays and Dalston skinny jeans! As you can see from our delicious diagram, GLTI.CH Breaks is a collaboration with several adventurous DJs who will mix vinyl LIVE between various cities around the world. Watch and gawp in awe as TramShed, DJing from London, mixes DJ Wax On, in Derby, straight into Sahn, live in LA…

(on saturday we tested some of these ideas out… a bonus very-shakey-video can be found above) In the spirit of time delays, infinite grooves and Skype decay, we will kludge together an energy-fuelled two-hour live DJ set, turning technical breakdowns into reasons to breakdown! We are really excited to be teaming up with curatorial wizards Christina Millare and Dee Sada, as well as a host of other technically minded creative megalomaniacal superstars. Featuring GLTI.CH Breaks from:

TramShed, DJ Wax On, Sahn, and OTHER DJs Yet TBC!!

with live performances, exhibitions and HAPPENINGS from:

The Bohman Brothers, Dog Chocolate, Ewa Justka, New Noveta, Lorah Pierre, Tom White

Enjoy the Breaks LIVE, 8pm – 2am, at Power Lunches (Kingsland Road, Dalston) or join us online on the night at: tinychat.com/gltich Tickets: £5 adv / £6 on the door Advance tickets available here: wegottickets.com/event/220669 - Facebook event invite thingy here: HAPPENING!

Through mistranslation, malfunction or a signal of the wrong duration, this night is not just a celebration of the error itself but a visual and sonic manifestation of improvised mayhem. What if machines were reconfigured to corrupt? Expect overheated batteries, projectors chewing images and sonic assaults like the sound of furniture exploding – all from the comfort of The Salutation Hotel. Machines By Other Means is a house party gone wrong, featuring MOGA mastermind Mark Amerika’s live manifesto on glitch in collaboration with sound artist, Twine (Ghostly Records), Lydia Lunch’s provocative musings on contemporary society, squalling and spacey sonicism by noise merchants Bo Ningen, ‘Holy Artist’ Bjorn Veno’s spontaneous exploration of technological spirituality, Oscar Lhermitte’s drill machine cameras and collaborative karaoke devised by GLTI.CH. Join us in person (Facebook Event) or Join us LIVE online (tinychat.com/gltich) at 9pm GMT On 30th of August we hit AND Festival, singing our hearts out from a bedroom at the Salutation Hotel in Manchester. In the build-up to our transglobal sing off, we’d love to hear what your favourite Karaoke songs are and why. Do you sing Prince’s “Kiss” to woo? U2′s “With or Without You?” when you want to sway in the booth holding your lighter aloft? Johnny Cash’s “Walk the Line” to start the night off with a bang? Bon Jovi’s “Livin on a Prayer” to finish at a climax? Rihanna’s “Umbrella” when it’s raining outside? We invite your responses as we rethink the karaoke songbook. One for lovers of song and story. That celebrates the emancipated crooner and highlights our unique experiential associations and stories with the music we love. It’ll be online and indexed by the names (or alias if you’d like) and descriptions/stories of those who sing them and then hyperlinked to the respective song on YouTube so that others may feel what you feel when you sing what you sing. Any/all responses very welcome here, at our Facebook Event page or via email at gltiches@gmail.com (ideally between now and August 20th). Let the GLTI.CH Karaoke Songbook Revolution begin!

Join us in person or virtually tomorrow, Saturday 17 December 2011 5-7pm GMT (aka London time) for some holiday GLTI.CH Karaoke at the Wobble & Squint Christmas Art Fair in Stoke Newington! Sonic Christmas and Kwaanza overload with art and mulled wine. See invite for details on corporeal karoling. Virtually log-in at http://tinychat.com/gltich.

Chicago was a milestone for Glti.ch Karaoke : we broke the two-locations-at-a-time barrier! Squeezing more pop tunes and more bytes of data to more Karaoke singers than Cephalopods have limbs. Many thanks and general claps of gratitude must go to Mike, of the superb and inspiring fyidisco, who rocked his very own microphone and webcam from his West London flat. Also, all the people who logged on to our TinyChat and Google+ pages via browser, smartphone or Astral Projection. On Friday night our second outing for the wonderful Gli.tc/h 20111 Festival takes place in AMSTERDAM: at PlanetArt. I (Daniel) will be there in person, convincing every Dutch person I meet to duet Barry Manilow with me and my online bretheren. #1 collaborator and primary glitcher Kyougn will taunt London with her magnificent lungs, Sam Meech will no doubt roll up his singing sleeves for Liverpool. How can you join us on Friday? At 7pm Amsterdam time go to: ⇐ our TinyChat room Next, tune in and keep your eye on: ⇐ our Google+ page (if you add us as a friend on G+ now, you’ll be ready to sing on the night – follow twitter @gltich for live updates) With both these windows open on your computer, a webcam, a microphone and some speakers you too can Glti.ch Karaoke! Invite your friends around, force beer down their gullets, dress them up in clothes indicative of an era of pop from well before their time. Watch out Amsterdam… Glti.ch is in town

Mr. Daniel

GLTI.CH Karaoke event, hosted 2nd April 2011 at Meanwhile Space, Whitechapel.

See our website: glti.ch or follow us on twitter @gltich for more information!

Saturday 2nd April : Come and join us a for an afternoon of GLTI.CH KARAOKE! GLTI.CH KARAOKE will be hosting this live karaoke event in conjunction with the citizens of Kumamoto City, Japan. All proceeds raised at Glitch Karaoke will go to The Japan Society Tohoku Earthquake Relief Fund. Defy human spacetime by warbling Elvis, the Spice Girls, and Beat Crusaders with friends in London and Kumamoto at the Meanwhile Space (Whitechapel) at the End of the Universe with the power of Skype, hand-me-down computers, and mutual love of amateur live singing. Free to attend, donations encouraged. There will be drinking and singing, but no pressure to do either! The event kicks off at 12 Midday, Meanwhile Space, 3-5 Whitechapel Road, London

WHAT ON EARTH IS GLTI.CH KARAOKE?

GLTI.CH KARAOKE is a virtual jukebox oozing with time-delayed, glitchy fun. Streaming live, over the web, London and Kumamoto will be joined in a sing off to end all sing offs. GLTI.CH KARAOKE will take place in Meanwhile’s underground space where the nine hour difference between the UK and Japan becomes meaningless, and all that matters is that the interwebs keep running and the participants keep on singing.

If you have a favourite song you’d like to see at GLTI.CH KARAOKE, send us the YouTube video or post it here. Language is no barrier – just as long as you can find it on YouTube, we’ll try and sing it! FOLLOW GLTICH KARAOKE AT twitter @gltich visit our website GLTI.CH and invite your friends via our Facebook Event Page