I am interested in innovative, creative uses and/or abuses of the Twitch streaming platform. Streamers who have used the platform as a creative medium, regardless of its (main) intention as a place for game streaming. Art and performance are what come to mind, but I am open to anything, either a single use case or a particular streamer who uses Twitch in an ongoing 'weird' way. My knowledge of Twitch is small, so I am limited on examples of what I mean... but the streamer 'Sushi Dragon' is doing super amazing things. Using the Twitch platform as a way for viewers to kind of 'programme' his dancing routines. Users respond in live chat, and the responses determine what music is played, filters drafted, and how Sushi Dragon is supposed to respond (and dance). The results are often hilarious.

The thin line between theory and practice: a conversation on Sonic Acts Academy 2016From February 26th to the 28th, in Amsterdam, took place the Sonic Acts Academy, a three-day festival happening in Stedelijk Museum, De Brakke Grond and Paradiso.

I am privileged to be involved in Ways of Something: an incredible collaboration between artist Lorna Mills and (currently) 85 artists. Episode 3 will have its World Premiere at The Photographer’s Gallery, London, on February 12th 2015. 85 web-based artists remake John Berger’s historic documentary ‘Ways of Seeing’ (1972) one minute at a time. Originally commissioned by The One Minutes, at Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam and compiled by Lorna Mills, the episodes present a sequence of 3D renderings, filmic remixes, videos and webcam performances which subvert the tropes of art history in an entertaining and overwhelming way. Followed by a Q&A between Julia van Mourik, director of The One Minutes and Lorna Mills via Skype.

Artists in Episode 1 1: Daniel Temkin, 2: Rollin Leonard, 3: Sara Ludy, 4: Rhett Jones, 5: Jaakko Pallasvuo, 6: Dafna Ganani, 7: Jennifer Chan, 8: Rea McNamara, 9: Theodore Darst, 10: Matthew Williamson, 11: Hector Llanquin, 12: Christina Entcheva, 13: V5MT, 14: Marisa Olson, 15: Joe McKay, 16: Carla Gannis, 17: Nicholas O’Brien, 18: Eva Papamargariti, 19: Rosa Menkman, 20: Kristin Lucas, 21: Jeremy Bailey & Kristen D. Schaffer, 22: Giselle Zatonyl, 23: Paul Wong, 24: Alfredo Salazar-Caro, 25: Sally McKay, 26: RM Vaughan & Keith Cole, 27: Andrew Benson, 28: Christian Petersen, 29: Faith Holland, 30: Jennifer McMackon Artists in Episode 2 1: Kevin Heckart, 2: Geraldine Juarez, 3: Gaby Cepeda, 4: Angela Washko, 5: Emilie Gervais, 6: LaTurbo Avedon, 7: Lyla Rye, 8: Mattie Hillock, 9: Antonio Roberts, 10: Georges Jacotey, 11: Daniel Rourke, 12: Sandra Rechico & Annie Onyi Cheung, 13: Yoshi Sodeoka, 14: Alma Alloro, 15: LoVid, 16: Andrea Crespo, 17: Ad Minoliti, 18: Arjun Ram Srivatsa, 19: Carrie Gates, 20: Isabella Streffen, 21: Esteban Ottaso, 22: ZIL & ZOY, 23: Hyo Myoung Kim, 24: Jesse Darling, 25: Tristan Stevens, 26: Erica Lapadat-Janzen, 27: Claudia Hart, 28: Anthony Antonellis Artists in Episode 3 1: Carine Santi-Weil, 2: Nicolas Sassoon, 3: Tom Sherman, 4: Kim Asendorf and Ole Fach, 5: Rafaela Kino, 6: Alex McLeod, 7: Kate Wilson and Lynne Slater, 8: Aleksandra Domanović, 9: Systaime, 10: Erik Zepka, 11: Adam Ferriss, 12: Rodell Warner and Arnaldo James, 13: Debora Delmar, 14: Brenna Murphy, 15: Nick Briz, 16: Carlos Sáez, 17: Jenn E Norton, 18: Juliette Bonneviot, 19: Luis Nava, 20: Vince McKelvie; 21: Claudia Maté 22: Evan Roth, 23: Shana Moulton, 24: Sabrina Ratté, 25: Jordan Tannahill, 26: Vasily Zaitsev feat.MON3Y.us, 27: Ann Hirsch REVIEWS - Read an interview with Lorna Mills about Ways Of Something on The Creators Project. Read here. - Ben Davis wrote an essay looking at the first two episodes on artnet. Read here. - The project was also featured by Animal New York here.

Julia van Mourik is an independent curator and editor, based in Amsterdam. Since 1999, she has produced visual arts projects and has composed programmes and publications, exploring new possibilities for presenting the moving image. She is Director of The One Minutes, a place for artists to experiment, to produce and to present within the inexorable limit of 60 seconds, hosted by Sandberg Instituut, Masters of Art and Design in Amsterdam (NL). She is also director of the Lost & Found programme, where artists show material that doesn’t fit comfortably into regular gallery contexts, that seems out of place. And she is Adviser to the to the Dutch Cultural Media Fund, promoting the development and production of high-quality artistic programmes by the national public broadcasting corporations. Lorna Mills has actively exhibited her work internationally in both solo and group exhibitions since the early 1990’s. Her practice has included obsessive Ilfochrome printing, obsessive painting, obsessive super 8 film & video, and obsessive on-line animated GIFs incorporated into restrained off-line installation work. She has also co-curated monthly group animated GIF projections with Rea McNamara for the Sheroes performance series in Toronto, a group GIF projection event When Analog Was Periodical in Berlin co-curated with Anthony Antonellis, and a touring four person GIF installation, :::Zip The Bright:::, that originated at Trinity Square Video in Toronto. In June 2013, Mills opened a solo exhibition ‘The Axis of Something’ at TRANSFER, her work was exhibited by the gallery at the Moving Image Art Fair NYC in March 2014, and her second solo show for TRANSFER is currently in development for 2015.  Her most recent solo project was Ungentrified a large GIF projection installation at OCADU in Toronto for Nuit Blanche. £7 / £4 concs Episodes 1 and 2 are produced by The One Minutes at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam. Episode 3 is produced by Lorna Mills.        

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.

I wrote an essay released in tandem with GLITCHOMETRY: Daniel Temkin‘s solo exhibition, held at Transfer Gallery, New York – November 16 through December 14, 2013. The publication also features an interview with the artist by Curt Cloninger. Excerpt from my essay : Glitchometry turns away from the ‘new earth’; the milieu of cyphers that constitute our contemporary audio-visual cognizance. By foregoing the simulations relied on when Photoshopping an image Temkin assumes an almost meditative patience with the will of the digital. As with Duchamp’s infra-thin – ‘the warmth of a seat which has just been left, reflection from a mirror or glass… velvet trousers, their whistling sound, is an infra-thin separation signalled’ – the one of the image and the other of the raw data is treated as a signal of meagre difference. Data is carefully bent in a sequence of sonifications that always risk falling back into the totalising violence of failure. Download as PDF More info : danieltemkin.com and TransferGallery.com

International Conference on Narrative, ‘Narrating Digital Things for Posthuman Ends’ as part of panel, ‘It Shall Have Become: Time and Presentness in Narratives of Digital Process’, Manchester Metropolitan University, with Zara Dinnen, Rob Gallagher, Simon Clark, June 26th-29th 2013

Jennifer Chan giving aura to a primary structure

Animated GIF from the website Parked Domain Girl Tombstone (2013) DR: On first inspection, a lot of your work appears to be rooted in the 90s, drawing on the low bandwidth aesthetics inherent in GIFs, midi plugins, embedded frames, ASCII art, and forgotten webring hyperlinks. But the 90s comes out in other ways, too. Pop-cultural undercurrents include Nintendo and Leisure Suit Larry; mixtapes and a particular flavor of Europop. How/why do these things speak to you as a contemporary (Web) artist? EG: The origin of the meaning of most collected n found elements i use in my work is rooted in the 90s. My work itself isn't rooted in the 90s. I've been dragged to use that type of stuff mostly bc i like it n its accurate w the topics im interested in rn. Still tho the source material or what it evokes isn't really important. It jst adds semantic layer/s for some people n so does the aesthetics. Everything linked to that part of my work is treated as game elements (to be inserted) in different contexts of reception w diff codes of conduct. Its about notebooks. All that content is accessory to my work. You could really jst take the whole structure/s n insert totally diff content. It'd still make sense. Maybe Im already doing that but its not linked anywhere rn. Its kinda like people who enjoy playing Canabalt but hate playing Robot Unicorn. The gameplay is literally the same. Jst the content n aesthetic is different. That changes the whole experience. Whats a contemporary web artist?

Blinking Girls Cave (2012) DR: I love the idea of interchangeable (aesthetic) content, as if Andy Warhol could have changed the contents of a "textures" subfolder and suddenly transformed a Campbell's Soup painting into a Heinz. How is play more than a structural component to your work? I'm thinking about rulemaking and breaking, especially your collaboration with Sarah Weis, Blinking Girls Cave, which the park authorities took a disliking to while it was in progress. [Ed. – Blinking Girls Cave (2012) was a part of Apache Project, a series of artworks installed at Mother Neff State Park in Moody, Texas, in a cave that was once used by the Tonkawa Indians as a shelter as well as a burial site. After an initial proposal for an installation in the cave was rejected by park management (despite having been initially approved), the project ultimately took the form of a photo shoot, in which GIFs—some of them drawn from the imagery in seduction-based adventure game Leisure Suit Larry—were displayed on tablets, smartphones and laptops that were placed within the cave and documented. This scaled-back version also proved unacceptable to park management.] EG: I think play is a structural component of life. It's related to how i conceptualize, process n think stuff. It opens space for experimentation. To me, its more related to what sociologists do than anything performance art; like how-to approach different types of social dynamics from diff point of view per example. Also, like that Andy Warhol eating a hamburger video; a partly exhibited learning process. Breaking rules wasn't really a thing in ♡ ♥ Blinking Girls ♥ ♡. What happened at Mother Neff is that our first intended installation, which involved light effects n bubble machines, was disapproved at the last minute bc of the damage it could cause to the cave walls. Blinking Girls Cave thus became about hardwares n gifs. During the documentation - that being the installation - Nate Hitchcock, the director n curator n everything at Apache Project, was interrupted by a park ranger who requested him to leave the park because taking pictures n or making videos in the cave wasn't appropriate. DR: There’s a real sense of a partly exhibited learning process in your URL works: an ever growing array of Web 1.0 motifs, exhibited as unique URLs. For me these works expose the Internet as a spatial, material thing, still begging to be explored. You spoke of sociology, is there perhaps something archaeological in your practice? EG: The internet is def abt spatiality and materiality. One can relate to these notions differently. To me, its really more abt physicality. I wasn't really thinking abt them topics when i made these. It's jst kinda there in all websites. Thats the internet. I wouldnt say that these r really web 1.0. The user in both cases isnt primarily a content consumer. Backdoor trojan girl was exhibited at Domain Gallery in a way that highlighted the urls. Under other circumstances, it'd prob be different. The archaeological in my practice is kinda superficial rn. DR: Your URL artworks, http://backdoortrojangirl.net (2012) and http://w-h-a-t-e-v-e-r.net (2013), both flicker between female and male signifiers. Do you think the Web is gendered? How would you approach gender differently in work produced for a gallery context? EG: I don't think the web is gendered. Culture is n adds gendered filter/s to it in some cases. I don't know if i would approach it; maybe i'd dig a hole for feminists/feminism or i'd do a show about postpostpostpostpostpostpost-transexualism. It'd be really fun. DR: For your ongoing collaborative online exhibition Art Object Culture (2011-), you and Lucy Chinen bring together two artists each month to create a new work based on trinkets that were purchased online. These readily available objects accrue value as they pass through the project. I could ask you about the long shadow cast by Duchamp’s readymades, about ownership, exhibition value and artistic identity as they relate to the Web. Instead, I’d really like it if you shared some AOC secrets with us. What criteria do you use to select the artists? Which is your favorite submission so far and why? EM: Art Object Culture offers a website template for artists to explore art making within one rule: create new art objects from items pre-existing in various online stores. We mainly seek artists that have the ability to bend that rule. I don't really have a favorite submission. I like some more than others but my opinion on this is not important. There is no secret. The current format is a translation of our ideas on AOC related topics from 2011. It might eventually mutate. Hopefully we'll sell all the artworks that were made for it before that n or have a show; some kinda showcase for all of them together w everyone that made stuff for it n other people too.

Émilie Gervais  Age: my age range is 7 to 77. Location: Paca/FR. How long have you been working creatively with technology? How did you start? Since forever. I started by playing games on some used pc and recontextualizing movies, game related stuff as improvised play based on the characters n plot/s with friends at school. I've always spent a lot of time randomly surfing the internet while chatting on microsoft comic chat, mIRC, the palace n was really into customizing anything that was customizable ie. winamp skins, mirc themes, etc... Beside that, my fav drawing thing is Lite Bright n i've been deleting, moving, opening files since ive been typing on a keyboard. I've crashed the home computer a couple of times. Describe your experience with the tools you use. How did you start using them? Where did you go to school? What did you study? Experimentation n play! My main tool is the internet or jst even information. In college, ive done a dble cursus in literature n social studies. Then, I dropped out of art school in Mtl n went to Paris. In 2010/2011, i did a dnap/bfa in 1yr at the Ecole d'Art Superieure d'Aix-en-Provence where I'm currently finishing a dnsep/master w a focus in hypermedia. My thesis text thing's title is Fuck Privacy Demo Game Over. What traditional media do you use, if any? Do you think your work with traditional media relates to your work with technology? I'm not media based. The traditional/non traditional dichotomy makes no sense to me. I jst use whatever depending on the project im working on. It's more about ideas n processes. Are you involved in other creative or social activities (i.e. music, writing, activism, community organizing)? I tweet n play music on my iphone everyday. Before that, i played ice hockey n have done some cycling as a summer training thing. I love dancing. Also, health related stuff; superfoods n other stuff, but i mostly eat pizza n candies. Thats creative. I'm involved with adrenaline, gaming, immersive as non immersive n fun everyday. I'm really concerned about open source n how it affects education/academics. But im not seriously implicated in anything, im jst personally into it rn. 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? I worked at HMV Megastore n Liquid Nutrition in Montreal while being in college. I spent one summer selling autoportraits on the Pont Saint-Louis in Paris w a friend. I worked at some pizza place on bd de Belleville. The boss never slept, ate one fried egg a day and gave us free pizza n drinks everyday. Clients ordered one expresso and remained seated for hrs jst talking abt whatever. Total Belleville cliche. Everything influences the way i process stuff. RN im an art student. Who are your key artistic influences? Toru Iwatani, Kassia Meador, Gustav Klimt n the internet. Have you collaborated with anyone in the art community on a project? With whom, and on what? I collaborate w Lucy Chinen on Art Object Culture n conducted the Blinking Girls project w Sarah Weis. I work/ed w friends that are mostly into painting n music. I ghostpost alot n collaborate w lots of people actively n passively everyday on everything. Its mostly passive networked collaboration/s. Do you actively study art history? Im surrounded by it. I've been into it for as long as i can remember. My dad always brought the family to museums. When i was living in San Francisco, we went to Los Angeles one time mostly jst to go n visit the Getty museum. My college art history teacher was totally awesome. Art history entertains me. Do you read art criticism, philosophy, or critical theory? If so, which authors inspire you? I have phases in which i read alot and others in which i dont at all. Most of the time, i try not to remember the authors so it remains jst about the ideas. RN im reading Critical Play by Mary Flanagan. Are there any issues around the production of, or the display/exhibition of new media art that you are concerned about? Yes, but no at the same time. It really depends on the whole concept of a project. I kinda hate almst everything that is JUST about representation when it comes to new media related art tho, so i'd say im concerned about that. This conversation took place between 22 March and 1 April on a Google Drive document.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO DIGITAL ART? Cast your mind back to the late 1990s, when we got our first e-mail accounts. Wasn’t there a pervasive sense that visual art was going to get digital, too, harnessing the new technologies that were just beginning to transform our lives? But somehow the venture never

I took a trip to Chicago for GLI.TC/H 2112! – A conference/festival/carnival/movement in honour (and despite) of hardware/software/wetware errors, databends and feedback blackholes. I took a ton of photographs, you can view them on Flickr (better quality) or Facebook (dotted with comments, insights and exultations from the GLI.TC/H community). I intend to write more about the event, but for now I will post my talk here, which I gave on Saturday 8th December. It’s title is Glitches in Things and the “Friendly Medium”, a talk expanding on an idea I have been carting around for a couple of years now. Updated with Object Oriented insights I hope it acts as a mental toolkit for artists looking to dance with objects, in all their glitchy splendour. As usual, I completely ignored my notes whilst talking, for this reason it’s worth listening to the question and answer bit afterwards. Infinite thanks must go to Rosa Menkman, Jon Satrom and Nick Briz – the GLI.TC/H Bots at the heart of the fest. Thank you for inviting me to participate. More on OOO, glitches, kipple and Things to come reeeeal soon… (the talky bit starts a few minutes in)

Art historian and associate professor at New York’s CUNY Graduate Center Claire Bishop has taken to the pages of Artforum’s September edition to issue a kind of rebuke for contemporary art. She argues, in an extended essay that only briefly detours into egregious artspeak, that though the new realities of technology and the internet provide the fundamental context for art currently being made, art and artists have failed to critically confront this context and are too content simply to respond and adapt to it. Bishop writes simplistically of digital art that “somehow the venture never really gained traction,” and that “the appearance and content of contemporary art have been curiously unresponsive to the total upheaval in our labor and leisure inaugurated by the digital revolution.” Is it really the case that art has been so nonreactive to such a huge change in our world?

Bishop rightly notes that, “Most art today deploys new technology at one if not most stages of its production, dissemination, and consumption.” Like any time in history, artists have taken to contemporary technology, adapting computers, portable projectors, and server networks as art-making materials (see Stan VanDerBeek’s 1963-66 “Movie-Drome” at the New Museum’s Ghosts in the Machine exhibition for one such example). Yet the author goes on to cite contemporary artists who aren’t exactly the names one immediately comes up with when considering the avant-garde of digital art. She considers Frances Stark, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Ryan Trecartin as artists who do make some effort to be technologically engaged, but Bishop fails to acknowledge other artists who truly confront digital technology, both appropriating it and reflecting on it critically.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO DIGITAL ART? Cast your mind back to the late 1990s, when we got our first e-mail accounts. Wasn’t there a pervasive sense that visual art was going to get digital, too, harnessing the new technologies that were just beginning to transform our lives? But somehow the venture never

I have some work in A Shot to the Arse, an exhibition coming August 14th at Michaelis Galleries, Cape Town. Many thanks to Belinda Blignaut!

Last year I released a music single through iTunes. Entitled RAWTunes.exe 10.4.2, it was my first forray into sound-art/noise-art. I AM a popstar. I am proud to announce the release of my 8 track album RAWTunes.exe 10! You can listen to a selection of tracks below (making sure that all small children and dogs are at a safe distance), or buy the whole lot for £7.99: RAWTunes.exe 10 by machinemachine It took me about 20 minutes to make this album. Here’s how you can do it yourself:

Using a program like Audacity, open ANY file as RAW data Choose your conversion method The file you send to iTunes and release to the world MUST be in this format: 16 bit (sample size), 44.1 kHz (sample rate), 1411 kbps (bit rate) stereo wav So, after playing with your file (or not doing anything in particular) export it with these options Using a service like TuneCore, release your album to the world Become a famous Noise artist like me

I chose to convert a series of iTunes executable files, each one plucked from a long list of releases under the iTunes 10 label, but you can choose anything. Have a look on Souncloud for a bunch of people who have done just this. This is ‘art’, so of course my work has to be critically engaged, and self aware. Thankfully, iTunes regulations make this really easy: Content that is not produced by Apple Inc. must not include the word “iTunes” anywhere in the metadata or cover art. I would argue that the content of my album is 100% ‘produced by Apple Inc.’ but they wouldn’t let me call it ‘iTunes.exe 10′. It was only after several iterations of cover art that the album was allowed into the Apple store. These are just some of the woes that a true Noise artist must suffer in the pursuit of their art.

Discussions of religion are typically about God. Atheists reject religion because they don’t believe in God; Jews, Christians and Muslims take belief in God as fundamental to their religious commitment. The philosopher John Gray, however, has recently been arguing that belief in God should have little or nothing to do with religion. He points out that in many cases — for instance, “polytheism, Hinduism and Buddhism, Daoism and Shinto, many strands of Judaism and some Christian and Muslim traditions” — belief is of little or no importance. Rather, “practice — ritual, meditation, a way of life — is what counts.” He goes on to say that “it’s only religious fundamentalists and ignorant rationalists who think the myths we live by are literal truths” and that “what we believe doesn’t in the end matter very much. What matters is how we live.”

The fine arts are articulated into discourse in several ways; however, usually it happens either post-factum or externally to the field of arts. An art history might serve as a fine example of the former, and governmental policy – of the latter. In this regard, so-called art or artists’ manifestos are a unique genre – a programmatic statement of purposes evaluating the current state of arts and proposing possible future developments from the perspective of creators, i.e. artists, instead of scholars, critics or politicians. Initially, a manifesto was a piece of evidence in a court of law, put on show to catch the eye, a public declaration; but the genre, as we know it today, has its roots in political documents of the 19th century. Any manifesto – political and artists’ alike – signifies the presence of more than one legitimating discourse within the particular field of activity; thus, one can say – the appearance of a manifesto serves as a signal of a certain crisis. A manifesto is simultaneously a diagnosis and a document of ideology, created to convince and convert. It is also a way how an artist speaks to her audience, crafting and legitimizing a new identity in the act of speaking, i.e. using her initial right to articulate it, instead of being categorized by someone else. Offering something new, the authors of manifestos stand for change, and thus often criticize, oppose and deny the status quo. The political dimension and orientation towards the future highlight manifestos among similar genres, such as curatorial statements or artistic conceptions. Formally, art manifestos usually represent a particular movement or a group of persons rather than individual artists; often they are written in a form of numbered statements and tend to use extreme means of language.

In this view belonging to a religion involves accepting a set of beliefs, which are held before the mind and assessed in terms of the evidence that exists for and against them. Religion is then not fundamentally different from science, both seem like attempts to frame true beliefs about the world. That way of thinking tends to see science and religion as rivals, and it then becomes tempting to conclude that there's no longer any need for religion.

This was the view presented by the Victorian anthropologist JG Frazer in his book The Golden Bough, a study of the myths of primitive peoples that is still in print. According to Frazer, human thought advances through a series of stages that culminate in science. Starting with magic and religion, which view the world simply as an extension of the human mind, we eventually reach the age of science in which we view the world as being ruled by universal laws.

Liam Gillick at e_flux

Contemporary art does not account for that which is taking place

Animated GIF Q & A : on @tommoody blog

The internet finally seems to have made a dint in New York's institutional art world. Cory Arcangel, an artist who began his career manipulating old computer technologies and critiquing web culture, has an entire floor to himself at The Whitney. At the age of 33, his show Pro Tools makes him the youngest artist to receive a solo show at the institution since Bruce Nauman in 1973. Meanwhile, over at MoMA PS1, 30-year-old art star Ryan Trecartin is gathering steam with his four hour-plus video exhibiton of fucked-up child-adults on Blackberries, titled Any Ever. The show at PS1, chock full of internet jargon, is just one stop on a world tour that includes the Istanbul Modern Museum and the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Given the ridiculous level of buzz now surrounding these shows, one has to wonder just what we're expecting from the art.