…ok, haven’t blogged in a while, it’s been a kind of intense semester… but the summer is finally here (windows open, cool breeze in כhitown) and so in the interest of posterity… here’s the last couple months re:cap >>>

exactly two months ago, Jason Soliday + Jeff Kolar + myself hosted the first NO-MEDIA event (at Tritriangle) (or technically the second NO-MEDIA event… the ‘pilot’ was organized by Jason at the last GLI.TC/H 2112) 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.

Meredith Kooi wrote and article about the event for Bad At Sports. The third NO-MEDIA was held last week at Defibrillator + we’re planning another one for mid summer, so keep your eyes on the tumblr if you’re interested in signing up for one, or just coming to watch! ++ visit the tumblr for full list of past performers.

Shortly after that first/second NO-MEDIA the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago held it’s last Internet Superheroes event for the season: Glitch Art 0P3NR3P0.NET Share Fest, which was an IRL installation of the 0p3nr3p0 (another GLI.TC/H spin-off project I’ve continued working on with Joseph Yolk Chiocchi) >> 0p3nr3p0.net is an open/public repository of glitch art worx; a modular art/archive project serving multiple goals + still undergoing some development. You can check out all the worx shared at the MCA here: http://0p3nr3p0.net/mca_archive.html ++ here’s some video documentation of the event that found its way to youtube:

0p3nr3p0‘s next venture will be yet another IRL installment, this time at Furtherfield Gallery in London. That’ll be on June 8th, but we’ve already started accepting (open) submissions, so hit up the repo if you’ve got glitch worx to share or if you just want to check out the worx thus far: the growing lineup for the furtherfield show can be found here: http://0p3nr3p0.net/furtherfield.html

In early April I traveled to Savannah Georgia for the FATE (Foundations in Art: Theory and Education) Conference + gave a talk on Social Media && Digital Ecology… by which I mean looking at social media not simply as a tool or communications platform but also as an environment + how understanding these systems grant us agency w/in them + how I take this perspective/position when teaching wwweb histories, theories && tech in my Wired: Creative Code + Advanced Web course in the Contemporary Practices department (SAIC’s foundations department). I don’t think there’s any documentation from the talk, but my presentation notes are available here: http://nickbriz.com/other/fate/

…and speaking of Wired + Contemporary Practices, on April 12th we held ArtBash, our end of the year exhibition of first year student worx and it was fux’n amazing!!! ++this year we held a speed show style event to exhibit wwweb worx made in our Wired classes, you can check those out here: http://wwwired.net/speedshow/ (site design by Wired student Paula Nacif )

The following week I went to Notacon (with nearly the entire SAIC New Media department, faculty && students) which is a super rad hacker conference held out in Cleveland Ohio. There’s a long story behind why I think this event is so amazing (…part of that story is documented in a video I made the last time I attended Notacon in 2010)… but this is perhaps beyond the scope of this already very long blog post. I will say it was awsum, and that I debuted lots of new work as SkeumorFX; a purist skeuomorphic design democrew (jon.satrom + myself), artifacts from this project should be finding its way onto the internetz soon…

I should mention one more thing re:Notacon… there was talk of this being the last (after 10years)… which neadless to say made me very sad, but there is hope that it will continue!!! However, they need some help/support in order to make that happen. Notacon is also home to PixelJam, the only (that I know of) midwest demoparty (the demoscene being an extremely rad/important fringe digital art scene) >>> Please help keep it alive: http://www.notacon.org/1674/notacon-going-forward/

…ok, lastly: some of my solo-worx hav-been/are-being shown around. My prosumer manifesto / video essay Apple Computers had a few screenings following the opening at the Gene Siskel in March, including at LEAP berlin as part of the (Glitch) Art Genealogies + at the University of Florida as part of UFLEX: Situational Cinema + the Axis International Art Festival + this really rad screening called Relax + Watch in Kansas City curated by Eric Fleischauer in a laundromat!

I also recently made a short video essay about missingNo (a glitch I have a very personal connection with) for SPAMM’s latest show: Safari , curated by La Turbo Avedon && Michaël Borras A.K.A Systaime >> I’m super stoked to be included in this, I’m a big fan of SPAMM’s last two shows ++ the other artists showing are some of my favz

“Following the interdisciplinary nature of InterArtive, the selected texts and artworks intend to give an overview –as complete as possible- of the phenomenon of copyright and the free culture movement as its counterpart. The content of this special volume raises the issue of copyright in relation to programming, music, digital culture, but also in the context of science and biology –copyright laws applied in medicine and life itself. At the same time, it highlights the issue of appropriation as a means of creating culture: although artistic creation and scientific research had always been based on the achievements of the past, today’s remix culture projects the value of creation as a ‘yeast’ for subsequent transformations.”

As part of Conversations at the Edge (at the Gene Siskel Film Center) jonCates is organizing a screening of worx from the Phil Morton Memorial Archive along side remix’d worx from the archive by contemporary new media artists (including worx sourced from an open call on the screenings tumblr). This Thursday (March 7, 8 pm) From the press nfoz:

Chicago video pioneer Phil Morton (1945-2003) anticipated remix in his genre-defying individual and collaborative projects that share characteristics with what we now call “New Media” today. Radically open, committed to process, collaborative, contentious, and charismatic; Morton embodied what he dubbed COPY-IT-RIGHT. An alternative to copyright, this ethic encourages making, sharing, remixing, and distributing media art, its systems, and technologies. To illuminate Morton’s continued influence and inspiration, Jon Cates, founder of the Phil Morton Memorial Archive, asked an international roster of contemporary video and new media artists to remix, rework, and re-imagine Morton’s original tapes. This program interweaves Morton’s work with his remixes, resulting in a generous mash-up of past, present, proto-digital and cyber psychedelic. Presented in collaboration with the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference. This program is generously supported by the Richard and Ellen Sandor Family Foundation.

screening includes new worx by, Yoshi Sodeoka, Jennifer Chan, Emilie Gervais, Akihiko Taniguchi, Constant Dullaart, Rick Silva and myself. I made a [re]mix/make of my favorite Phil Morton piece (and quite frankly one of my favorite pieces of video art ever) General Motors. Below Part1 of General Motors from the Phil Morton Memorial Archive && above a kinda ‘trailer’ for [re]mix/make Apple Computers, with some footage I had to cut from the final version of the video.

General Motors (Part 1) – Phil Morton (1976) from Phil Morton on Vimeo.

I’ve got a piece on the latest [super packed] DVD Dead Drop, a (previously unreleased… && unfinished) arware project. If you’re in Astoria, NYC between the 8th of Feb && the 14th of March stop by the Museum of the Moving Image with a blank DVD and get yourself a copy (bring an xtra DVD for me please ^_^). Curated/compiled by Ole Fach && Kim Asendorf of fa-g.org :

“The Internet, it is everywhere. It is here, it is there and it is where you actually are. It is so huge that nobody ever could print it. It is so deep that no one ever would dive to its end. There is peace and war in it, love and hate and all between. Once you have traveled through it, you will never forget, and you will come back, asap.”

Since then, Fach & Asendorf Gallery has served 24 online exhibitions of digital and net art to more than 28,000 unique visitors. To celebrate the beginning of their third season, Fach & Asendorf Gallery presents BEST OF, an enormous collection of unreleased and exclusive work by 78 artists from around the world spanning a broad range of formats including applications, videos, and animated GIFs. BEST OF is a whole week of Internet on DVD.

DVD Dead Drop at MMI NYC from aram bartholl on Vimeo.

Participating artists:
Absis Minas, Alan Butler, Alexander Peverett, Alfredo Salazar-Caro, Andrew Benson, Andrew Rosinski, Aoki and Peverett, Bea Fremderman, Brandon Blommaert, Carlos Saez, Charles Chalas, Chris Collins, Christian Petersen, Claudia Mate, Clement Valla and Kyle McDonald, Constant Dullaart, curatingyoutube.net, Daniel Leyva, David Kraftsow, Deanna Havas, Dominik Podsiadly, Emilie Gervais, Emilio Gomariz, Fabien Mousse, Ferestec, Florian Kuhlmann, Francoise Gamma, Fritz Laszlo Weber, Georges Jacoty, Goto80, Grace McEvoy, Hugo Scibetta, Jacob Engblom, Jan Robert Leegte, Jasper Elings, Jerome Saint-Clair, JK Keller, Johannes P Osterhoff, Jon Satrom, Jonas Lund, Jonathan Pirnay and Jörn Röder, jonCates, Jordan Tate, Jörg Piringer, Julien A Lacroix, Lorna Mills, Manuel Fernández, Mark Beasley, Mark Durkan, Martin Böttger, Matthew Williamson, Max Capacity, Michael Manning, Mitch Trale, Miyö Van Stenis, Nicholas O’Brien, Nicolas Boillot, Nicolas Sassoon, Nick Briz, Niko Princen, Paul Flannery, Philipp Teister, Rajeev Basu, Raphaël Bastide, Rick Silva, Rollin Leonard, Sara Ludy, Sarah Weis, Sebastian Schmieg and Silvio Lorusso, Stefan Riebel, Sterling Crispin, Ted Davis, Theodore Darst, Travis Hallenbeck, V5MT, Yoshi Sodeoka

This week In Media Res is hosting a week long chat on ‘Glitch Media’ lead by Evan Meaney + w/posts by Simon Tarr + Shawné Holloway + A. Bill Miller + myself. I’ll be posting on Friday: “there’s a huge noise in the middle of this: the ha[ng]ppenings of Glti.ch Karaoke” >>> video below:

This is a treasure trove for anyone into experimental media work! I used to work for CATE (Conversations at the Edge) while going to grad school at SAIC + have long awaited the day these would go online. I captured + edited plenty of these tapes and thus have watched many of them + can attest to how aawsum they are! CATE is a series the Film, Video, New Media and Animation department at SAIC puts on spearheaded by Amy Beste: each week another rad media artist visits Chicago to share + chat about their work, just check out this roster!

&& if ya live in Chicago the new season starts Feb 14th! http://blogs.saic.edu/cate/ !!!

Nick Briz (2012) copy<it>right
&& rotoscoped by Andrew Briz

DOWNLOAD MOV HERE

jon.satrom and I will be sharing our wurrrk + chatting about our involvement in the glitch art community && co-organizing the GLI.TC/H conference/festival/gathering @Columbia College tomorrow!!! Free + open to all, come and chat

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 7 AT 7:00PM

WABASH CAMPUS, #150 916 S. WABASH, CHICAGO, IL, CHICAGO

this is long overdue, but here are some screen recordings from the preliminary steps of the Glitch Codec Tutorial: http://nickbriz.com/glitchcodectutorial/preliminaries/ (from March,2010)

A couple years ago a colleague accused me of “killing my art” in a public presentation of the Glitch Codec Tutorial (GCT). Though my intention was to encourage others to engage with their computers at a level which would reveal system/media politix that often go unnoticed… he felt I was ruining the mystery and enabling others to produce lots of bad glitch art on youtube. There’s no escaping bad datamoshed youtube videos (with or without the GCT), and while many folks see the GCT as a method for producing ‘em, I hope most viewers are considering the <embeded> ideology:

(conversation on the GCT comment thread)

It’s been really rad to meet && chat with glitch artists/enthusiasts via comments && emails pertaining to the GCT + it’s been xciting to see the interesting projects others have developed using the GCT: everything from feature length experimental narratives to AR installations!

one question that’s come up a few times is, are there any preliminary steps? This usually comes from Ubuntu users wanting to follow along on their own systems (i.e. not using the .ISO). The answer is yes, there are a few preliminary steps, I left this out of the GCT in the interest of keeping it accessible (only focusing on the important part, i.e. hacking codecs and the politix therein). That said, I dug up screen recordings from a couple years ago where I go through all these preliminary steps, downloading the ffmpeg source and compiling the ‘glitchcodec’ from it.

+ folks interested in trying to set this up on other operating systems might also benefit. Quick disclaimer, this isn’t’ a ‘proper’ tutorial, it’s raw screen recordings from the compiling process… that said, I think it’s pretty straight fwd. So have at it: http://nickbriz.com/glitchcodectutorial/preliminaries/

Last week I shared my ‘perspective’ on the New Aesthetic with SETUP [a space in Utrecht which hosts events on digital culture] which held an opening for their Coded Perception expo. From their site [translated from Dutch via Google]:

• What images constructs the computer as he looks to our world? During the exhibition ‘Coded Perception‘ you can take a look at the new visual culture that originated here, and the responses of designers, thinkers and artists on this elusive imagery.

I was one of 8 artist/academics asked to curate a ‘perspective’ on the New Aesthetic using their projection expo tool. Below is the video I recorded for the introduction && my notes + links to the pieces which were projected.

#tag #glitch

“A glitch isn’t inherently ‘New Aesthetic,’ but it certainly becomes that when appropriated. Just like the voxel sculptures, glitch revels in the visual result of a functional system purely for its aesthetic merit.” – -Kyle Mcdonald

The following are ‘glitch’ works/observations I’ve appropriated for inclusion in this expo, thus having tagged them #theNewAesthetic. Some of these glitches have been provoked/composed by artists while others are less domesticated.

The New Aesthetic has been labeled a #movement, a kind of #genre and even a #NewWayOfSeeing. I prefer to label it a #conversation, in that it is less of an organized + manifesto-driven + institution and rather a collection [tumblr blog] of observations && relations [#tags == #glitch being one such tag]. An artist provoking glitches w/in their practice [and by the same token, a glitch naturally occurring w/in a digital system] is not concerned with the New Aesthetic. It is the New Aesthetic [or rather its champions && critics] who are concerned with glitches.

A quick google search for the new aesthetic will land you on tumblr, Gizmodo, Wired, the Atlantic, the Creators Project, etc. It is on this blogroll [and their comments] that the New Aesthetic #conversation is taking place, and where the works of [unsuspecting] others have been collected and offered to the rest of us as insight.

I’ve collected #glitches here for the insights they [may] possess about our digital culture + in being re-contextualized from ‘accidents’ worth discarding [or worse, fixing] to the subject of our attention: sometimes to disturb social [media] order, sometimes to bare witness to [otherwise] invisible systems, and other times… yes, as an #aesthetic.

——–

Kitten Glitches (Jake Elliott)
[ http://kittenglitches.tumblr.com/ ]
“Kitten Glitches takes images posted to Flickr that Flickr users have tagged w/the term ‘kittens’ + processes those found objects w/a “pseudorandom automatic databending script” then posting to a tumblr account.” [ jonCates, from ‘lists, boards, friends and feeds (PART V)’ on furtherfield.org ]. Many of Jake Elliott’s artware projects take the form of an automatic tumblr or twitter bot. These are sincerely considered, yet fun + playful + flippant. “Flippancy is antagonistic to art that prides itself on the importance of criticality. It not only upends the critical, but treats it as no more important than fun, than enjoyment, than entertainment. One could even say that debasing criticality is what flippancy does for its own entertainment.” [ Beth Capper, from a txt message ]

Glitchaus (Jeff Donaldson)
[ http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mbhyfvs9Mk1rgeepro3_1280.jpg ]
The digital made physical + the digital made fashion. For a handful of years artists [ like Melissa Barron ] have been working at the intersection of digital glitches and mechanically produced textiles. Most recently artist Phillip Stearns pre-sold $12,100 worth in glitch textiles [ +a few grand more in donations ] on Kickstarter. Jeff Donaldson (aka noteNdo) has recently launched ‘Glitchaus’, a design house devoted to, ‘glitch as a new paradigm in design.’ Donaldson began hacking [now vintage] game consoles in 2001. More recently he’s begun appropriating from his screen based practice to produce his new line. “Last year Antonio Cavadini, AKA Tonylight, and I worked together on a one of a kind button down for his personal collection. Custom made in Milan, Italy, the print is an 8bit design I created with one of my prepared NES. The same design was knit for the 2011 scarf editions. These are some pictures Antonio sent.” [ Jeff Donaldson, from the Glitchaus tumblr ]

Book of Durrow (as observed by Curt Cloninger)
[ http://lab404.com/glitch/media/durrow_large.jpg ]
“And so when you see a picture like this [ satellite image of agricultural patterns ], you see pixels, right? Those aren’t pixels. Those are fields. They’re irrigated fields on the border of Namibia and South Africa. But because we expect to see things in a certain world, our understanding of where the border between physical and digital has changed, because we’ve experienced this kind of imagery and these kind of views before, and we’re unconsciously comfortable of them being mixed up.” [ James Bridle, from ‘Waving at the Machines’ transcript ] Similarly, we could look at the entropy of the past [from our digital vector view] and tag it #glitch. “The Book of Durrow is a piece of analog ‘media’ created around 680 A.D. which has gradually glitched over the last several hundred years. Certain parts of it were colored with a pigment that has eaten away at its vellum substrate. This glitch actually follows the contours of the original ornamentation. It is a very slow glitch.” [ Curt Cloninger, from ‘GltchLnguistx: The Machine in the Ghost / Static Trapped in Mouths’ ]

$23 Quadrillion Charge (Visa)
[ http://goo.gl/pTTRe ]
“A technical snafu left some Visa prepaid cardholders stunned and horrified Monday to see a $23,148,855,308,184,500 charge on their statements. That’s about 2,007 times the size of the national debt. Josh Muszynski, 22, of Manchester, New Hampshire, was one Visa customer aghast to find the 17-digit charge on his bill. Adding insult to injury, he had also been hit with a $15 overdraft fee.” [ Jason Kessier, from ‘Glitch hits Visa users with more than $23 quadrillion charge’ CNN News ]. “Muszynski is still a customer of the bank, but now he checks his account balance every day. As another result of this incident, he has shifted his spending behavior to a more old-fashioned approach: ‘I now pay for things using cash. I used to rely on my debit card, but it’s just easier and safer for me to go to the bank and take cash out for what I need’” [ Jeff Papows, Ph.D from “GLITCH the Hidden Impact of Faulty Software”]

GLTI.CH Karaoke
[ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-ARWTyWPXo ]
Kyougn Kmi and Daniel Rourke [collectively known as GLTI.CH Karaoke ] facilitate happenings where participants are invited to sing karaoke duets with one another. Breaking from tradition, participants are paired with partners halfway across the world, singing together over the Internet. “Using free versions of Skype, YouTube and collaborative web software livestream.com, we orchestrated duets between people who had never met each other, who didn’t speak the same language, bypassing thousands of geographic miles with glitchy, highly compressed data and a little bit of patience.” [ GLTI.CH Karaoke, from their website ] At these ha[ngs]ppenings Kmi and Rourke go to great lengths to avoid glitches + delays + drops [having been present at a few I can attest to this] while trusting in the network’s unreliable signal to not render their name [GLTI.CH] innapropriate.

Glitchr
[ https://www.facebook.com/glitchr ]
Glitchr is the online [ facebook, tumblr && twitter ] handle of #NewMediaArtist + #SocialMediaInterventionist, Laimonas Zakas. Glitchr has made it his mission to find + exploit bugs + wholes w/in social media systems. His most notable works are perhaps the ‘hacks’ he has ‘exhibited’ on his facebook fan page. Comments + text that spill out of their frames and windows that feedback infinitely inwards are among the behaviors his page exhibits, but only temporarily–every hack Glitchr ‘composes’ facebook ‘fixes.’ “I have counted more than ten Facebook employees from FB HQ, not to mention those from international departments [as fans], […] They probably like Glitchr to detect bugs. Don’t know how much truth is there, but by now, the following bugs, that I have used in my posts, were fixed: Embedding animated pictures in notes, sharing animated pictures in thumbnails, unlimited extension of text in the post to the right side and some others.” [Glitchr, quoted by Alexia Tsotsis on techcrunch ]