To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. Deirdre Barrett’s body was in bed, but her mind was in a library. The library was inside a very old house, with glowing oil lamps and shelves of beautiful leatherbound books.

To survive. Just keep it alive Like the moment when I first heard Gil Scott-Heron, I knew upon first read that I would return to this book.

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In Antoine de Saint Exupéry's tale the Little Prince meets a businessman who accumulates stars with the sole purpose of being able to buy more stars. The Little Prince is perplexed. He owns only a flower, which he waters every day. Three volcanoes, which he cleans every week.

To address our unprecedented global and immediate need for access to reading and research materials, as of today, March 24, 2020, the Internet Archive will suspend waitlists for the 1.

Biomimicry design, explained with 99% Invisible. Check them out here: https://99percentinvisible.org/

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Japan’s Shinkansen doesn’t look like your typical train. With its long and pointed nose, it can reach top speeds up to 150–200 miles per hour.

It didn’t always look like this. Earlier models were rounder and louder, often suffering from the phenomenon of "tunnel boom," where deafening compressed air would rush out of a tunnel after a train rushed in. But a moment of inspiration from engineer and birdwatcher Eiji Nakatsu led the system to be redesigned based on the aerodynamics of three species of birds.

Nakatsu’s case is a fascinating example of biomimicry, the design movement pioneered by biologist and writer Janine Benyus. She's a co-founder of the Biomimicry Institute, a non-profit encouraging creators to discover how big challenges in design, engineering, and sustainability have often already been solved through 3.8 billion years of evolution on earth. We just have to go out and find them.

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The New Observatory opened at FACT, Liverpool on Thursday 22nd of June and runs until October 1st. The exhibition, curated by Hannah Redler Hawes and Sam Skinner, in collaboration with The Open Data Institute, transforms the FACT galleries into a playground of micro-observatories, fusing art with data science in an attempt to expand the reach of both. Reflecting on the democratisation of tools which allow new ways of sensing and analysing, The New Observatory asks visitors to reconsider raw, taciturn ‘data’ through a variety of vibrant, surprising, and often ingenious artistic affects and interactions. What does it mean for us to become observers of ourselves? What role does the imagination have to play in the construction of a reality accessed via data infrastructures, algorithms, numbers, and mobile sensors? And how can the model of the observatory help us better understand how the non-human world already measures and aggregates information about itself? In its simplest form an observatory is merely an enduring location from which to view terrestrial or celestial phenomena. Stone circles, such as Stonehenge in the UK, were simple, but powerful, measuring tools, aligned to mark the arc of the sun, the moon or certain star systems as they careered across ancient skies. Today we observe the world with less monumental, but far more powerful, sensing tools. And the site of the observatory, once rooted to specific locations on an ever spinning Earth, has become as mobile and malleable as the clouds which once impeded our ancestors’ view of the summer solstice. The New Observatory considers how ubiquitous, and increasingly invisible, technologies of observation have impacted the scale at which we sense, measure, and predict. Citizen Sense, Dustbox (2016 – 2017). The New Observatory at FACT, 2017. Photo by Gareth Jones. The Citizen Sense research group, led by Jennifer Gabrys, presents Dustbox as part of the show. A project started in 2016 to give residents of Deptford, South London, the chance to measure air pollution in their neighbourhoods. Residents borrowed the Dustboxes from their local library, a series of beautiful, black ceramic sensor boxes shaped like air pollutant particles blown to macro scales. By visiting citizensense.net participants could watch their personal data aggregated and streamed with others to create a real-time data map of local air particulates. The collapse of the micro and the macro lends the project a surrealist quality. As thousands of data points coalesce to produce a shared vision of the invisible pollutants all around us, the pleasing dimples, spikes and impressions of each ceramic Dustbox give that infinitesimal world a cartoonish charisma. Encased in a glass display cabinet as part of the show, my desire to stroke and caress each Dustbox was strong. Like the protagonist in Richard Matheson’s 1956 novel The Shrinking Man, once the scale of the microscopic world was given a form my human body could empathise with, I wanted nothing more than to descend into that space, becoming a pollutant myself caught on Deptford winds. Moving from the microscopic to the scale of living systems, Julie Freeman’s 2015/2016 project, A Selfless Society, transforms the patterns of a naked mole-rat colony into an abstract minimalist animation projected into the gallery. Naked mole-rats are one of only two species of ‘eusocial’ mammals, living in shared underground burrows that distantly echo the patterns of other ‘superorganism’ colonies such as ants or bees. To be eusocial is to live and work for a single Queen, whose sole responsibility it is to breed and give birth on behalf of the colony. For A Selfless Society, Freeman attached Radio Frequency ID (RFID) chips to each non-breeding mole-rat, allowing their interactions to be logged as the colony went about its slippery subterranean business. The result is a meditation on the ‘missing’ data point: the Queen, whose entire existence is bolstered and maintained by the altruistic behaviours of her wrinkly, buck-teethed family. The work is accompanied by a series of naked mole-rat profile shots, in which the eyes of each creature have been redacted with a thick black line. Freeman’s playful anonymising gesture gives each mole-rat its due, reminding us that behind every model we impel on our data there exist countless, untold subjects bound to the bodies that compel the larger story to life.

James Coupe, A Machine for Living (2017). The New Observatory at FACT, 2017. Photo by Gareth Jones. Natasha Caruana’s works in the exhibition centre on the human phenomena of love, as understood through social datasets related to marriage and divorce. For her work Divorce Index Caruana translated data on a series of societal ‘pressures’ that are correlated with failed marriages – access to healthcare, gambling, unemployment – into a choreographed dance routine. To watch a video of the dance, enacted by Caruana and her husband, viewers must walk or stare through another work, Curtain of Broken Dreams, an interlinked collection of 1,560 pawned or discarded wedding rings. Both the works come out of a larger project the artist undertook in the lead-up to the 1st year anniversary of her own marriage. Having discovered that divorce rates were highest in the coastal towns of the UK, Caruana toured the country staying in a series of AirBnB house shares with men who had recently gone through a divorce. Her journey was plotted on dry statistical data related to one of the most significant and personal of human experiences, a neat juxtaposition that lends the work a surreal humour, without sentimentalising the experiences of either Caruana or the divorced men she came into contact with. Jeronimo Voss, Inverted Night Sky (2016). The New Observatory at FACT, 2017. Photo by Gareth Jones. The New Observatory features many screens, across which data visualisations bloom, or cameras look upwards, outwards or inwards. As part of the Libre Space Foundation artist Kei Kreutler installed an open networked satellite station on the roof of FACT, allowing visitors to the gallery a live view of the thousands of satellites that career across the heavens. For his Inverted Night Sky project, artist Jeronimo Voss presents a concave domed projection space, within which the workings of the Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy teeter and glide. But perhaps the most striking, and prominent use of screens, is James Coupe’s work A Machine for Living. A four-storey wooden watchtower, dotted on all sides with widescreen displays wired into the topmost tower section, within which a bank of computer servers computes the goings on displayed to visitors. The installation is a monument to members of the public who work for Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing system run by corporate giant Amazon that connects an invisible workforce of online, human minions to individuals and businesses who can employ them to carry out their bidding. A Machine for Living is the result of James Coupe’s playful subversion of the system, in which he asked mTurk workers to observe and reflect on elements of their own daily lives. On the screens winding up the structure we watch mTurk workers narrating their dance moves as they jiggle on the sofa, we see workers stretching and labelling their yoga positions, or running through the meticulous steps that make up the algorithm of their dinner routine. The screens switch between users so regularly, and the tasks they carry out as so diverse and often surreal, that the installation acts as a miniature exhibition within an exhibition. A series of digital peepholes into the lives of a previously invisible workforce, their labour drafted into the manufacture of an observatory of observations, an artwork homage to the voyeurism that perpetuates so much of 21st century ‘online’ culture.

The New Observatory at FACT, 2017. Learning Space. Photo by Gareth Jones. The New Observatory is a rich and varied exhibition that calls on its visitors to reflect on, and interact more creatively with, the data that increasingly underpins and permeates our lives. The exhibition opened at FACT, Liverpool on Thursday 22nd of June and runs until October 1st.

ISIS vs. 3D Printing: On Morehshin Allahyari's 'Material Speculation: ISIS' project: Men descend on the venerated space, laying waste to anything they can topple. Armed with sledgehammers, power drills, and cellphone cameras, they leave dust and stones in their wake, mere suggestions of the priceless artifacts proudly displayed only hours before…Time and again, conflict has been bad news for historical artifacts and sculptures. There was the infamous burning of the Library of Alexandria, the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan by the Taliban, and the Nazi’s battle to burn as much “degenerate art” as they could find. Swept up in a violent fervor, mobs and soldiers have been quick to destroy what took societies centuries to create; what museums and collectors spent decades collecting, preserving, and documenting for the public.The digital era looks different: files can be cheaply hosted in data centers spread across several states or continents to ensure permanence. Morehshin Allahyari, an Iranian born artist, educator, and activist, wants to apply that duplicability to the artifacts that ISIS has destroyed.Now, Allahyari is working on digitally fabricating the sculptures for a series called “Material Speculation” as part of a residency in Autodesk’s Pier 9 program. The first in the series is “Material Speculation: ISIS,” which, through intense research, is modeling and reproducing statues destroyed by ISIS in 2015. Allahyari isn’t just interested in replicating lost objects but making it possible for anyone to do the same: Embedded within each semi-translucent copy is a flash drive with Allahyari’s research about the artifacts, and an online version is coming.

In the lead-up to her solo show, institutions of Resolution Disputes [iRD], at Transfer Gallery, Brooklyn, I caught up with Rosa Menkman over two gallons of home-brewed coffee. We talked about what the show might become, discussing a series of alternate resolutions and realities that exist parallel to our daily modes of perception. iRD is open to visitors on Saturdays at Transfer Gallery until April 18th, and will also function as host to my and Morehshin Allahyari’s 3D Additivist Manifesto, on Thursday April 16th. Rosa Menkman: The upcoming exhibition at Transfer is an illustration of my practice based PhD research on resolutions. It will be called ‘institutions of Resolution Disputes’, in short iRD and will be about the liminal, alternative modes of data or information representation, that are obfuscated by technological conventions. The title is a bit wonky as I wish for it to reflect that kind of ambiguity that invokes curiosity. In any case, I always feel that every person, at least once in their grown-up life, wants to start an institution. There are a few of those moments in life, like “Now I am tired of the school system, I want to start my own school!”; and “Now I am ready to become an architect!”, so this is my dream after wanting to become an architect. Daniel Rourke: To establish your own institution?

RM: First of all, I am multiplexing the term institution here. ‘institutions’ and the whole setting of iRD does mimic a (white box) institute, however the iRD does not just stand for a formal organization that you can just walk into. The institutions also revisit a slightly more compound framework that hails from late 1970s, formulated by Joseph Goguen and Rod Burstall, who dealt with the growing complexities at stake when connecting different logical systems (such as databases and programming languages) within computer sciences. A main result of these non-logical institutions is that different logical systems can be ‘glued’ together at the ‘substrata levels’, the illogical frameworks through which computation also takes place. Secondly, while the term ’resolution’ generally simply refers to a standard (measurement) embedded in the technological domain, I believe that a resolution indeed functions as a settlement (solution), but at the same time exists as a space of compromise between different actors (languages, objects, materialities) who dispute their stakes (frame rate, number of pixels and colors, etc.), following rules (protocols) within the ever growing digital territories. So to answer your question; maybe in a way the iRD is sort of an anti-protological institute or institute for anti-utopic, obfuscated or dysfunctional resolutions. DR: It makes me think of Donna Haraway’s Manifesto for Cyborgs, and especially a line that has been echoing around my head recently:

“No objects, spaces, or bodies are sacred in themselves; any component can be interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed for processing signals in a common language.”

By using the terms ‘obfuscation’ and ‘dysfunction’ you are invoking a will – perhaps on your part, but also on the part of the resolutions themselves – to be recognised. I love that gesture. I can hear the objects in iRD speaking out; making themselves heard, perhaps for the first time. In The 3D Additivist Manifesto we set out to imagine what the existence of Haraway’s ‘common language’ might mean for the unrealised, “the powerless to be born.” Can I take it that your institute has a similar aim in mind? A place for the ‘otherwise’ to be empowered, or at least to be recognised?

RM: The iRD indeed kind of functions as a stage for non-protocological resolutions, or radical digital materialism. I always feel like I should say here, that generally, I am not against function or efficiency. These are good qualities, they make the world move forward. On the other hand, I do believe that there is a covert, nepotist cartel of protocols that governs the flows and resolutions of data and information just for the sake of functionality and efficiency. The sole aim of this cartel is to uphold the dogma of modern computation, which is about making actors function together (resonate) as efficiently as possible, tweaking out resources to maximum capacity, without bottlenecks, clicks, hicks or cuts, etc. But this dogma also obfuscates a compromise that we never question. And this is where my problem lies: efficiency and functionality are shaping our objects. Any of these actors could also operate under lower, worse or just different resolutions. Yet we have not been taught to see, think or question any of these resolutions. They are obfuscated and we are blind to them. I want to be able to at least entertain the option of round video (strip video from its interface!), to write inside non-quadrilateral, modular text editors (no more linear reading!) or to listen to (sonify) my rainbows (gradients). Right now, the protocols in place simply do not make this possible, or even worse, they have blocked these functionalities. There is this whole alternate universe of computational objects, ways that our data would look or be used like, if the protocols and their resolutions had been tweaked differently. The iRD reflects on this, and searches, if you will, a computation of many dimensions. DR: Meaning that a desktop document could have its corners folded back, and odd, non standard tessellations would be possible, with overlapping and intersecting work spaces?

RM: Yes! Exactly! Right now in the field of imagery, all compressions are quadrilateral, ecology dependent, standard solutions (compromises) following an equation in which data flows are plotted against actors that deal with the efficiency/functionality duality in storage, processing and transmission. I am interested in creating circles, pentagons and other more organic manifolds! If we would do this, the whole machine would work differently. We could create a modular and syphoning relationships between files, and just as in jon Satroms’ 2011 QTzrk installation, video would have multiple timelines and soundtracks, it could even contain some form of layer-space! DR: So the iRD is also a place for some of those alternate ‘solutions’ that are in dispute? RM: Absolutely. However, while I am not a programmer, I also don’t believe that imagining new resolutions means to absolve of all existing resolutions and their inherent artifacts. History and ecology play a big role in the construction of a resolution, which is why I will also host some of my favorite, classic solutions and their inherent (normally obfuscated) artifacts at the iRD, such as scan lines, DCT blocks, and JPEG2000 wavelets.

The iRD could easily function as a Wunderkammer for artifacts that already exist within our current resolutions. But to me this would be a needles move towards the style of the Evil Media Distribution Center, created by YoHa (Matsuko Yokokoji and Graham Harwood) for the 2013 Transmediale. I love to visit Curiosity Cabinets, but at the same time, these places are kind of dead, celebrating objects that are often shielded behind glass (or plastic). I can imagine the man responsible for such a collection. There he sits, in the corner, smoking a pipe, looking over his conquests. But this kind of collection does not activate anything! Its just ones own private boutique collection of evil! For a dispute to take place we need action! Objects need to have – or be given – a voice! DR: …and the alternate possible resolutions can be played out, can be realised, without solidifying them as symbols of something dead and forgotten. RM: Right! It would be easy and pretty to have those objects in a Wunderkammer type of display. Or as Readymades in a Boîte-en-valise but it just feels so sad. That would not be zombie like but dead-dead. A static capture of hopelessness. DR: The Wunderkammer had a resurgence a few years ago. Lots of artists used the form as a curatorial paradigm, allowing them to enact their practice as artist and curator. A response, perhaps, to the web, the internet, and the archive. Aggregated objects, documents and other forms placed together to create essayistic exhibitions. RM: I feel right now, this could be an easy way out. It would be a great way out, however, as I said, I feel the need to do something else, something more active. I will smoke that cigar some other day.

DR: So you wouldn’t want to consider the whole of Transfer Gallery as a Wunderkammer that you were working inside of? RM: It is one possibility. But it is not my favorite. I would rather make works against the established resolutions, works that are built to break out of a pre-existing mediatic flow. Works that were built to go beyond a specific conventional use. For example, I recently did this exhibition in The Netherlands where I got to install a really big wallpaper, which I think gained me a new, alternative perspectives on digital materiality. I glitched a JPEG and zoomed in on its DCT blocks and it was sooo beautiful, but also so scalable and pokable. It became an alternative level of real to me, somehow. DR: Does it tesselate and repeat, like conventional wallpaper? RM: It does repeat in places. I would do it completely differently if I did it again. Actually, for the iRD I am considering to zoom into the JPEG2000 wavelets. I thought it would be interesting to make a psychedelic installation like this. It’s like somebody vomited onto the wall.

DR: [laughs] It does look organic, like bacteria trying to organise. RM: Yeah. It really feels like something that has its own agency somehow.

DR: That’s the thing about JPEG2000 – and the only reason I know about that format, by the way, is because of your Vernacular of File Formats - the idea that they had to come up with a non-regular block shape for the image format that didn’t contradict with the artifacts in the bones and bodies that were being imaged. It feels more organic because of that. It doesn’t look like what you expect an image format to look like, it looks like what I expect life to look like, close up. RM: It looks like ‘Game of Life’. DR: Yes! Like Game of Life. And I assume that now they don’t need to use JPEG2000 because the imaging resolution is high enough on the machines to supersede bone artifacts. I love that. I love the effect caused when you’ve blown it up here. It looks wonderful. What is the original source for this? RM: I would blow this image [the one from A Vernacular of File Formats] up to hell. Blow it up until there is no pixel anymore. It shouldn’t be too cute. These structures are built to be bigger. Have you seen the Glitch Timond (2014)? The work itself is about glitches that have gained a folkloric meaning over time, these artifact now refer to hackers, ghosts or AI. They are hung in the shape of a diamond. The images themselves are not square, and I can install them on top of the wallpaper somehow, at different depths. Maybe I could expand on that piece, by putting broken shaped photos, and shadows flying around. It could be beautiful like that.

DR: It makes me think of the spatiality of the gallery. So that the audience would feel like they were inside a broken codec or something. Inside the actual coding mechanism of the image, rather than the standardised image at the point of its visual resolution. RM: Oh! And I want to have a smoke machine! There should be something that breaks up vision and then reveals something. DR: I like that as a metaphor for how the gallery functions as well. There are heaps of curatorial standards, like placing works at line of sight, or asking the audience to travel through the space in a particular order and mode of viewing. The gallery space itself is already limited and constructed through a huge, long history of standardisations, by external influences of fashion and tradition, and others enforced by the standards of the printing press, or the screen etc. So how do you make it so that when an audience walks into the gallery they feel as though they are not in a normal, euclidean space anymore? Like they have gone outside normal space? RM: That’s what I want! Disintegrate the architecture. But now I am like, “Yo guys, I want to dream, and I want it to be real in three weeks…” DR: “Hey guys, I want to break your reality!” [laughs] RM: One step is in place, Do you remember Ryan Maguire who is responsible for The Ghost in the MP3? His research is about MP3 compressions and basically what sounds are cut away by this compression algorithm, simply put: it puts shows what sounds the MP3 compression normally cuts out as irrelevant – in a way it inverses the compression and puts the ‘irrelevant’ or deleted data on display. I asked him to rework the soundtrack to ‘Beyond Resolution’, one of the two videowork of the iRD that is accompanied by my remix of professional grin by Knalpot and Ryan said yes! And so it was done! Super exciting.   DR: Yes. I thought that was a fantastic project. I love that as a proposition too… What would the equivalent of that form of ghosting be in terms of these alternate, disputed resolutions? What’s the remainder? I don’t understand technical formats as clearly as you do, so abstract things like ‘the ghost’, ‘the remainder’ are my way into understanding them. An abstract way in to a technical concept. So what is the metaphoric equivalent of that remainder in your work? For instance, I think it depends on what this was originally an image of. I think that is important. RM: The previous image of JPEG2000 does not deal with the question of lost information. I think what you are after is an inversed Alvin Lucier ‘Sitting in a Room’ experiment, one that only shows the “generation loss” (instead of the generation left over, which is what we usually get to see or hear in art projects). I think that would be a reasonable equivalent to Ryan Maguires MP3 compression work. Or maybe Supraconductivity. I can struggle with this for… for at least two more days. In any case I want the iRD to have a soundtrack. Actually, it would like there to be a spatial soundtrack; the ghost soundtrack in the room and the original available only on a wifi access point. DR: I’m really excited by that idea of ghostly presence and absence, you know. In terms of spatiality, scan lines, euclidean space… RM: It’s a whole bundle of things! [laughs] “Come on scan lines, come to the institutions, swim with the ghosts!” DR: It makes me think of cheesy things you get in a children’s museum. Those illusion rooms, that look normal through a little window, but when you go into them they are slanted in a certain way, so that a child can look bigger than an adult through the window frame. You know what I mean? They play with perspective in a really simple way, it’s all about the framing mechanism, the way the audience’s view has been controlled, regulated and perverted. RM: I was almost at a point where I was calling people in New York and asked, “Can you produce a huge stained glass window, in 2 weeks?” I think it would be beautiful if the Institute had its own window. I would take a photo of what you could see out of the real window, and then make the resolution of that photo really crappy, and create a real stained glass window, and install that in the gallery at its original place. If I have time one day I would love to do that, working with real craftspeople on that. I think that in the future the iRD might have a window through which we interface the outside. Every group of people that share the same ideas and perspectives on obfuscation need to have a secret handshake. So that is what I am actually working on right now. Ha, You didn’t see that coming? [Laughs] DR: [Laughs] No… that’s a different angle. RM: I want people to have a patch! A secret patch. You remember Trevor Paglen’s book on the symbology of military patches?

DR: Oh yeah. Where he tries to decode the military patches? Yes, I love that. RM: Yeah, I don’t think the world will ever have enough patches. They are such an icon for secret handshakes. I have been playing around with this DCT image. I want to use it as a key to the institutions, which basically are a manifest to the reasonings behind this whole exhibition, but then encrypted in a macroblock font (I embedded an image of Institution 1 earlier). There was one of Paglen’s patches that really stood out for me; the black on black one. The iRD patch should be inspired by that.

DR: Hito Steyerl’s work How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, centres on the grid used by the military to calibrate their satellites from space. The DCT structure looks a lot like that, but I know the DCT is not about calibration. It contains all the shapes necessary to compose any image? RM: If you look up close at a badly compressed JPEG, you will notice the image consist of macroblocks. A macroblock is a block organizations, usually consisting of 8×8 pixels, that posses color (chrominance) and light (luminance) values embedded via DCT (discrete cosine transform). Basically all JPEGs you have ever seen are build out of this finite set of 64 macroblocks. Considering that JPEGs make up the vast majority of images we encounter on a daily basis, I think it is pretty amazing how simple this part of the JPEG compression really is. But the patch should of course not just be square. Do you know the TV series Battlestar Galactica, where they have the corners cut off all their books? All the paper in that world follows this weird, octagonal shape? Or Borges Library and its crimson hexagon, that holds all knowledge. I love those randomly cryptic geometric forms… DR: It reminds me of a 1987 anime film, Wings of Honneamise, that had a really wonderfully designed world. Everything is different, from paper sizes and shapes, through to their cutlery. Really detailed design from the ground up, all the standards and traditions. RM: Like this Minecraft book too. The Blockpedia. DR: Oh that’s great. I love the Minecraft style and the mythos that has arisen around it. RM: So Minecraft and Borges follow a 6 corner resolution, and Battlestar paper has 8 corners… Discrepancy! I want to reference them all! DR: So these will go into the badges? RM: I want to have a black on black embroidered patch with corners. Don’t you think this would be so pretty? This black on black. I want to drop a reference to 1984, too, Orwell or Apple, the decoder can decide. These kind of secret, underground references, I like those. DR: A crypto exhibition. RM: It’s so hot right now (and with hot I do not mean cool). Since the 90s musicians encrypt or transcode things in their sounds, from Aphex Twin, to Goodiepal and now TCF, who allegedly encrypted an image from the police riots in Athens into one of his songs. However, he is a young Scandinavian musician so that makes me wonder if the crypto design in this case is confusingly non-political. Either way, I want to rebel against this apparent new found hotness of crypto-everything, which is why I made Tacit:Blue.

Tacit:Blue uses a very basic form of encryption. Its archaic, dumb and decommissioned. Every flash shows a next line of my ‘secret message’ encrypted in masonic pigpen. When it flickers it gives a little piece of the message which really is just me ranting about secrecy. So if someone is interested in my opinion, they can decode that.

Actually, the technology behind the video is much more interesting. Do you know The Nova Drone? Its a small AV synthesizer designed by Casper Electronics. The the flickr frequency of this military RGB LED on the top of the board can be altered by turning the RGB oscillators. When I come close to the LED with the lens of my iphone, the frequencies of the LED and the iphone camera do not sync up. What happens is a rolling shutter effect. The camera has to interpret the input and something is gone, lost in translation. In fact, a Resolutional Dispute takes place right there. DR: So the dispute happens because framerate of the camera conflicts with the flicker of the LED? RM: And the sound is the actual sound of the electronics. In Tacit:Blue I do not use the NovaDrone in a ‘clean’ way, I am actually misusing it (if there is such a thing when it comes to a device of dispute). Some of the sounds and disruptions of flow are created in this patch bay, which is where you can patch the LFOs, etc. Anyway, when you disconnect the patch it flickers, but I never take it out fully so it creates this classic, noisy electric effect. What do you think about the text? Do you think this works? I like this masonic pigpen, its a very simple, nostalgic old quiff. DR: It reminds me of the title sequence for Alien. Dave Addey did a close visual, sci-fi etymological, analysis of the typography in Alien. It went viral online recently. Did you see that?

RM: No! DR: It is fantastic. Everything from the title sequence to the buttons on the control panel in the background. Full of amazing insights.

RM: Wow, inspiring!

So with any cypher you also need a key, which is why I named the video Tacit:Blue, a reference to the old Northrop Tacit Blue stealth surveillance aircraft. The aircraft was used to develop techniques against passive radar detection, but has been decommissioned now, just like the masonic pigpen encryption. DR: This reminds me of Eyal Weizman. He has written a lot on the Israeli / Palestinian conflict as a spatial phenomena. So we don’t think about territory merely as a series of lines drawn on a globe anymore, but as a stack, including everything from airspace, all the way down beneath the ground, where waste, gas and water are distributed. The mode by which water is delivered underground often cuts across conflicted territories on the surface. A stacked vision of territory brings into question the very notion of a ‘conflict’ and a ‘resolution’. I recently saw him give a lecture on the Forensic Architecture project, which engages in disputes metered against US Military activities. Military drones are now so advanced that they can target a missile through the roof of a house, and have it plunge several floors before it explodes. It means that individual people can be targeted on a particular floor. The drone strike leaves a mark in the roof which is – and this is Weizman’s terminology - ‘beneath the threshold of detectability’. And that threshold also happens to be the size of a human body: about 1 metre square. Military satellites have a pixel size that effectively translates to 1 metre square at ground level. So to be invisible, or technically undetectable, a strike needs only to fall within a single pixel of a satellite imaging system. These drone strikes are designed to work beneath that threshold. In terms of what you are talking about in Trevor Paglen’s work, and the Northrop Tacit Blue, those technologies were designed to exist beneath, or parallel to, optic thresholds, but now those thresholds are not optic as much as they are about digital standards and resolution densities. So that shares the same space as the codecs and file formats you are interested in. Your patch seems to bring that together, the analogue pixel calibration that Steyerl refers to is also part of that history. So I wonder whether there are images that cannot possibly be resolved out of DCT blocks. You know what I mean? I think your work asks that question. What images, shapes, and objects exist that are not possible to construct out of this grid? What realities are outside of the threshold of these blocks to resolve? It may even be the case that we are not capable of imagining such things, because of course these blocks have been formed in conjunction with the human visual system. The image is always already a compromise between the human perceptual limit and a separately defined technical limit. RM: Yes, well I can imagine vector graphics, or mesh based graphics where the lines are not just a connection between two points, but also a value could be what you are after. But I am not sure. At some point I thought that people entering the iRD could pay a couple of dollars for one of these patches, but if they don’t put the money down, then they would be obliged to go into the exhibition wearing earplugs. DR: [Laughs] So they’d be allowed in, but they’d have one of their senses dampened? RM: Yes, wearing earmuffs, or weird glasses or something like that. [Laughs] DR: Glasses with really fine scan lines on them that conflict with TV images or whatever. RM: [Laughs] And I was thinking, well, there should be a divide between people. To realise that what you see is just one threshold that has been lifted to only a few. There are always thresholds, you know. DR: Ways to invite the audience into the spaces and thresholds that are beneath the zones of resolutional detectability? RM: Or maybe just to show the mechanics behind objects and thresholds. DR: Absolutely. So to go back to your Tacit:Blue video, in regards the font, I like the aesthetic, but I wonder whether you could play with that zone of detectability a little more. You could have the video display at a frequency that is hard for people to concentrate on, for instance, and then put the cryptographic message at a different frequency. Having zones that do not match up, so that different elements of the work cut through different disputed spaces. Much harder to detect. And more subliminal, because video adheres to other sets of standards and processes beyond scan lines, the conflict between those standards opens up another space of possibilities. It makes me think about Takeshi Murata’s Untitled (Pink Dot). I love that work because it uses datamoshing to question more about video codecs than just I and P frames. That’s what sets this work apart, for me, from other datamoshed works. He also plays with layers, and post production in the way the pink dot is realised. As it unfolds you see the pink dot as a layer behind the Rambo footage, and then it gets datamoshed into the footage, and then it is a layer in front of it, and then the datamosh tears into it and the dot become part of the Rambo miasma, and then the dot comes back as a surface again. So all the time he is playing with the layering of the piece, and the framing is not just about one moment to the next, but it also it exposes something about Murata’s super slick production process. He must have datamoshed parts of the video, and then post-produced the dot onto the surface of that, and then exported that and datamoshed that, and then fed it back into the studio again to add more layers. So it is not one video being datamoshed, but a practice unfolding, and the pink dot remains a kind of standard that runs through the whole piece, resonating in the soundtrack, and pushing to all elements of the image. The work is spatialised and temporalised in a really interesting way, because of how Murata uses datamoshing and postproduction to question frames, and layers, by ‘glitching’ between those formal elements. And as a viewer of Pink Dot, your perception is founded by those slips between the spatial surface and the temporal layers. RM: Yeah, wow. I never looked at that work in terms of layers of editing. The vectors of these blocks that smear over the video, the movement of those macroblocks, which is what this video technologically is about, is also about time and editing. So Murata effectively emulates that datamosh technique back into the editing of the work before and after the actual datamosh. That is genius! DR: If it wasn’t for Pink Dot I probably wouldn’t sit here with you now. It’s such an important work for me and my thinking.

Working with Morehshin Allahyari on The 3D Additivist Manifesto has brought a lot of these processes into play for me. The compressed labour behind a work can often get lost, because a final digital video is just a surface, just a set of I and P frames. The way Murata uses datamoshing calls that into play. It brings back some of the temporal depth. Additivism is also about calling those processes and conflicts to account, in the move between digital and material forms. Oil is a compressed form of time, and that time and matter is extruded into plastic, and that plastic has other modes of labour compressed into it, and the layers of time and space are built on top of one another constantly – like the layers of a 3D print. When we rendered our Manifesto video we did it on computers plugged into aging electricity infrastructures that run on burnt coal and oil. Burning off one form of physical compressed time to compress another set of times and labours into a ‘digital work’. RM: But you can feel that there is more to that video than its surface! If I remember correctly you and Morehshin wrote an open invitation to digital artists to send in their left over 3D objects. So every object in that dark gooey ocean in The 3D Additivist Manifesto actually represents a piece of artistic digital garbage. It’s like a digital emulation of the North Pacific Gyre, which you also talked about in your lecture at Goldsmiths, but then solely consisting of Ready-Made art trash.

The actual scale and form of the Gyre is hard to catch, it seems to be unimaginable even to the people devoting their research to it; it’s beyond resolution. Which is why it is still such an under acknowledged topic. We don’t really want to know what the Gyre looks or feels like; it’s just like the clutter inside my desktop folder inside my desktop folder, inside the desktop folder. It represents an amalgamation of histories that moved further away from us over time and we don’t necessarily like to revisit, or realise that we are responsible for. I think The 3D Additivist Manifesto captures that resemblance between the way we handle our digital detritus and our physical garbage in a wonderfully grimm manner. DR: I’m glad you sense the grimness of that image. And yes, as well as sourcing objects from friends and collaborators we also scraped a lot from online 3D object repositories. So the gyre is full of Ready-Mades divorced from their conditions of creation, use, or meaning. Like any discarded plastic bottle floating out in the middle of the pacific ocean. Eventually Additivist technologies could interface all aspects of material reality, from nanoparticles, to proprietary components, all the way through to DNA, bespoke drugs, and forms of life somewhere between the biological and the synthetic. We hope that our call to submit to The 3D Additivist Cookbook will provoke what you term ‘disputes’. Objects, software, texts and blueprints that gesture to the possibility of new political and ontological realities. It sounds far-fetched, but we need that kind of thinking. Alternate possibilities often get lost in a particular moment of resolution. A single moment of reception. But your exhibition points to the things beyond our recognition. Or perhaps more importantly, it points to the things we have refused to recognise. So, from inside the iRD technical ‘literacy’ might be considered as a limit, not a strength. RM: Often the densities of the works we create, in terms of concept, but also collage, technology and source materials move quite far away or even beyond a fold. I suppose that’s why we make our work pretty. To draw in the people that are not technically literate or have no back knowledge. And then perhaps later they wonder about the technical aspects and the meaning behind the composition of the work and want to learn more. To me, the process of creating, but also seeing an interesting digital art work often feels like swimming inside an abyss of increments. DR: What is that? RM: I made that up. An abyss is something that goes on and on and on. Modern lines used to go on, postmodern lines are broken up as they go on. Thats how I feel we work on our computers, its a metaphor for scanlines. DR: In euclidean space two parallel lines will go on forever and not meet. But on the surface of a globe, and other, non-euclidean spaces, those lines can be made to converge or diverge. * RM: I have been trying to read up on my euclidean geometry. DR: And I am thinking now about Flatland again, A Romance in Many Dimensions. RM: Yeah, it’s funny that in the end, it is all about Flatland. That’s where this all started, so thats where it has to end; Flatland seems like an eternal ouroboros inside of digital art. DR: It makes me think too about holographic theory. You can encode on a 2D surface the information necessary to construct a 3D image. And there are theories that suggest that a black hole has holographic properties. The event horizon of a black hole can be thought of as a flat surface, and contains all the information necessary to construct the black hole. And because a black hole is a singularity, and the universe can be considered as a singularity too – in time and space – some theories suggest that the universe is a hologram encoded on its outer surface. So the future state of the universe encodes all the prior states. Or something like that. RM: I once went to a lecture by Raphael Bousso, a professor at Department of Physics, UC Berkeley. He was talking about black holes, it was super intense. I was sitting on the end of my seat and nearly felt like I was riding a dark star right towards my own event horizon. DR: [laughs] Absolutely. I suppose I came to understand art and theory through things I knew before, which is pop science and science fiction. I tend to read everything through those things. Those are my starting points. But yes, holograms are super interesting. RM: I want to be careful not to go into the wunderkammer, because if there are too many things, then each one of them turns into a fetish object; a gimmick. DR: There was a lot of talk a few years ago about holographic storage, because basically all our storage – CDs, DVDs, hard drive platters, SSD drives – are 2D. All the information spinning on your screen right now, all those rich polygons or whatever, it all begins from data stored on a two dimensional surface. But you could have a holographic storage medium with three dimensions. They have built these things in the laboratory. There goes my pop science knowledge again. RM: When I was at Transmediale last year, the Internet Yami-ichi (Internet Black Market) was on. There I sold some custom videos for self cracked LCD screens. DR: Broken on purpose? RM: Yes, and you’d be allowed to touch it so the screen would go multidimensional. Liquid crystals are such a beautiful technology. DR: Yes. And they are a 3D image medium. But they don’t get used much anymore, right? LEDS are the main image format. RM: People miss LCDS! I saw a beautiful recorded talk from the Torque event, Esther Leslie talking about Walter Benjamin who writes about snow flakes resembling white noise. Liquid crystals and flatness and flatland. I want to thank you Dan, just to talk through this stuff has been really helpful. You have no idea. Thank you so much! DR: Putting ideas in words is always helpful. RM: I never do that, in preparation, to talk about things I am still working on, semi-completed. It’s scary to open up the book of possibilities. When you say things out loud you somehow commit to them. Like, Trevor Paglen, Jon Satrom are huge inspirations, I would like to make work inspired by them, that is a scary thing to say out loud. DR: That’s good. We don’t work in a vacuum. Trevor Paglen’s stuff is often about photography as a mode of non-resolved vision. I think that does fit with your work here, but you have the understanding and wherewithal to transform these concerns into work about the digital media. Maybe you need to build a tiny model of the gallery and create it all in miniature. RM: That’s what Alma Alloro said! DR: I think it would be really helpful. You don’t have to do it in meatspace. You could render a version of the gallery space with software. RM: Haha great idea, but that would take too much time. iRD needs to open to the public in 3 weeks! * DR originally stated here that a globe was a euclidean space. This was corrected, with thanks to Matthew Austin.

Uvula Audio‘s James Campanella has added a complete reading of H.P. Lovecraft’s “quintessential work of horror” to his podcast feed. In China Miéville’s introduction to the Modern Library paperback edition of At The Mountains Of Madness, he describes the novella as “taxonomy as horror.

Reb Livingston @rebliv Bernadette Mayer's List of Journal Ideas & Writing Experiments: writing.upenn.edu/library/Mayer-…

[Another post in our behind-the-scenes series.] One of the great aspects of bookstores and libraries is their uncanny ability to produce serendipity, as people bump unexpectedly into works as they walk through aisles and scan shelves. Everyone seems to have a story of a serendipitous find.

Places that have never existed except in the human imagination may find an incongruous afterlife in the everyday world. Umberto Eco tells of how an attempt to commemorate the brownstone New York home of Nero Wolfe, Rex Stout’s orchid-loving fictional detective, runs up against the resistance of fact. Wolfe’s house cannot be identified because Stout “always talked of a brownstone at a certain number on West 35th Street, but in the course of his novels he mentioned at least ten different street numbers – and what is more, there are no brownstones on 35th Street”. Using Eco’s typology, a fiction has been transmuted into a legend: “Legendary lands and places are of various kinds and have only one characteristic in common: whether they depend on ancient legends whose origins are lost in the mists of time or whether they are in effect a modern invention, they have created flows of belief.”

Because they involve the belief that they existed, exist or can be made to exist – whether in the past, the future or somewhere off the map – legendary places are illusions rather than fictions. The distinction may sometimes be blurry, as the example of Nero Wolfe’s house shows; but the difference is fundamental to this enriching and playfully erudite exploration of the fabulous lands that human beings have invented.

Fictions we know to be neither true nor false and paradoxically this gives them a kind of absolute veracity that historical facts can never have: “The credulous believe that El Dorado and Lemuria exist or existed somewhere or other, but we all know that it is undeniably certain that Superman is Clark Kent and that Dr Watson was never Nero Wolfe’s right-hand man ... All the rest is open to debate.” Unfortunately, humans have an invincible need to believe in their fictions. So they turn them into legends, which they anxiously defend from doubt – even to the point of attacking and killing those who do not share them.

Eco thinks it is not too difficult to explain why humankind is so drawn to legendary places: “It seems that every culture – because the world of everyday reality is cruel and hard to live in – dreams of a happy land to which men once belonged, and may one day return.” Nowadays everyone believes that the ability to envision alternate worlds is one of humankind’s most precious gifts, a view Eco seems to endorse when, at the end of his journey through legendary lands, he describes these visions as “a truthful part of the reality of our imagination”. Yet Eco highlights a darker side of these visions when he describes how the Nazis drew inspiration from legends of ancient peoples, variously situated in ultima Thule (“a land of fire and ice where the sun never set”), Atlantis and the polar regions, who spoke languages that were “racially pure”. Himmler was obsessed with ancient Nordic runes, while in an interview after the war the commander of the SS in Rome claimed that when Hitler ordered him to kidnap Pope Pius XII so he could be interned in Germany, he also ordered the Pope to take from the Vatican library “certain runic manuscripts that evidently had esoteric value for him”.

The Nazi adoption of the swastika began with the Thule Society, a secret racist organisation founded in 1918. Legends of lost lands fed the ideology of Aryan supremacy. In 1907, Jörg Lanz founded the Order of the New Temple, preaching that “inferior races” should be subjected to castration, sterilisation, deportation to Madagascar and incineration – ideas, Eco notes, that “were later to be applied by the Nazis”. Legendary lands are idylls from which minorities, outsiders and other disturbing elements have been banished. When these fantasies of harmony enter politics, a process of exclusion is set in motion whose end point is mass murder and genocide.

A metamorphosis of fiction into legend occurred when some Nazis took seriously a picture of the world presented by the Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton. In his novel The Coming Race (1871), Bulwer-Lytton tells of the “Vril-ya”, survivors from the destruction of Atlantis who possessed amazing powers as a result of being imbued with Vril, a type of cosmic energy, living in the hollow interior of earth. He intended the book as an exercise in fantasy literature but the founder of the Thule Society, who also founded a Vril Society, seems to have taken it more literally. Occultists in several countries read Bulwer-Lytton’s novel as a fictional rendition of events that may actually have happened and the legend was mixed in the stew of mad and bad ideas we now call Nazism.

The process at work was something like that described in Jorge Luis Borges’s story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, in which an encyclopaedia of an imaginary world subverts and disrupts the world that has hitherto been real. The difference is that in Borges’s incomparable fable the secret society that devised the encyclopaedia knew it to be fiction, while 19th-century occultists and some 20th-century Nazis accepted Bulwer-Lytton’s fiction as a version of fact. Among the marks that Bulwer-Lytton’s Vril-ya left in the real world, the most lasting was reassuringly prosaic: the name given to Bovril, the meat extract invented in the 1870s.

Among the legendary places human beings have dreamed up, those that Eco calls “the islands of utopia” have exercised a particular fascination in recent times. As he reminds us, “Etymologically speaking, utopia means non-place” – ou-topos, or no place. Thomas More, who coined the term in his book Utopia (composed in Latin and only translated in 1551 after More had been executed for treason in 1535), plays on an ambiguity in which the word also means a good or excellent place. Using a non-existent country to present an ideal model of government, More established a new literary genre, which included Étienne Cabet’s A Journey to Icaria (1840), in which a proto-communist society is envisioned, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872, an anagram of “nowhere”) and William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890).

Visions of ideal societies have recurred throughout history but such societies were nearly always placed in an irretrievable past. The paradise of milk and honey of which human beings dreamed – a land of perpetual peace and abundance – belonged in religion and mythology rather than history or science. Yet by the end of the 19th century, the fiction of an ideal society had been turned into a realisable human condition. Already in the second half of the 18th century, Rousseau was writing of an egalitarian society as if something of the kind had once existed – a move repeated by Marx and Engels in their theory of primitive communism, which they believed could be recreated at a higher level. More’s non-existent land was given a veneer of science and situated in a non-existent future. Having been a literary genre, utopia became a political legend.

The Book of Legendary Lands covers a vast range of non-places, including a flat and a hollow earth, the Antipodes, the lands of Homer and the many versions of Cockaigne (where honey and bread fall from the sky and no one is rich or poor). A fascinating chapter deals with the far more recent invention of Rennes-le-Château, a French village near Carcassonne that has been hailed as a site of immense treasure and of a priory established by descendants of Jesus, who supposedly did not die on the cross but fled to France and began the Merovingian dynasty.

Presented by Eco in light and witty prose, these legendary places are made more vivid by many well-chosen illustrations and historic texts. Yet this is far from being another coffee table book, however beautiful. As in much of his work, Eco’s theme is the slippage from fiction to illusion in the human mind. Rightly he sees this as a perennial tendency but it is one that has gathered momentum in modern times. So-called primitive cultures understood that history runs in cycles, with civilisations rising and falling much as the seasons come and go – a view of things echoed in Aristotle and the Roman historians. The rise of monotheism changed the picture, so that history came to be seen as an unfolding drama – a story with a beginning, an end and a redemptive meaning. Either way, no one believed that history could be governed by human will. It was fate, God or mere chaos that ruled human events.

Legendary lands began to multiply when human beings started to believe they could shape the future. Non-places envisioned by writers in the past were turned into utopian projects. At the same time, literature became increasingly filled with visions of hellish lands. As Eco puts it, “Sometimes utopia has taken the form of dystopia, accounts of negative societies.”

What counts as a dystopia, however, is partly a matter of taste. Aldous Huxley may have meant Brave New World (1932) as a warning but I suspect many people would find the kind of world he describes – genetically engineered and drug-medicated but also without violence, poverty or acute unhappiness – quite an attractive prospect. If the nightmarish society Huxley imagines is fortunately impossible, it is because it is supposed to be capable of renewing itself endlessly – a feature of utopias and one of the clearest signs of their unreality.

Whether you think a vision of the future is utopian or not depends on how you view society at the present time. Given the ghastly record of utopian politics in the 20th century, bien-pensants of all stripes never tire of declaring that all they want is improvement. They assume that the advances of the past are now permanent and new ones can simply be added on. But if you think society today is like all others have been – deeply flawed and highly fragile – you will understand that improvement can’t be inherited in this way. Sooner or later, past advances are sure to be lost, as the societies that have inherited them decline and fail. As everyone understood until just a few hundred years ago, this is the normal course of history.

No bien-pensant will admit this to be so. Indeed, many find the very idea of such a reversal difficult to comprehend. How could the advances that have produced the current level of civilisation – including themselves – be only a passing moment in the history of the species? Without realising the fact, these believers in improvement inhabit a legendary land – a place where what has been achieved in the past can be handed on into an indefinite future. The human impulse to dream up imaginary places and then believe them to be real, which Eco explores in this enchanting book, is as strong as it has ever been.

John Gray is the lead book reviewer of the NS. His latest book, “The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths”, is published by Allen Lane (£18.99)

Anyone who can read German can read the first book ever printed. If you can read Sumerian cuneiform, you can read clay tablets that were probably the first things ever written. Hard copy sticks around, equally a delight to scholars and a burden to office managers. More significantly, the read-out system - the human eye, hand, and brain for which the scribes of Sumer scratched in clay - has not changed appreciably, which is why nearly every written thing that survives, from the dawn of writing to yesterday's newspaper, is still accessible and constitutes a fragment of civilization. But as we move forward we discover that not all modern means of storing data share the characteristic of eternal readability. This problem originally appeared in the pre-electronic age, with the invention of sound recording. Signals were embodied in an object that required a specific machine to render it back into a form that could be apprehended by the senses. In those days, there were dozens of incompatible recording formats. The 10-inch, 78-rpm shellac platter ultimately won out, but not before the losers had produced a substantial body of recorded material, some of it irreplaceable. Serious audiophiles constructed customized machines that could play anything from Edison cylinders to the various platter formats - including those that ran from the axis to the circumference - to the standard outside-in disk. When LPs were introduced, turntable manufacturers included variable-speed switches, so you could play your old 45s as well as the new "albums." That was a slower era, of course, when decades passed between one standard and another. But the advent of digital computing in the early '50s vastly accelerated the pace at which we replace formats designed to store information. With computers increasing an order of magnitude in speed every two or three years, at the same time decreasing in cost, the pressure to dump the old, less efficient standards was irresistible. Obviously, much of the data stored on the old systems - the material of immediate or archival value to the organization doing the replacement - is recorded in the new format and lives on. But a lot of it doesn't. Digital archaeology is a discipline that doesn't quite exist yet, but may develop to deal with this problem, which is pervasive in the world of data. NASA, for example, has huge quantities of information sent back from space missions in the 1960s stored on deteriorating magnetic tape, in formats designed for computers that were obsolete twenty years ago. NASA didn't have the funds to transfer the data before the machines became junk. The National Center for Atmospheric research has "thousands of terabits" of data on aging media that will probably never be updated because it would take a century to do it. The archival tapes of Doug Engelbart's Augment project - an important part of the history of computing - are decaying in a St. Louis warehouse. "The 'aging of the archives' issue isn't trivial," says desktop publisher Ari Davidow. "We're thinking of CD-ROM as a semi-permanent medium, but it isn't. We already have PageMaker files that are useless." Also, recall that the PC era is an eye-blink compared to the mainframe generations that came and went under the care of the old Egyptian priesthood of computer geeks. (Would you believe a '60s vintage GE 225 machine that ran tapes that stored 256 bits per inch? Drop some developer on it and you can actually see the bits.) J. Paul Holbrook, technical services manager for CICNet (one such Egyptian priest), summarizes the problem this way: "The biggest challenge posed by systems like this is the sheer volume of information saved - there's too much stuff, it isn't indexed when it's saved, so there's lots of stuff you could never discover without loading it up again - that is, if you could load it up. "The nature of the technology makes saving it all a daunting task. It's certainly possible to keep information moving forward indefinitely, if you keep upgrading it as you go along. But given the volume of data and how fast it's growing, this could present an enormous challenge." Holbrook says twenty years is the maximum time you can expect to maintain a form of digital data without converting it to a newer format. He draws an analogy to print: "What if all your books had only a twenty-year life span before you had to make copies of them?" A 'museum of information,' suggested by WELL info-maven Hank Roberts, might help to stem the leakage. Roberts says, "[Museum] collections are spotty and odd sometimes, because whenever people went out to look for anything, they brought back 'everything else interesting.' And that's the only way to do it, because it always costs too much to get info on demand - a library makes everything available and throws out old stuff; a museum has lots of stuff tucked away as a gift to the future."

So a little while ago, the stars aligned and Adult Swim (Williams Street Records actually) decided to make an Off The Air style music video for Dan Deacon's 22 minute USA suite, to coincide with the release of an Adult Swim Dan Deacon single, which he created from a folder of Library songs that we've used in Space Ghost, Aqua Teen, and Perfect Hair Forever. For me, it's almost too much to comprehend. Perfect worlds colliding, so on and so forth. But here's the video, and see the links below for the single, and the talented people we used to help put this video together. HUGE thanks to Jason DeMarco (@Clarknova1)for thinking this was a good idea. The Dan Deacon Single video.adultswim.com/music/singles-2013/ Williams Street Records video.adultswim.com/music/ Video Contributors iStock.com Andrew Benson - pixlpa.com El Hombre Y La Tierra - rtve.es/television/30-anos-sin-felix/ Eric Hines - vimeo.com/erichinesphotography NASA ISS Crew Observations - eol.jsc.nasa.gov/Videos/CrewEarthObservationsVideos/ Groosland Ballet - mezzo.tv/en/our-programs/groosland-maguy-marin-het-nationaal-ballet-amsterdam Adam Bruneau - vimeo.com/user853456 Prelinger Archives - archive.org/details/prelinger Lior Ben Horin - vimeo.com/liorbenhorin Islands & Rivers - islandsandrivers.com Korduroy.tv - vimeo.com/11714524 Reel Water Productions - vimeo.com/56298775 Alan Steadman - vimeo.com/user6847830 Cody DeMatteis - codydematteis.comCast: dave hughesTags: Dan Deacon, USA, Off The Air, Adult Swim, Datamosh, Dave Hughes, Million Monkeys and whoa

How do you make a library live online? On a recent tour of the Folger Shakespeare Library, here in Washington, DC, I had the pleasure of seeing, in person, one of the library's 82 First Folios: This particularly Folio is graced by the doodles of one Elizabeth Okell, about whom little is known.

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. 

demonagerie:

British Library, Additional 62925, detail of f. 48r. Psalter, Use of Sarum (‘The Rutland Psalter’) c. 1260

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.