[for In Media Res: mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/] Kyougn Kmi and Daniel Rourke [collectively known as GLTI.CH Karaoke ] facilitate happenings where participants are invited to sing karaoke duets with one another. Breaking from tradition, participants are paired with partners halfway across the world, singing together over the Internet. “Using free versions of Skype, YouTube and collaborative web software livestream.com, we orchestrated duets between people who had never met each other, who didn’t speak the same language, bypassing thousands of geographic miles with glitchy, highly compressed data and a little bit of patience.” [ GLTI.CH Karaoke, from their website ] At these ha[ng]ppenings Kmi and Rourke go to great lengths to avoid glitches + delays + drops [having been present at a few I can attest to this] while trusting in the network’s unreliable signal to not render their name [GLTI.CH] innapropriate. src footage [in order of appearance]: @birmingham: youtube.com/watch?v=KXPy0WtjfBg @manchester: youtube.com/watch?v=8-ARWTyWPXo @amsterdam: youtube.com/watch?v=W-2t1jB7YKw @chicago: vimeo.com/33420876 @camden: youtube.com/watch?v=pLDEHEJWqmECast: Nick BrizTags: glitch, glti.ch, karaoke, art, performance, happening, chicago, amsterdam, birmingham, manchster, camden, daniel rourke, kyougn, kmi, noise, error, music, communication, transmission and network

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   

A pioneering and collaborative spirit brings 16 UK and Korean artists together in a celebration of technology and creative culture

The legacy of Nam June Paik and the "electronic superhighway" is at the heart of a new exhibition in London this autumn. 16 artists from Korea and the UK explore how contemporary artwork is expressed through scientific technology, through IT, social media and cinema. If Paik's legacy is his ability to embrace electronic media and technology creatively, using it as a medium and a language to articulate his artistic interpretation of modern culture this three day exhibition explores how with creative technology at the fingertips of the masses, does the artist crystallize their ideas? Technology offers a common language for artists working in two different cultures. The work featured in the historic vault at Billingsgate illustrates how contemporary artists across the globe are harnessing fascinating media empowering them to express global culture, domestic behaviour, politics and ideas.

The exhibition is part of the wider Korea Brand and Entertainment Expo 2013, celebrating Korea's 'creative economy', a strategic vision aspiring to emulate the success of the UK's creative industries. At the heart of the exhibition along with an innovative use and communication through technology is the spirit of collaboration, of shared ideas, mutual respect and a desire to fix a lens on modern culture.

Nam June Paik, the Korean artist, world famous provocateur and founder of video art pioneered the innovative use of technological tools that artists continue to practice today. The first to voice the phrase "electronic super highway" as early as 1974, Paik saw the boundless possibilities offered by broadcasting and the Internet age. Within the exhibition a shrine to Paik features 'Documenta 6 Satellite Telecast' (1977) his collaborative work with Joseph Beuys and Douglas Davis, the world's first live satellite performance broadcast simultaneously into 25 different countries. From this genesis sprouts the contemporary work of the artists featured.

The curator for 'Crystallize', Stephanie Seungmin Kim (ISKAI Contemporary Art) has carefully selected the 16 artists who each embrace art, science and creativity. Collaboration across industry and practice roots this exhibition in a language of exploration.

'More Songs of Innocence and of Experience', takes text from 'spam' emails and displays them in the style of a karaoke machine, accompanied by the kind of anodyne music favoured by supermarkets and shopping centres. The text derives from emails purporting to come from the likes of Mrs. Gadhafi or a successful but terminally ill millionaire, offering spurious financial deals couched in plaintive, flowery language. Thomson & Craighead are interested in the fantasies at work in the scenarios that these emails play out - fantasies mirrored in the aspirational projections of the karaoke singer - in which plain text on a screen promises an unrealistic wish fulfillment of the most unlikely variety.Cast: Carroll / FletcherTags:

For 3 years I have collaborated on a project with Kyoung Kim. Known as GLTI.CH Karaoke, or sometimes just GLTI.CH, we’ve plotted the course of accidents, of temporal lyrical disjoints and technical out-of-syncs through a wide variety of different mediums, spaces and social conditions. This week saw what feels like the climax of our experiments, a three day – 67 hour – installation at CRYSTALLIZE, an exhibition of new media art held alongside the 2013 Korea Brand & Entertainment Expo, at Old Billingsgate, London. GLTI.CH has played a significant part in my practice and thus my thinking over the last 3 years. Working with Kyoung has afforded me countless experiences and opportunities, and introduced me to the world of glitch, digital, net and new media arts and artists. The project is not over, but its Karaoke phase is drawing to a conclusion. I thought it would be a good time to republish this half-considered manifesto I wrote a while back. 15 Statements about Glti.ch Notworking What makes out today’s networking is the notworking. There would be no routing if there were no problems on the line. Spam, viruses and identity theft are not accidental mistakes, mishaps on the road to techno perfection. They are constitutional elements of yesterday’s network architectures. Lovink, Gert. (2005), “The Principle of Notworking Concepts in Critical Internet Culture,” p. 10 GLTI.CH Karaoke is not a hack or some fancy programming. It’s taking the front-end of things and trying to make something else. We’ve made the mishmashed world of GLTI.CH Karaoke through play and we hope you’ll sing with us. karaoke, glti.ch (2011), “WHAT IS GLTI.CH KARAOKE?”

Glti.ches are more than aesthetic revelations: as software crashes, or hardware halts to a stutter, the soft underbelly of the notwork is exposed. The trick is to see the glti.ch not as an abhorrence, but as a signal of noisy potential: error and noise are an implicit feature of digital materiality. What Gaston Bachelard called ‘Desire Paths’, physical etchings in our surroundings drawn by the thoughtless movement of (human) feet, also exist online. For those versed in the language of the glti.ch, desire equals subversion and the means of flight – a way to reverse the roles of power. The line of desire in these cases is often laid directly over the enclosed path. Being buffered along by the unruly torrents of technical failure, the true semblance of the glti.ch is impossible to pin down: notwork control mechanisms have desirable unintended effects. The kludge is a hands-on, makeshift solution, to an unpredictable technical or social problem: 100% of cargo cult coders, pirates, glti.ch artists and hackers started out as kludgers. Algorithms that churn your Google search, or offer you potential meta-data with which to imbricate your image collection into the logic of the database, have themselves become actors in the play of human relations. Digital formats as diverse as ePub, DivX, and GIF, and software platforms from the likes of Google, Microsoft or Apple, trace narrative arcs which are themselves transcodable relations. Interruption, stutters and breaks force us into encounters with the world, exposing the circuitry that we as consumers are expected to elude into the background. Digital copies, being copied, forever copying, exert an unruly behaviour that exposes the material world. The most astonishing thing about the notwork is how any order can be maintained in it at all. The more regulations imposed upon the notworks, the more interesting the resulting glti.ches will be in their variation/liberation. Human beings are material entities, buffered by the same stops and starts as the notwork. Participating in the glti.ch, in the artifact that exposes the failure, is to align oneself with material reality. The glti.ch is a social phenomenon.

We just finished a 3 day marathon we called GLTI.CH Portals, at CRYSTALLIZE exhibition. Part of a 3 day New Media art installation at the 2013 Korea Brand & Entertainment Expo, held at Old Billingsgate, London. Below are photos from the event. You can also listen to a brief interview we did with BBC Radio’s Dan Damon for World Update (listen from about 17mins in). We really want to thank everyone who took part and all those who brought this exhibition together, especially Stephanie Seungmin Kim, Heejin Cho and Hyemi Na for inviting, curating and welcoming us into the Korean/UK collaborative fold. This might very well be the last time GLTI.CH host a Karaoke event. We have news of this soon, but for now, please enjoy the wondrous smiles on all the GLTI.CH Portal participants’ faces.

GLTI.CH wants to collaborate with you! We are embarking on a project to hook up galleries, bedsits, artist studios, and other disparate spaces across the globe in a project we are calling GLTI.CH Portals.

The idea is very simple: you setup a laptop with headphones, webcam, and an improvised microphone stand between the 4th and 6th of November. Your ‘Portal’ will be online 24 hours a day, hooked into a Google Hangout with a series of other Portals throughout the world. People are then encouraged to pop on the headphones, or crank up the volume, and sing glorious karaoke songs with anyone who happens to be online. When no one is around, your Portal will give people a view into your space from wherever they happen to be; in whatever timezone, suburb or strange space they inhabit. The hub of GLTI.CH Portals will be based at Crystallize, at The Korea Brand Entertainment Expo, to be held at Old Billingsgate Market, London between the 4th and 6th of November. The work will feature access points that connect the lower level of the New Media Art Exhibition to the upper floor of the Korea Brand and Entertainment Expo. By interacting with these GLTI.CH Portals, visitors will be able to sing with your bedsit in Seoul or San Francisco, with your artist studio in Boston or Manchester, with galleries in New York, Zurich and beyond! Following the labyrinth below/above, inside/outside, locally/globally, GLTI.CH Portals will thread the internet with the starts and stutters of song. Will you join us? Join up with us? Sing along with us? Can you host a Portal in the corner of your gallery, studio or dead-centre in your living room? We’d LOVE to work with you, and hope you can surprise us with the crazy spaces your GLTI.CH Portal will inhabit. If you know any other spaces, places or faces who might like to host a GLTI.CH Portal, please send this invitation along to them, or direct them to our website at http://glti.ch/portals Looking forward to hearing from you via mess@glti.ch! Cheers, Daniel and Kyoung

  We continue to GLTI.CH Karaoke at The White Building with nothin’ but BALLADS! So come and unleash your inner Frankie, Ella, Billie, Julio, Whitney, Patti… onto bleeding hearts around the world at The White Building and/or live online at http://glti.ch/ballads. It’s our first ever GLTI.CH Karaoke themed session, so more than ever, we are curious: What ballad will YOU sing? p.s. Don’t forget to translate our start time of 7:30BST to your timezone! This event will be preceded by The Digital Subconscious I – a forum looking at Art, Technology and Global Society.

We are delighted to announce the first in a series of GLTI.CH events at The White Building, East London! Kicking off with KARAOKE at 7pm GMT on Sunday the 18th of August Come and sing your hearts out from The White Building, in our event space – with the Olympic Park and Annish Kapoor looking on in the background. For this trans-global sing-off, we’ll be celebrating our Indian summer with a slew of hits – from post-revolutionary angst to Rihanna. Let the GLTI.CH Karaoke Summer Revolution begin! Catch us in the flesh - 7pm-11.30pm GMT August 18th - or live online at our TinyChat hub to join in the fun.

Part of an ongoing series of interviews with artists who have developed a significant body of work but may not (yet) be well known to our readers. Nick Briz is an artist/educator/organizer living in Chicago, and co-founder of the conference and festival GLI.TC/H. This interview took place via Google Drive.

Nick Briz, The Glitch Codec Tutorial (2010-2011). Screenshot from YouTube video. Daniel Rourke: You are involved in an “improvisational realtime/performance media art event” at the moment called “No Media,” where participants are explicitly discouraged from preparing before they take part, or from creating documentation of any kind. I was lucky enough to see the first iteration of No-Media at GLI.TC/H 2112. I think my favourite performance involved a collaboration between Evan Kühl (of Vaudeo Signal), Curt Cloninger and yourself, scrambling to get something, anything, to work. The mania of this performance stood out because of its simplicity. At base I was watching a blindfolded anarchic poet stammering over ambient noise, but it really felt as if something important had happened. I wanted to start from this stripped-back position. Before we talk about media, why no media? Nick Briz: NO-MEDIA was initially a performance experiment proposed by Jason Soliday for GLI.TC/H 2112 >> && Jason + Jeff + I have continued organizing ’em since. The premise is this: artists w/any kind of performative discipline (realtime A/V, jazz, dance, expanded cinema, noise, comedy, spoken word, etc) sign up. They get randomly paired w/two other performers at a random point in the evening (no one knows when or who until their names show up on the screen). They perform for 10mins. You’re not allowed to prepare any material (bring what tools/gear/props you want but there’s NO time set aside for preparation) and there’s NO documentation.  So far they’ve been a lot of fun, very messy + very inspiring. Re:my performance with Curt and Evan at the first NO-MEDIA, I’m not totally sure if this is the “something” you refer too… but for me there was a point a few mins into the performance where I realized what I was trying to do (some google chrome live coding) wasn’t going to work… and I stopped… and I looked over at Evan and Curt… and totally changed my game plan… I don’t want to go into detail re:what I started to project on a blindfolded Curt Cloninger… cause I don’t want to break the second rule of NO-MEDIA (no documentation DR: Your recent video essay, an open letter to Apple Computers, garnered a lot of support from glitch art / (new) media art communities. Can you talk about the politics of this work, and how it relates to glitch art methodologies? NB: My personal relationship w/Apple is as complicated as it is b/c of glitch >> intentionally invoking glitches is usually a kind of misuse… and when you misuse Apple technology the (often invisible) politix embedded in their systems become very clear + am forced to reconcile ’em. The video is about that impossible reconciliation between my tech dependencies && my politix. I made the video for a screening organized by jonCates of remixes of work from the Phil Morton Memorial Archive + is a [re]mix/make of his 1976 video tape General Motors, where Phil, an artist and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago at the time, addresses similar issues re:his + his community’s relationship to && dependence on technology && tech-industries. As a professor at the same school + artist w/in the same community (nearly 40yrs later) dealing w/very similar problems w/similar industries… it seemed an appropriate issue to tackle && appropriate format to tackle it in. 

DR: Many of your projects tap into the “democratizing” potential of digital art, from your work to crack open codecs, through to your recent New Media One-Liner on The New Aesthetic, where you programmed and openly distributed a heap of scripts and libraries for anyone and everyone to mess around with. NB: Yea, one thing those two pieces have in common is my interest in the “tutorial” as a form (+  pedagogy in general). theNewAesthetic.js is an executable-essay / open-source javascript artware-library for quick [re]production of “New Aesthetic” compositions and related new-media art tropes. So by that I mean it’s literally a functional tool/utility with thorough documentation, examples and video tutorial, but it’s also an essay + my comment/critique on the whole NA conversation. The source code to the library can be read as a kind of code-essay. Similarly, the Glitch Codec Tutorial is a lesson in hacking video codecs to make glitch art, but also a video essay on the assumptions/influence digital systems make/have on us + their embedded politix + glitch’s potential (as a practice) to make us aware of these assumptions/influence.

Nick Briz, theNewAesthetic.Js (2012). Screenshot from online tutorial. DR: Now that “the glitch” has broken through into mainstream culture as a technical, aesthetic trope, does the glitch still have this political potential? Or is it merely a visual style? NB: As far as glitch’s political/social potential specifically, sometimes folks have a hard time understanding the obvious political ramifications b/c they conflate glitch (as a concept, a moment, a break) with the aesthetic its more commonly associated with; it’s becoming more important to separate these two things: glitch art && glitch aesthetics (or better: the aesthetics of digital artifacts). There’s obviously a venn-diagram overlap going on here, but not everything that loox “glitchy” is actually a “glitch” (or break in a system). For example, a datamoshing filter in a title sequence of a hollywood film might render the text with digital artifacts, but nothing’s actually “glitching” (technically or conceptually). Likewise, not all glitch art loox ‘glitchy.’ A great example is Glitchr, the online [ facebook, tumblr && twitter ] handle of artist + social media Interventionist, Laimonas Zakas. Glitchr has made it his mission to find + exploit bugs + holes w/in social media systems. His work is often formally “glitchy” but not in the compression artifact sense, but in the “zalgo” (overlapping/spilling unicode characters) sense. Though, my favorite glitchr posts aren’t formally “glitchy” at all. A couple of times he’s managed to post animated images on a facebook post && folks go crazy; a barrage of comments quickly follow below along the lines of “OMG how did you do that? show me show me show me” …and shortly after facebook will “fix” the bug/work. This leaves a frozen image the comments below now functioning as testimonials, and in that moment these [often] invisible politix embedded w/in the system are brought to the fore.   Glitchr (aka Laimonas Zakas), Twitter account (ongoing). Screenshot. This is the kind of perspective/approach many of us involved in the GLI.TC/H (as in the confernece/festival/gathering, not to be confused w/ your project glti.ch karaoke) are interested in. While most of us are also interested in the aesthetics of artifacts, this is different from (though it overlaps w/) our interest in the glitch as a break, a tactic, a slippage, an intervention—this is where it can become political. DR: I can read your work as a network of attempts to intervene in the course of things (for better or worse; with aesthetic, technical and/or social results). But the role of human intent in that disruption is trickier to determine. You motivate subjects to empower themselves through instigated complexities or stumbled upon accidents” [1] that are by definition beyond their control. How do you deal with this contradiction? Is there a “glitch politics”? And if so, is it more about human intervention or the intervention of the glitches themselves? NB: [ the perceived contradiction ]: can encouraging a digital practice like glitch art which compromises control still grant folks digital agency? Absolutely (we’re only compromising partial control afterall). Databending101 (a la stAllio!) for example: pick the pic you wanna hack (choice) + where && by which means (choice), then see what happens (chance); while the details w/in the composition of artifacts are usually beyond our control, it’s in peaking under the hood + the realizations/perspective that comes w/it that as practitioners/users/netizens we gain agency… not in the production of objects/artifacts. I like this “network of attempts to intervene,” I think definitely the majority of my better projects are nodes in an “intervention network” >> I’m thinking my artwarez, tutorialz, installations (virtual+physical), courses && organizational efforts >> worx/efforts which require participation. Personally, I’m less interested in aesthetic functionalism—in producing an object/artifact which is itself an end meant to be “experienced” or contemplated for its own sake. I’m interested in adding nodes to a larger network >> participating in specific conversations [ internet culture, digital rights, intellectual property, media && digital literacy, human>computer interface/relationships, etc ]; I do this by contributing projects that are often literally meant to be “used,” usually as a way to introduce/enable others to a convo + share my point/poke on/in/at a convo. Again, this is why I’m so interested in tutorials as a form, it can be a utility and an essay simultaneously. in re:to “glitch politi[x]” + human/glitch: I think glitches are human artifacts more so than digital ones. Computers don’t make mistakes, People do; programmers leave memory leaks, users input bad data… the computer will “bug” out in the same predictable way given the same bad data, we only call that moment a “glitch” when it catches us off guard. That moment can then become political when we leverage it as a tactic for political use: to call out the influence of predominantly invisible systems.  Second-Half Questionnaire: Age: 27 Location:Chicago, IL ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒   ✶  ✶  ✶  ✶ ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒ How long have you been working creatively with technology? How did you start? + Describe your experience with the tools you use. How did you start using them? + Where did you go to school? What did you study? I’m lucky to have a mom who as early as I was born (I was 0yrs she was 21yrs) gave me a sketch pad + pencils but also sat me down in front of her computer, which she built (she was an amatuer painter getting her BA in computer science). My mom taught me how to use Office95 when it came out (I was 9yrs) and I started making “games” with PowerPoint’s presentation mode. In middle-school/high-school I got way more into traditional media (illustration, photography and video) + went to film school (at the University of Central Florida) convinced I wanted to be a filmmaker. Even though I had been working commercially in wwweb dev since high school (with my cousin Paul Briz who taught me HTML in NotePad! O__O), it wasn’t till later in college that I realized… “oh shit! this is what I should be making wurk with && about” and quickly abandoned all the romantic-notions/fetishes I had for analog materials (like film). In college I found my way to Rhizome && UbuWeb + came across rad wurk folks were making in Chicago &&thus decided that’s where I needed to be >> applied to SAIC for grad-school >> moved to Chi + am wurking/living here now.   What traditional media do you use, if any? Do you think your work with traditional media relates to your work with technology? I call myself a ‘new-media artist’ because I use predominantly digital technologies to make wurk about digital culture. But I guess I could just as well call myself a conceptual +/or political +/or contemporary artist. I use the media which most appro[pirate]ly gets the job done… it’s 2013, so these tend to be wwweb/digital media.  Are you involved in other creative or social activities (i.e. music, writing, activism, community organizing)? yea definitely, I usually refer to myself as an artist/educator/organizer, the lines between these are blurry (ex: I’m really interested in the ‘web video tutorial’ as a kinda essay-video form + makewurk in this form, but thesevideos I make are also simultaneously/literally tutorialz + I also simultaneously teach the same material atactualinstitutions). I mentioned before I make wurk with but also about digital culture + a major focus the last few years for me has been digital rights && digital literacy >> I make wurk about this + I teach courses on these subjects + I organize lots of events (shows/festivals/conferences) around these themes …these are blurry distinctions. Who are your key artistic influences? …should I list ’em? I’ve stolen ideas from a lot of folks >> some of them are dead: Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Stan Brakhage, some of them are alive + I follow ’em online: Joshua Davis, Cory Doctorow, jodi, Evan Roth, Squarepusher, Elisa Kreisinger, Cornelius, Mary Flanagan, Olia Lialina, Alexei Shulgin + many of them are my friends/collaborators/students: jonCates, jon.satrom, Rosa Menkman, Evan Meaney… actually imma stop there and let that list feed into the next question… Have you collaborated with anyone in the art community on a project? With whom, and on what? Mos definitely yes!!! + my most valuable xperiences stem from these collaborations + revolve around community + this is why I moved to Chicago: to partake in these communities. For me these collaborations usually take the form of project/event-organizational ventures, the largest of which is probably the GLI.TC/H festival/conference/gathering, which I’ve been co-organizing (with lots of people, namely jon.satrom +Rosa Menkman) for over 3yrs now. I mentioned before the lines between artist/educator/organizer are pretty blurry >> what I mean by this is nuanced [save detailz] this is a mode of operating familiar to lots of Chicago [dirty] new-media folks which I’ve adopted + learned predominantly from wurking with jonCates (whose practice is much more nuanced/complex than I can get into + whose had an undeniable && guileful influence on me + many others here in Chi). I also wurk a lot w/jon.satrom [undoubtedly one of my biggest influences + one of the most brilliant artists on the planet] + currently working w/other local artists/educators/organizers like Christy LeMaster (on splitbeam) +Jason Soliday && Jeff Kolar (on NO-MEDIA) +Joseph (yyolk) Chiocchi (on 0p3nr3p0.net) + am constantly inspired by + partaking in new-media adventures w/other presently chicago-based folks: Aaron Zarzutzki, Adam Trowbridge, Alex Halbert, Alex Inglizian, Alfredo Salazar-Caro, Andrew Rosinski, Ben Baker-Smith, Ben Syverson, Beth Capper, Bryan Peterson, Dave Musgrave, Ei Jane Janet Lin, Emily Kuehn, Entro MC,  Eric Fleischauer, Evan Kühl, Grayson Bagwell, Harvey Moon, Jake Elliott, James Connolly, Jessica Westbrook, Josh Billions, Kevin Carey, Lisa Slodki, Lori Felker, Mark Beasley, Monica Panzarino, Nick Kegeyan, Patrick Lichty, Paul Hertz, Ryan T Dunn, Sam Goldstein, Shawne Holloway, Tamas Kemenczy, Theodore Darst, William Robertson… …ok, imma stop there >> I realize this may read as an obnoxiously long list, but these are all folks w/out whom my wurk/reality would be very different, these are the folks I chat w/on a regular basis +/or collaborate w/ +/or participate w/ +/or am inspired by. I like to think the wurk I do is about larger digital issues (digital rights, digital literacy, networked culture, intellectual property, etc) accessible/applicable to a global village/community well beyond my local one… but these are folks I regularly steal all my ideas from… and happen to be local. What do you do for a living or what occupations have you held previously? Do you think this work relates to your art practice in a significant way? yea I think this is always a great question, my students always want to know how new-media artists (at least in the States) make their monie$ >> for me it’s pretty modular: I teach new-media && digital art/literacy courses at a couple institutions here (the Marwen Foundation && the School of the Art Institute of Chicago) + I develop miscellaneous digital projects (apps, wwweb, installations) for different clients w/ Branger_Briz (my cousin’s agency, the same one who taught me HTML in high-school). I’d say it definitely relates to my practice… or rather that it is my practice in that I’d probably be doing something else entirely if I wasn’t a ‘new-media artist/educator/organizer’ …again, these are blurry distinctions. [imma combine these]: Do you actively study art history? + Do you read art criticism, philosophy, or critical theory? If so, which authors inspire you? yes && yes. I’m xtreamly interested in the parallel/perpendicular + complementing/contradicting + fringe && mainstream narratives that make up the histories of the conversations I’m invested in: media art histories, computer science histories, digital folk histories, Chicago histories, activist histories, piracy histories, etc. I read lots of criticism/philosophy/theory… I’m inspired by lots of folks: lots of contemporary/mainstream digital culture folks (Lessig, Shirky, Jenkins, Benkler, Stallman) + netstream new media art folks (Lialina, Galloway, the “software studies” crowd) + academix/bloggers/podcasters I follow closely (Katie Salen, Larisa Mann, Yoani Sánchez, Anita Sarkeesian) + the writings of many of my collaborators like Rosa Menkman && jonCates. And then of course the theoretical giants that influence most of us, in particular ideas like Martin Heidegger’s notion of ‘enframing’, that rather than looking at technologies simply as tools, we’re better served by considering how they are symptomatic of our particular world view. This has been key to my understanding of technologies as indicative of prevailing ideologies >> McLuhan’s perspectives too, specifically the medium-is-the-message angle, rather than getting lost in the content the media carries (and similarly the utility a technology provides) we should consider how the technology itself changes (often completely turns on its head) our relationship to each other and the world. Are there any issues around the production of, or the display/exhibition of new media art that you are concerned about? christ… that’s a can’o’worms. I’ve got lots of vibez here, but I’ll keep it short… one thing I think a lot about (for ex) is new-media art archives. I’m a fan of bittorrent as a technology: it’s distributed/redundant && (especially for small institutions/projects) xtreamly efficient. Why don’t we have more new-media art archives leveraging this technology? Where can I get the ArtBase torrent? There’s precedence for it (thinking Jason Scott && the Archive Team‘s GeoCities torrent) but it’s also been stigmatized + somehow branded as anti-artist-interest. Similarly, for as much as the new-media art wurldz likes to talk about “Open Source” conceptually, we’ve got a lot to learn (especially structurally) from that community. Why aren’t more new-media art archives versioned like open-source projects? this would solve all kinds of exhibition headaches that arise when attempting to display new-media pieces that are 3+ yrs old (and thus require ‘antiquated’ technology)… again, this is a much larger convo, I’m being a little flippant… but I’m happy to have nuanced convos w/interested parties at more length elsewhere   cool! thnx for the chat Daniel ^__^ ../n!ck

[1] Briz, Nick. Glitch Art Historie[s]:  contextualising glitch art – a perpetual beta, in “READER[R0R], GLI.TC/H 20111”. pg. 55. https://gli.tc/h/readerror, 2011. 

Part of an ongoing series of interviews with artists who have developed a significant body of work but may not (yet) be well known to our readers. Nick Briz is an artist/educator/organizer living in Chicago, and co-founder of the conference and festival GLI.TC/H. This interview took place via Google Drive.

Nick Briz, The Glitch Codec Tutorial (2010-2011). Screenshot from YouTube video. Daniel Rourke: You are involved in an "improvisational realtime/performance media art event" at the moment called "No Media," where participants are explicitly discouraged from preparing before they take part, or from creating documentation of any kind. I was lucky enough to see the first iteration of No-Media at GLI.TC/H 2112. I think my favourite performance involved a collaboration between Evan Kühl (of Vaudeo Signal), Curt Cloninger and yourself, scrambling to get something, anything, to work. The mania of this performance stood out because of its simplicity. At base I was watching a blindfolded anarchic poet stammering over ambient noise, but it really felt as if something important had happened. I wanted to start from this stripped-back position. Before we talk about media, why no media? Nick Briz: NO-MEDIA was initially a performance experiment proposed by Jason Soliday for GLI.TC/H 2112 >> && Jason + Jeff + I have continued organizing 'em since. The premise is this: artists w/any kind of performative discipline (realtime A/V, jazz, dance, expanded cinema, noise, comedy, spoken word, etc) sign up. They get randomly paired w/two other performers at a random point in the evening (no one knows when or who until their names show up on the screen). They perform for 10mins. You’re not allowed to prepare any material (bring what tools/gear/props you want but there's NO time set aside for preparation) and there's NO documentation.  So far they've been a lot of fun, very messy + very inspiring. Re:my performance with Curt and Evan at the first NO-MEDIA, I'm not totally sure if this is the "something" you refer too... but for me there was a point a few mins into the performance where I realized what I was trying to do (some google chrome live coding) wasn't going to work... and I stopped... and I looked over at Evan and Curt... and totally changed my game plan... I don't want to go into detail re:what I started to project on a blindfolded Curt Cloninger... cause I don’t want to break the second rule of NO-MEDIA (no documentation ;) DR: Your recent video essay, an open letter to Apple Computers, garnered a lot of support from glitch art / (new) media art communities. Can you talk about the politics of this work, and how it relates to glitch art methodologies?

Nick Briz, Apple Computers (2013). Single-channel video with sound. NB: My personal relationship w/Apple is as complicated as it is b/c of glitch >> intentionally invoking glitches is usually a kind of misuse... and when you misuse Apple technology the (often invisible) politix embedded in their systems become very clear + am forced to reconcile 'em. The video is about that impossible reconciliation between my tech dependencies && my politix. I made the video for a screening organized by jonCates of remixes of work from the Phil Morton Memorial Archive + is a [re]mix/make of his 1976 video tape General Motors, where Phil, an artist and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago at the time, addresses similar issues re:his + his community's relationship to && dependence on technology && tech-industries. As a professor at the same school + artist w/in the same community (nearly 40yrs later) dealing w/very similar problems w/similar industries... it seemed an appropriate issue to tackle && appropriate format to tackle it in. 

Extract from Phil Morton, General Motors (1976). Single-channel video with sound. DR: Many of your projects tap into the “democratizing” potential of digital art, from your work to crack open codecs, through to your recent New Media One-Liner on The New Aesthetic, where you programmed and openly distributed a heap of scripts and libraries for anyone and everyone to mess around with. NB: Yea, one thing those two pieces have in common is my interest in the "tutorial" as a form (+  pedagogy in general). theNewAesthetic.js is an executable-essay / open-source javascript artware-library for quick [re]production of "New Aesthetic" compositions and related new-media art tropes. So by that I mean it's literally a functional tool/utility with thorough documentation, examples and video tutorial, but it's also an essay + my comment/critique on the whole NA conversation. The source code to the library can be read as a kind of code-essay. Similarly, the Glitch Codec Tutorial is a lesson in hacking video codecs to make glitch art, but also a video essay on the assumptions/influence digital systems make/have on us + their embedded politix + glitch's potential (as a practice) to make us aware of these assumptions/influence.

Nick Briz, theNewAesthetic.Js (2012). Screenshot from online tutorial. DR: Now that "the glitch" has broken through into mainstream culture as a technical, aesthetic trope, does the glitch still have this political potential? Or is it merely a visual style? NB: As far as glitch's political/social potential specifically, sometimes folks have a hard time understanding the obvious political ramifications b/c they conflate glitch (as a concept, a moment, a break) with the aesthetic its more commonly associated with; it's becoming more important to separate these two things: glitch art && glitch aesthetics (or better: the aesthetics of digital artifacts). There's obviously a venn-diagram overlap going on here, but not everything that loox "glitchy" is actually a "glitch" (or break in a system). For example, a datamoshing filter in a title sequence of a hollywood film might render the text with digital artifacts, but nothing's actually "glitching" (technically or conceptually). Likewise, not all glitch art loox 'glitchy.' A great example is Glitchr, the online [ facebook, tumblr && twitter ] handle of artist + social media Interventionist, Laimonas Zakas. Glitchr has made it his mission to find + exploit bugs + holes w/in social media systems. His work is often formally "glitchy" but not in the compression artifact sense, but in the "zalgo" (overlapping/spilling unicode characters) sense. Though, my favorite glitchr posts aren't formally "glitchy" at all. A couple of times he's managed to post animated images on a facebook post && folks go crazy; a barrage of comments quickly follow below along the lines of "OMG how did you do that? show me show me show me" ...and shortly after facebook will "fix" the bug/work. This leaves a frozen image the comments below now functioning as testimonials, and in that moment these [often] invisible politix embedded w/in the system are brought to the fore.   Glitchr (aka Laimonas Zakas), Twitter account (ongoing). Screenshot. This is the kind of perspective/approach many of us involved in the GLI.TC/H (as in the confernece/festival/gathering, not to be confused w/ your project glti.ch karaoke) are interested in. While most of us are also interested in the aesthetics of artifacts, this is different from (though it overlaps w/) our interest in the glitch as a break, a tactic, a slippage, an intervention—this is where it can become political. DR: I can read your work as a network of attempts to intervene in the course of things (for better or worse; with aesthetic, technical and/or social results). But the role of human intent in that disruption is trickier to determine. You motivate subjects to empower themselves through instigated complexities or stumbled upon accidents” [1] that are by definition beyond their control. How do you deal with this contradiction? Is there a "glitch politics"? And if so, is it more about human intervention or the intervention of the glitches themselves? NB: [ the perceived contradiction ]: can encouraging a digital practice like glitch art which compromises control still grant folks digital agency? Absolutely (we're only compromising partial control afterall). Databending101 (a la stAllio!) for example: pick the pic you wanna hack (choice) + where && by which means (choice), then see what happens (chance); while the details w/in the composition of artifacts are usually beyond our control, it's in peaking under the hood + the realizations/perspective that comes w/it that as practitioners/users/netizens we gain agency... not in the production of objects/artifacts. I like this "network of attempts to intervene," I think definitely the majority of my better projects are nodes in an "intervention network" >> I'm thinking my artwarez, tutorialz, installations (virtual+physical), courses && organizational efforts >> worx/efforts which require participation. Personally, I'm less interested in aesthetic functionalism—in producing an object/artifact which is itself an end meant to be "experienced" or contemplated for its own sake. I'm interested in adding nodes to a larger network >> participating in specific conversations [ internet culture, digital rights, intellectual property, media && digital literacy, human>computer interface/relationships, etc ]; I do this by contributing projects that are often literally meant to be "used," usually as a way to introduce/enable others to a convo + share my point/poke on/in/at a convo. Again, this is why I'm so interested in tutorials as a form, it can be a utility and an essay simultaneously. in re:to "glitch politi[x]" + human/glitch: I think glitches are human artifacts more so than digital ones. Computers don't make mistakes, People do; programmers leave memory leaks, users input bad data... the computer will "bug" out in the same predictable way given the same bad data, we only call that moment a "glitch" when it catches us off guard. That moment can then become political when we leverage it as a tactic for political use: to call out the influence of predominantly invisible systems.  Second-Half Questionnaire: Age: 27 Location:Chicago, IL ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒   ✶  ✶  ✶  ✶ ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒ How long have you been working creatively with technology? How did you start? + Describe your experience with the tools you use. How did you start using them? + Where did you go to school? What did you study? I’m lucky to have a mom who as early as I was born (I was 0yrs she was 21yrs) gave me a sketch pad + pencils but also sat me down in front of her computer, which she built (she was an amatuer painter getting her BA in computer science). My mom taught me how to use Office95 when it came out (I was 9yrs) and I started making "games" with PowerPoint's presentation mode. In middle-school/high-school I got way more into traditional media (illustration, photography and video) + went to film school (at the University of Central Florida) convinced I wanted to be a filmmaker. Even though I had been working commercially in wwweb dev since high school (with my cousin Paul Briz who taught me HTML in NotePad! O__O), it wasn't till later in college that I realized... "oh shit! this is what I should be making wurk with && about" and quickly abandoned all the romantic-notions/fetishes I had for analog materials (like film). In college I found my way to Rhizome && UbuWeb + came across rad wurk folks were making in Chicago &&thus decided that's where I needed to be >> applied to SAIC for grad-school >> moved to Chi + am wurking/living here now.   What traditional media do you use, if any? Do you think your work with traditional media relates to your work with technology? I call myself a 'new-media artist' because I use predominantly digital technologies to make wurk about digital culture. But I guess I could just as well call myself a conceptual +/or political +/or contemporary artist. I use the media which most appro[pirate]ly gets the job done... it's 2013, so these tend to be wwweb/digital media.  Are you involved in other creative or social activities (i.e. music, writing, activism, community organizing)? yea definitely, I usually refer to myself as an artist/educator/organizer, the lines between these are blurry (ex: I'm really interested in the 'web video tutorial' as a kinda essay-video form + makewurk in this form, but thesevideos I make are also simultaneously/literally tutorialz + I also simultaneously teach the same material atactualinstitutions). I mentioned before I make wurk with but also about digital culture + a major focus the last few years for me has been digital rights && digital literacy >> I make wurk about this + I teach courses on these subjects + I organize lots of events (shows/festivals/conferences) around these themes ...these are blurry distinctions. Who are your key artistic influences? ...should I list 'em? I've stolen ideas from a lot of folks >> some of them are dead: Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Stan Brakhage, some of them are alive + I follow 'em online: Joshua Davis, Cory Doctorow, jodi, Evan Roth, Squarepusher, Elisa Kreisinger, Cornelius, Mary Flanagan, Olia Lialina, Alexei Shulgin + many of them are my friends/collaborators/students: jonCates, jon.satrom, Rosa Menkman, Evan Meaney... actually imma stop there and let that list feed into the next question... Have you collaborated with anyone in the art community on a project? With whom, and on what? Mos definitely yes!!! + my most valuable xperiences stem from these collaborations + revolve around community + this is why I moved to Chicago: to partake in these communities. For me these collaborations usually take the form of project/event-organizational ventures, the largest of which is probably the GLI.TC/H festival/conference/gathering, which I've been co-organizing (with lots of people, namely jon.satrom +Rosa Menkman) for over 3yrs now. I mentioned before the lines between artist/educator/organizer are pretty blurry >> what I mean by this is nuanced [save detailz] this is a mode of operating familiar to lots of Chicago [dirty] new-media folks which I've adopted + learned predominantly from wurking with jonCates (whose practice is much more nuanced/complex than I can get into + whose had an undeniable && guileful influence on me + many others here in Chi). I also wurk a lot w/jon.satrom [undoubtedly one of my biggest influences + one of the most brilliant artists on the planet] + currently working w/other local artists/educators/organizers like Christy LeMaster (on splitbeam) +Jason Soliday && Jeff Kolar (on NO-MEDIA) +Joseph (yyolk) Chiocchi (on 0p3nr3p0.net) + am constantly inspired by + partaking in new-media adventures w/other presently chicago-based folks: Aaron Zarzutzki, Adam Trowbridge, Alex Halbert, Alex Inglizian, Alfredo Salazar-Caro, Andrew Rosinski, Ben Baker-Smith, Ben Syverson, Beth Capper, Bryan Peterson, Dave Musgrave, Ei Jane Janet Lin, Emily Kuehn, Entro MC,  Eric Fleischauer, Evan Kühl, Grayson Bagwell, Harvey Moon, Jake Elliott, James Connolly, Jessica Westbrook, Josh Billions, Kevin Carey, Lisa Slodki, Lori Felker, Mark Beasley, Monica Panzarino, Nick Kegeyan, Patrick Lichty, Paul Hertz, Ryan T Dunn, Sam Goldstein, Shawne Holloway, Tamas Kemenczy, Theodore Darst, William Robertson... ...ok, imma stop there >> I realize this may read as an obnoxiously long list, but these are all folks w/out whom my wurk/reality would be very different, these are the folks I chat w/on a regular basis +/or collaborate w/ +/or participate w/ +/or am inspired by. I like to think the wurk I do is about larger digital issues (digital rights, digital literacy, networked culture, intellectual property, etc) accessible/applicable to a global village/community well beyond my local one... but these are folks I regularly steal all my ideas from... and happen to be local. What do you do for a living or what occupations have you held previously? Do you think this work relates to your art practice in a significant way? yea I think this is always a great question, my students always want to know how new-media artists (at least in the States) make their monie$ >> for me it's pretty modular: I teach new-media && digital art/literacy courses at a couple institutions here (the Marwen Foundation && the School of the Art Institute of Chicago) + I develop miscellaneous digital projects (apps, wwweb, installations) for different clients w/ Branger_Briz (my cousin's agency, the same one who taught me HTML in high-school). I'd say it definitely relates to my practice... or rather that it is my practice in that I'd probably be doing something else entirely if I wasn't a 'new-media artist/educator/organizer' ...again, these are blurry distinctions. [imma combine these]: Do you actively study art history? + Do you read art criticism, philosophy, or critical theory? If so, which authors inspire you? yes && yes. I'm xtreamly interested in the parallel/perpendicular + complementing/contradicting + fringe && mainstream narratives that make up the histories of the conversations I'm invested in: media art histories, computer science histories, digital folk histories, Chicago histories, activist histories, piracy histories, etc. I read lots of criticism/philosophy/theory... I'm inspired by lots of folks: lots of contemporary/mainstream digital culture folks (Lessig, Shirky, Jenkins, Benkler, Stallman) + netstream new media art folks (Lialina, Galloway, the "software studies" crowd) + academix/bloggers/podcasters I follow closely (Katie Salen, Larisa Mann, Yoani Sánchez, Anita Sarkeesian) + the writings of many of my collaborators like Rosa Menkman && jonCates. And then of course the theoretical giants that influence most of us, in particular ideas like Martin Heidegger's notion of 'enframing', that rather than looking at technologies simply as tools, we're better served by considering how they are symptomatic of our particular world view. This has been key to my understanding of technologies as indicative of prevailing ideologies >> McLuhan's perspectives too, specifically the medium-is-the-message angle, rather than getting lost in the content the media carries (and similarly the utility a technology provides) we should consider how the technology itself changes (often completely turns on its head) our relationship to each other and the world. Are there any issues around the production of, or the display/exhibition of new media art that you are concerned about? christ... that's a can'o'worms. I've got lots of vibez here, but I'll keep it short... one thing I think a lot about (for ex) is new-media art archives. I'm a fan of bittorrent as a technology: it's distributed/redundant && (especially for small institutions/projects) xtreamly efficient. Why don't we have more new-media art archives leveraging this technology? Where can I get the ArtBase torrent? There's precedence for it (thinking Jason Scott && the Archive Team's GeoCities torrent) but it’s also been stigmatized + somehow branded as anti-artist-interest. Similarly, for as much as the new-media art wurldz likes to talk about "Open Source" conceptually, we've got a lot to learn (especially structurally) from that community. Why aren't more new-media art archives versioned like open-source projects? this would solve all kinds of exhibition headaches that arise when attempting to display new-media pieces that are 3+ yrs old (and thus require 'antiquated' technology)... again, this is a much larger convo, I’m being a little flippant... but I'm happy to have nuanced convos w/interested parties at more length elsewhere :)  cool! thnx for the chat Daniel ^__^ ../n!ck

[1] Briz, Nick. Glitch Art Historie[s]:  contextualising glitch art - a perpetual beta, in “READER[R0R], GLI.TC/H 20111”. pg. 55. http://gli.tc/h/readerror, 2011. 

Visiting Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead’s survey exhibition, Never Odd Or Even, currently on show at Carroll / Fletcher Gallery, I found myself confronted with an enigma. How to assemble a single vision of a body of work, impelled only by the dislocated narratives it offers me? ‘Archaeology’ is derived from the Greek word, arche, meaning ‘beginning’ or ‘origin’. The principle that makes a thing possible, but which in itself may remain elusive, unquantifiable, or utterly impervious to analysis. And so it is we search art for an origin, for an arising revelation, knowing full well that meaning is not something we can pin down. Believing, that the arche of a great work is always just about to take place. In an essay written especially for the exhibition, David Auerbach foregrounds Thomson and Craighead’s work in the overlap between “the quotidian and the global” characteristic of our hyperconnected contemporary culture. Hinged on “the tantalising impossibility of seeing the entire world at once clearly and distinctly” [1] Never Odd Or Even is an exhibition whose origins are explicitly here and everywhere, both now and anywhen. The Time Machine in Alphabetical Order (2010), a video work projected at the heart of the show, offers a compelling example of this. Transposing the 1960 film (directed by George Pal) into the alphabetical order of each word spoken, narrative time is circumvented, allowing the viewer to revel instead in the logic of the database. The dramatic arcs of individual scenes are replaced by alphabetic frames. Short staccato repetitions of the word ‘a’ or ‘you’ drive the film onwards, and with each new word comes a chance for the database to rewind. Words with greater significance such as ‘laws’, ‘life’, ‘man’ or ‘Morlocks’ cause new clusters of meaning to blossom. Scenes taut with tension and activity under a ‘normal’ viewing feel quiet, slow and tedious next to the repetitive progressions of single words propelled through alphabetic time. In the alphabetic version of the film it is scenes with a heavier focus on dialogue that stand out as pure activity, recurring again and again as the 96 minute 55 second long algorithm has its way with the audience. Regular sites of meaning become backdrop structures, thrusting forward a logic inherent in language which has no apparent bearing on narrative content. The work is reminiscent of Christian Marclay’s The Clock, also produced in 2010. A 24 hour long collage of scenes from cinema in which ‘real time’ is represented or alluded to simultaneously on screen. But whereas The Clock’s emphasis on cinema as a formal history grounds the work in narrative sequence, Thomson and Craighead’s work insists that the ground is infinitely malleable and should be called into question.

Another work, Belief (2012), depicts the human race as a vast interlinked, self-reflexive system. Its out-stretched nodes ending at webcams pointing to religious mediators, spiritual soliloquists and adamant materialists, all of them searching to define what it means to be in existence. Projected on the floor of the gallery alongside the video a compass points to the location each monologue and interview was filmed, spiralling wildly each time the footage dissolves. Each clip zooms out of a specific house, a town, a city and a continent to a blue Google Earth marble haloed by an opaque interface. Far from suggesting a utopian collectivity spawned by the Google machine, Belief once again highlights the mutable structures each of us formalise ourselves through. As David Auerbach suggests, the work intimates the possibility of seeing all human kind at once; a world where all beliefs are represented by the increasingly clever patterns wrought through information technology. Instead, culture, language and information technology are exposed as negligible variables in the human algorithm: the thing we share is that we all believe in something.

Never Odd Or Even features a series of works that play more explicitly with the internet, including London Wall W1W (2013), a regularly updated wall of tweets sent from within a mile of the gallery. This vision of the “quotidian” out of the “global” suffers once you realise that twitter monikers have been replaced with each tweeter’s real name. Far from rooting the ethereal tweets to ‘real’ people and their geographic vicinity the work paradoxically distances Thomson and Craighead from the very thing twitter already has in abundance: personality. In a most appropriate coincidence I found myself confronted with my own tweet, sent some weeks earlier from a nearby library. My moment of procrastination was now a heavily stylised, neutralised interjection into Carroll / Fletcher gallery. Set against a sea of thoughts about the death of Margaret Thatcher, how brilliant cannabis is, or what someone deserved for lunch I felt the opposite of integration in a work. In past instances of London Wall, including one at Furtherfield gallery, tweeters have been contacted directly, allowing them to visit their tweet in its new context. A gesture which as well as bringing to light the personal reality of twitter and tweeters no doubt created a further flux of geotagged internet traffic. Another work, shown in tandem with London Wall W1W, is More Songs of Innocence and of Experience (2012). Here the kitsch backdrop of karaoke is offered as a way to poetically engage with SPAM emails. But rather than invite me in the work felt sculptural, cold and imposing. Blowing carefully on the attached microphone evoked no response. The perception and technical malleability of time is a central theme of the show. Both, Flipped Clock (2009), a digital wall clock reprogrammed to display alternate configurations of a liquid crystal display, and Trooper (1998), a single channel news report of a violent arrest, looped with increasing rapidity, uproot the viewer from a state of temporal nonchalance. A switch between time and synchronicity, between actual meaning and the human impetus for meaning, plays out in a multi-channel video work Several Interruptions (2009). A series of disparate videos, no doubt gleaned from YouTube, show people holding their breath underwater. Facial expressions blossom from calm to palpable terror as each series of underwater portraits are held in synchrony. As the divers all finally pull up for breath the sequence switches.

According to David Auerbach, and with echoes from Thomson and Craighead themselves, Never Odd Or Even offers a series of Oulipo inspired experiments, realised with constrained technical, rather than literary, techniques. For my own reading I was drawn to the figure of The Time Traveller, caused so splendidly to judder through time over and over again, whilst never having to repeat the self-same word twice. Mid-way through H.G.Wells’ original novel the protagonist stumbles into a crumbling museum. Sweeping the dust off abandoned relics he ponders his machine’s ability to hasten their decay. It is at this point that the Time Traveller has a revelation. The museum entombs the history of his own future: an ocean of artefacts whose potential to speak died with the civilisation that created them. [2] In Thomson and Craighead’s work the present moment we take for granted becomes malleable in the networks their artworks play with. That moment of arising, that archaeological instant is called into question, because like the Time Traveller, the narratives we tell ourselves are worth nothing if the past and the present arising from it are capable of swapping places. Thomson and Craighead’s work, like the digital present it converses with, begins now, and then again now, and then again now. The arche of our networked society erupting as the simulation of a present that has always already slipped into the past. Of course, as my meditation on The Time Traveller and archaeology suggests, this state of constant renewal is something that art as a form of communication has always been intimately intertwined with. What I was fascinated to read in the works of Never Odd Or Even was a suggestion that the kind of world we are invested in right now is one which, perhaps for the first time, begs us to simulate it anew.

[1] David Auerbach, “Archimedes’ Mindscrew,” in Never Odd Or Even (Carroll / Fletcher Gallery, London: Carroll / Fletcher Gallery, London, 2013), 4, https://www.carrollfletcher.com/usr/library/documents/thomson-and-craighead-essays/essay-from-tc-final-low-res.pdf.

[2] Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (Verso, 2005), 100. 

Visiting Jon Thompson and Alison Craighead’s survey exhibition, Never Odd Or Even, currently on show at Carroll / Fletcher Gallery, I found myself confronted with an enigma. How to assemble a single vision of a body of work, impelled only by the dislocated narratives it offers me? ‘Archaeology’ is derived from the Greek word, arche, meaning ‘beginning’ or ‘origin’. The principle that makes a thing possible, but which in itself may remain elusive, unquantifiable, or utterly impervious to analysis. And so it is we search art for an origin, for an arising revelation, knowing full well that meaning is not something we can pin down. Believing, that the arche of a great work is always just about to take place. In an essay written especially for the exhibition, David Auerbach foregrounds Thompson and Craighead’s work in the overlap between “the quotidian and the global” characteristic of our hyperconnected contemporary culture. Hinged on “the tantalising impossibility of seeing the entire world at once clearly and distinctly” [1] Never Odd Or Even is an exhibition whose origins are explicitly here and everywhere, both now and anywhen. The Time Machine in Alphabetical Order (2010), a video work projected at the heart of the show, offers a compelling example of this. Transposing the 1960 film (directed by George Pal) into the alphabetical order of each word spoken, narrative time is circumvented, allowing the viewer to revel instead in the logic of the database. The dramatic arcs of individual scenes are replaced by alphabetic frames. Short staccato repetitions of the word ‘a’ or ‘you’ drive the film onwards, and with each new word comes a chance for the database to rewind. Words with greater significance such as ‘laws’, ‘life’, ‘man’ or ‘Morlocks’ cause new clusters of meaning to blossom. Scenes taut with tension and activity under a ‘normal’ viewing feel quiet, slow and tedious next to the repetitive progressions of single words propelled through alphabetic time. In the alphabetic version of the film it is scenes with a heavier focus on dialogue that stand out as pure activity, recurring again and again as the 96 minute 55 second long algorithm has its way with the audience. Regular sites of meaning become backdrop structures, thrusting forward a logic inherent in language which has no apparent bearing on narrative content. The work is reminiscent of Christian Marclay’s The Clock, also produced in 2010. A 24 hour long collage of scenes from cinema in which ‘real time’ is represented or alluded to simultaneously on screen. But whereas The Clock’s emphasis on cinema as a formal history grounds the work in narrative sequence, Thomson and Craighead’s work insists that the ground is infinitely malleable and should be called into question.

Another work, Belief (2012), depicts the human race as a vast interlinked, self-reflexive system. Its out-stretched nodes ending at webcams pointing to religious mediators, spiritual soliloquists and adamant materialists, all of them searching to define what it means to be in existence. Projected on the floor of the gallery alongside the video a compass points to the location each monologue and interview was filmed, spiralling wildly each time the footage dissolves. Each clip zooms out of a specific house, a town, a city and a continent to a blue Google Earth™ marble haloed by an opaque interface. Far from suggesting a utopian collectivity spawned by the Google machine, Belief once again highlights the mutable structures each of us formalise ourselves through. As David Auerbach suggests, the work intimates the possibility of seeing all human kind at once; a world where all beliefs are represented by the increasingly clever patterns wrought through information technology. Instead, culture, language and information technology are exposed as negligible variables in the human algorithm: the thing we share is that we all believe in something.

Never Odd Or Even features a series of works that play more explicitly with the internet, including London Wall W1W (2013), a regularly updated wall of tweets sent from within a mile of the gallery. This vision of the “quotidian” out of the “global” suffers once you realise that twitter monikers have been replaced with each tweeter’s real name. Far from rooting the ethereal tweets to ‘real’ people and their geographic vicinity the work paradoxically distances Thomson and Craighead from the very thing twitter already has in abundance: personality. In a most appropriate coincidence I found myself confronted with my own tweet, sent some weeks earlier from a nearby library. My moment of procrastination was now a heavily stylised, neutralised interjection into Carroll / Fletcher gallery. Set against a sea of thoughts about the death of Margaret Thatcher, how brilliant cannabis is, or what someone deserved for lunch I felt the opposite of integration in a work. In past instances of London Wall, including one at Furtherfield gallery, tweeters have been contacted directly, allowing them to visit their tweet in its new context. A gesture which as well as bringing to light the personal reality of twitter and tweeters no doubt created a further flux of geotagged internet traffic. Another work, shown in tandem with London Wall W1W, is More Songs of Innocence and of Experience (2012). Here the kitsch backdrop of karaoke is offered as a way to poetically engage with SPAM emails. But rather than invite me in the work felt sculptural, cold and imposing. Blowing carefully on the attached microphone evoked no response. The perception and technical malleability of time is a central theme of the show. Both, Flipped Clock (2009), a digital wall clock reprogrammed to display alternate configurations of a liquid crystal display, and Trooper (1998), a single channel news report of a violent arrest, looped with increasing rapidity, uproot the viewer from a state of temporal nonchalance. A switch between time and synchronicity, between actual meaning and the human impetus for meaning, plays out in a multi-channel video work Several Interruptions (2009). A series of disparate videos, no doubt gleaned from YouTube, show people holding their breath underwater. Facial expressions blossom from calm to palpable terror as each series of underwater portraits are held in synchrony. As the divers all finally pull up for breath the sequence switches.

According to David Auerbach, and with echoes from Thomson and Craighead themselves, Never Odd Or Even offers a series of Oulipo inspired experiments, realised with constrained technical, rather than literary, techniques. For my own reading I was drawn to the figure of The Time Traveller, caused so splendidly to judder through time over and over again, whilst never having to repeat the self-same word twice. Mid-way through H.G.Wells’ original novel the protagonist stumbles into a crumbling museum. Sweeping the dust off abandoned relics he ponders his machine’s ability to hasten their decay. It is at this point that the Time Traveller has a revelation. The museum entombs the history of his own future: an ocean of artefacts whose potential to speak died with the civilisation that created them. [2] In Thomson and Craighead’s work the present moment we take for granted becomes malleable in the networks their artworks play with. That moment of arising, that archaeological instant is called into question, because like the Time Traveller, the narratives we tell ourselves are worth nothing if the past and the present arising from it are capable of swapping places. Thomson and Craighead’s work, like the digital present it converses with, begins now, and then again now, and then again now. The arche of our networked society erupting as the simulation of a present that has always already slipped into the past. Of course, as my meditation on The Time Traveller and archaeology suggests, this state of constant renewal is something that art as a form of communication has always been intimately intertwined with. What I was fascinated to read in the works of Never Odd Or Even was a suggestion that the kind of world we are invested in right now is one which, perhaps for the first time, begs us to simulate it anew.

[1] David Auerbach, “Archimedes’ Mindscrew,” in Never Odd Or Even (Carroll / Fletcher Gallery, London: Carroll / Fletcher Gallery, London, 2013), 4, http://www.carrollfletcher.com/usr/library/documents/thomson-and-craighead-essays/essay-from-tc-final-low-res.pdf.

[2] Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (Verso, 2005), 100. 

GLTI.CH Karaoke’s first ever GLTI.CH Breaks was a huge success. On May 24th, in conjunction with HAPPENING! at Power Lunches, Dalston, we hooked TramShed, DJing from London, into DJ Wax On, mixing in Derby, then segued into Sahn, live from San Francisco over the very-well-behaved interwebs. BONUS! DJ Wax On’s mix from the night:

More GLTI.CH Breaks coming soon! Here’s a cross section of photos from the evening… Click any photo to see it in LARGE or go to the GLTI.CH Breaks! Facebook Gallery to peruse at your leisure…                

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!

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.

DANIEL ROURKE + ALEX MYERS Daniel Rourke is a writer and artist. His work explores error, noise and kippleisation through words, sounds, performance and whatever ideas are to hand. He is one half of GLTI.CH Karaoke, an experimental performance platform exposing the course of accidents, temporary lyrical disjoints & technical out-of-syncs. Daniel writes regularly forRhizome.org and Furtherfield.org. He is currently undertaking a practice-based PhD in Art and Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. machinemachine.net / twitter @therourke Alex Myers makes artgames to explore how accidental meaning/anomalous discourse emerges by breaking rule-based game spaces to disrupt player expectations and concepts. He is an Assistant Professor and Director of Game Studies at Bellevue University. Alex has exhibited at NP3 in Groningen,Nikolaj Kunsthallen in Copenhagen, Lab for Electronic Art and Performance, Berlin, Interaccess in Toronto, FACT in Liverpool, and LACDA in Los Angeles. www.alexmyers.info / twitter @aandnota

run computer, run : RAWerTUNES10.EXE (3Dude Remix) RAWerTUNES10.EXE is a noise-art album made in homage to the now late, (great?) iTunes 10 release. As iTunes 11 makes its way onto computers across the globe this album will remain as a media-archive of splendid noises transcoded from iTunes 10 executables. Exapted from the same raw code each track is now accompanied by its own ‘Dude’ ready to be 3D printed, at your own (great) expense. DANIEL ROURKE + ALEX MYERS Daniel Rourke is a writer and artist. His work explores error, noise and kippleisation through words, sounds, performance and whatever ideas are to hand. He is one half of GLTI.CH Karaoke, an experimental performance platform exposing the course of accidents, temporary lyrical disjoints & technical out-of-syncs. Daniel writes regularly forRhizome.org and Furtherfield.org. He is currently undertaking a practice-based PhD in Art and Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. machinemachine.net / twitter @therourke

Alex Myers makes artgames to explore how accidental meaning/anomalous discourse emerges by breaking rule-based game spaces to disrupt player expectations and concepts. He is an Assistant Professor and Director of Game Studies at Bellevue University. Alex has exhibited at NP3 in Groningen,Nikolaj Kunsthallen in Copenhagen, Lab for Electronic Art and Performance, Berlin, Interaccess in Toronto, FACT in Liverpool, and LACDA in Los Angeles. www.alexmyers.info / twitter @aandnota