From Modern Mythology: Our standard movie monsters deviate from their early folkloric roots in a number of major ways, but the most notable might be the general move from bewitchment to infection: where strigoi, revenants, zombi, and loup-garou are generally the result of targeted curses, post-Univ

Artist Daniel Temkin has been creating and discussing glitch art for over seven years. In that time, he's exhibited in solo and group shows, and had his work featured in Rhizome and Fast Company, amongst other publications. For Temkin, glitch art is about the disruption of algorithms, though algorithmic art is a bit of a misnomer. He prefers "algo-glitch demented" in describing the methods, aesthetics, and philosophy of glitch.

In January, Temkin published a fascinating glitch art essay on NOOART titled "Glitch && Human/Computer Interaction." There he laid down the philosophy and "mythology" of glitch, which had really started in a series of email conversations with Hugh Manon. Though there is no shortage of writings on glitch art, many aspects of the these texts didn't address what Temkin loved most about how it is created.

"The glitch aesthetic may be rooted in the look of malfunction, but when it comes to actual practice, there’s often not much glitch in glitch art," wrote Temkin in the essay. "Yes, some glitch artists are actually exploiting bugs to get their results — but for most it would be more accurate to describe these methods as introducing noisy data to functional algorithms or applying these algorithms in unconventional ways." This, he said, doesn't make it traditional algorithmic art (algorithm-designed artworks), but a more demented form of it—algo-glitch demented.

Over a series of email conversations, Temkin elaborated on some of his conclusions in "Glitch && Human/Computer Interaction." Aside from highlighting some of the best algo-glitch demented art, Temkin also talked about bad data, image hacking, and why computers are no less "image makers" than humans even though they aren't sentient (yet).

MOTHERBOARD: Aside from being an artist working in glitch, would you say that you've also sort of become a philosopher of glitch or algorithmic art, if there is such a thing?

Temkin: There's tons of writing on glitch, much of it very good (Lab404.com, for instance), but some aspects of glitch theory didn't jibe with what really interested me about the style. Originally, Hugh Manon and I started a long email conversation about glitch, which evolved into our 2011 paper. It ranged across glitch aesthetics, methodology, and issues around authorship, while delving into glitch's ambivalence about error—the way the glitch is possible because of software's ability to "fail to fully fail" when coming across unexpected data.

We questioned why computer error is so emphasized in this form when nothing is really at stake in a digital file (a deleted but endlessly reproducible JPEG has none of the aura of an Erased DeKooning), and what it means to purposely simulate an error, something that ordinarily has power because it is unexpected and outside of our control.

Ted Davis, FFD8 project

These issues stuck with me, until I considered Clement Valla's familiar quote about his Postcards From Google Earth project: that "these images are not glitches... they are the absolute logical result of the system." It was a familiar quote, but in this instance got me thinking about how most glitchwork can be described the same way—as products of perfectly functional systems.

I wrote my recent piece for NOOART, arguing that glitch's preoccupation with error doesn't always serve it well, that it limits the scope of what's produced and how we talk about it. Bypassing computer error opened new avenues of investigation about our relationship both with technology and with logic systems more generally, and got at what interested me more about the style we call glitch.

In the NOOART essay, you write: "Some glitch artists are actually exploiting bugs to get their results — but for most it would be more accurate to describe these methods as introducing noisy data to functional algorithms or applying these algorithms in unconventional ways." Can you elaborate on that point?

In the paper, I discuss JPEG corruption, one of the fundamental glitch techniques. Introduce bad data to a JPEG file, and you'll see broken-looking images emerge. I use this example because it's so familiar to glitch practice. JPEG is not just a file format but an algorithm that compresses/decompresses image data.

When we "corrupt" a JPEG, we're altering compressed data so that it (successfully) renders to an image that no longer appears photographic, taking on a chunky, pixelated, more abstract character we associate with broken software. To the machine, it is not an error—if the image were structurally damaged, we would not be able to open it. This underscores the machine as an apparatus indifferent to what makes visual sense to us, at a place where our expectations clash with algorithmic logic.

Daniel Temkin, Dither Studies #2, 2011

The excitement of altering JPEG data directly is the sense of image hacking—making changes at the digital level without being able to predict the outcome. This becomes more apparent in other glitch techniques, such as sonification, which add layers of complexity to the process. Giving up control to a system or process has a long history in art.

Gerhard Richter describes committing to a systematic approach, veiling the work from conscious decisions that may ruin or limit it. As he puts it, "if the execution works, this is only because I partly destroy it, or because it works in spite of everything—by not detracting and by not looking the way I planned" [p179, Gerhard Richter, Panorama]. In digital art, we often function in an all-too-WYSIWYG environment. Glitch frees us from this, bringing us to unexpected places.

Can you draw a distinction between generative art (which can feature algorithms) and your concept of algo-glitch demented?

I call it algo-glitch demented, as opposed to algorithmic art (which I understand meaning generative art that uses algorithms). I'll have to paraphrase Philip Galanter and say that generative art is any practice where the artist sets a system "in motion with some degree of autonomy," resulting in a work.

"Glitch is a cyborg art, building on human/computer interaction. The patterns created by these unknown processes is what I call the wilderness within the machine." What makes algo-glitch demented is how we misuse existing algorithms, running them in contexts that had never been intended by their designers. Furthermore, there are moments of autonomy in algo-glitch, but this autonomy is not what defines it as algo-glitch; what's more important is the control we give up to the process.

You call glitch art a collaboration with the machine. That's an interesting point because the human is conscious of this, while the machine is not. Or, do you have another way of looking at that collaboration?

Machines are not sentient, but they are image-makers. Trevor Paglen, in a recent Frieze Magazine piece, says we are now or very soon to be at the point "where the majority of the world’s images are made by-machines-for-machines," and "seeing with the meat-eyes of our human bodies is increasingly the exception," refering to facial-recognition systems, qr code readers, and a host of other automation.

One of the most compelling ideas to come from James Bridle's New Aesthetic is how we can treat the machine as having a vision—even as we know it's not sentient—and just how strange this vision is, that does not hold human beings as its audience.

Jeff Donaldson, panasonic wj-mx12 video feedback, 2012

Glitch artists have been doing this for a long time, treating it as an equal collaborator and seeing where it leads us as we cede control to broken processes and zombie algorithms. Curt Cloninger describes it as "painting with a very blunt brush that has a mind of its own;" in this way, glitch is a cyborg art, building on human/computer interaction. The patterns created by these unknown processes is what I call the wilderness within the machine.

Can you talk about glitch as mythology? I've never heard it described as such.

I'm probably being a bit obnoxious there, using mythology to describe the gap between how we talk about glitch and what we're actually doing. There are several strains of work within glitch or that overlap with glitch. There is Dirty New Media, which is related to noise-based work; materialist explorations; the algo-glitch I've emphasized in the JPEG example; and what we might call "minimal slippage glitch" (a term that arose in a Facebook discussion between me and Rosa Menkman).

Minimal Slippage fits a familiar contemporary art scenario of the single gesture that puts things in motion and reveals something new. It's great when things actually work this way, but when this language is used to describe work made by manipulating data repeatedly, there's a problem.

I also take issue with the term glitch art. I don't propose we replace it, only to be more conscious of its influence. If we produce work with other visual styles using glitch processes, why limit ourselves to work that has an error-strewn appearance? This connection begins to seems artificial. I kept this in mind with my Glitchometry series. I use the sonification technique to process simple geometric shapes (b&w squares and triangles, etc.) into works that range from somewhat glitchy to abstractions that fall very far from a glitch aesthetic. They emphasize process, the back-and-forth with the machine, and an anxiety about giving up that control.

Clement Valla, from “Iconoclashes” 2013

With Glitchometry Stripes (an extension of the Glitchometry work), the results are even less glitchy in appearance; this time using only sound effects that cleanly transform the lines, ending up with Op Art-inspired, crisply graphic works that create optical buzzing when scrolled across the screen.

You mention Ted Davis's FFD8 project in your essay. What is it about the work that you like?

FFD8 is JPEG image hacking, with protection against messing up the header (which would make the image undisplayable). It's a gentle introduction to glitching, but it illustrates how it works, which encourages one to go deeper. I'm suspicious of glitch software that does all the work for you, essentially turning glitch styling into the equivalent of a Photoshop filter. With FFD8, enough of the process is exposed that folks starting out in the style might decide to take the next step and mess with raw files directly, or build their own software, or discover some new avenue to create work.

What's your opinion on something like the iPhone's panorama function, which, if you move the camera fast or in unexpected directions, creates glitches? It's movement-based as opposed to other types of glitch.

I think someone will come along with a brilliant idea of how to use it to do something fresh and interesting. One interesting work that uses photo-stitching (although not on the iPhone) is Clement Valla's Iconoclasts series. He loads images of gods from the Met's collection and lets Photoshop decide how to combine them, creating improbable composites, many physically impossible. It works because of how carefully the objects were photographed. Each is lit the same way with the same background. Many of these religious relics come from cultures where it was believed that such objects were not created by human hands. Now an algorithm, also not human, decides how to combine them to construct new artifacts.

Daniel Temkin, Glitchometry Circles #6, 2013

Where do you feel you've been most successful in your own projects?

I never trust artists to tell me which of their works are more successful. [laughs] I'll tell you the theme I'm most interested in. Much of my work revolves around this clash between human thinking and computer logic, and the compulsiveness that comes from trying to think in a logical way. My own experience with this comes from programming, which is my background from before art. Glitch gives me a way to create chaotic works as a release from the overly structured thinking programming requires.

As a few examples of work that deals with this, my Dither Studies expose the seemingly irrational patterns that come from the very simple rules of dithering patterns. They began as a collaboration with Photoshop, where I asked it to dither a solid color with two incompatible colors. From there, I constructed a web tool that walks through progressions of dithers.

In Drunk Eliza, I re-coded the classic chat bot using my language Entropy, where all data is unstable. Since the original Eliza has such a small databank of phrases, yet so clearly has a personality, I wanted to know how she would seem with her mind slowly disintegrating, HAL-style. Drunk Eliza was the result. The drunken responses she gets online have been a great source of amusement for me.

Yearly reminder: unless you're over 60, you weren't promised flying cars. You were promised an oppressive cyberpunk dystopia. Here you go. An always-on, pervasive computer network offers addictive levels of immersion while doubling as a global panopticon.

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)

Freud’s ideas are today not simply rejected as false. They are repudiated as being dangerous or immoral; the “gloomy mythology” of warring instincts is condemned as a kind of slander on the species, the fundamental nobility of which it is sacrilege to deny. To be sure, righteous indignation has informed the response to Freud’s thought from the beginning. But its new strength helps explain one of the more remarkable features of intellectual life at the start of the 21st century, a time that in its own eyes is more enlightened than any other: the intense unpopularity of Freud, the last great Enlightenment thinker.

Petrichor (pronounced /ˈpɛtrɨkər/; from Greek petros "stone" + ichor "the fluid that is supposed to flow in the veins of the gods in Greek mythology") is the name of the scent of rain on dry earth.

The term was coined in 1964 by two Australian researchers, Bear and Thomas, for an article in the journal Nature.[1] In the article, the authors describe how the smell derives from an oil exuded by certain plants during dry periods, whereupon it is adsorbed by clay-based soils and rocks. During rain, the oil is released into the air along with another compound, geosmin, producing the distinctive scent. In a follow-up paper, Bear and Thomas (1965) showed that the oil retards seed germination and early plant growth.[2]