This Friday, 17th May, I have the pleasure of providing visuals for Elmo Sexwhistle at the Academy 3 in Birmingham from 7pm.

They’ll be supporting Johnny Normal and Among The Echoes. Tickets are £6 and can be bought on the door.

Elmo Sexwhistle (seriously, I love the name!), recently released their debut album, Minor/Major, which you can listen to in full below. Do it now!

From 8th June – 28th July I’ll be part of the Glitch Moment/ums exhibition, curated by Rosa Menkman & Furtherfield, at Furtherfield Gallery.

Glitches are commonly understood as malfunctions, bugs or sudden disruptions to the normal running of machine hardware and computer networks. Artists have been tweaking these technologies to deliberately produce glitches that generate new meanings and forms. The high-speed networks of creation and distribution across the Internet have provided the perfect compost to feed this international craze. The exhibition shows various approaches by artists hacking familiar hardware and their devices which include mobile phones, and kindles. They disrupt both the softwares and the digital artefacts produced by these softwares, whether it be in the form of video, sound and woven glitch textiles.

Glitch art subverts the way in which we are supposed to relate to technology, causing playful, imaginative disruptions. It is a low-tech and dirty media approach with a punk attitude. These artists appropriate the medium and forge expressions that go beyond what the mainstream art world expects artists to do, it is unstoppable – it is Glitch Moment/ums.

I’ll also be doing a short performance on Saturday 8th June, 3pm, at the gallery.

Participating artists + works

Alma Alloro – Empty Spinning Circle become Full (part b) (2012) from the Further Abstract series | One Square in colors (2012) from the Further Abstract series
Melissa Barron – untitled [screencaptures] (2010)
Nick Briz – The Glitch Codec Tutorial
Benjamin Gaulon – KindleGlitched (2012)
José Irion Neto – Thoreau Glitch Portrait (2011)
Antonio Roberts – Copyright Atrophy (2013) | What Revolution? (2011)
Ant Scott – Beyond Yes and No (2013)

Glitch Art 0P3NR3P0.NET Open Call

Glitch artists and enthusiasts are invited to add their work to GLI.TC/H 0p3nr3p0.net, a Glitch Art repository coded by and developed by Joseph ‘Yølk’ Chiocchi & Nick Briz. The submissions will be showcased during Glitch Moment/ums at Furtherfield Gallery. To include your work in the 0P3NR3P0 component of Glitch Moment/ums submit a link to any visually wwweb based file (html, jpg, gif, youtube, vimeo, etc.) and your piece will automatically be included in the line-up (one work per artist).

This new IRL exhibition has been organised in collaboration with Nick Briz and Joseph ‘Yølk’ Chiocchi.

SUBMIT && SHOW on 0P3NR3P0.NET

Below is my article for Volume 2, Issue 1 of Libre Graphics magazine. You can still buy the issue or download it from their website.

American English is the common language of computing and the internet. That’s quite unfortunate. There are indeed many talented non-English speakers building our websites and shaping our digital future. That potential aside, one only has to look at the programming languages themselves and even small things like web addresses to see a bias towards English. Functions in popular programming languages are derived from English and, while websites that are not in English exist, their URLs are always in English, with only the domain extension (.fr, .pt, .es, .cn, etc.) available to give the website a sense of cultural identity.

The English-language bias also extends itself to digital art. Creative programming languages like Pure Data and Processing still use English as their common language and present barriers to those who want to take part. Is an English-only ecosystem really the way forward?

One area of digital art that I see transcending these barriers is glitch art. Glitch art is the aesthetisation of digital or analogue errors, such as artifacts and other “bugs”, by either corrupting digital code and data or by physically manipulating electronic devices. Glitching through physical manipulation of electronics has been popularized by the practice of circuit bending. If this sounds too vague, think of a television screen beginning to corrupt or a camera taking strange-looking pictures. Glitch artists try to capture and reproduce these types of ephemeral moments and display them as art.

The history of glitch art is very hard to trace. Glitch music (Aphex Twin, Autechre) has been around since the 1990s and with it, chaotic and noisy visuals like those of Gantz Graf by Autechre and Szamar Madar by Venetian Snares. In popular culture it has even broken out of the electronic music scene and can be seen everywhere from music videos by Kanye West, Xiu Xiu and Everything Everything to advertisements for MTV and The Biggest Loser. One only has to look at the “glitch art” tag on Tumblr or Flickr to see that it is an art form that has sparked the imaginations of people the world over.

Beyond the internet, digital arts and new media festivals serve as physical meeting places for those interested in digital art forms. Glitch art has found an audience at these festivals. Festival de Arte Digital in Brazil, AND (Abandon Normal Devices) in the UK and Transmediale in Germany are only a selection of venues which, at one time or another, have had sections devoted to glitch art. However, until 2002, there hadn’t been a festival dedicated solely to glitch art.

In 2002, in Oslo, Norway, the Motherboard art group was the first to hold a large-scale glitch art event. Post-Oslo, glitch-specific events laid dormant for a time, until 2010, when the GLI.TC/H conference began in Chicago. Since then, it has taken place in 2011 in Amsterdam and Birmingham, UK. I attended the 2010 festival in Chicago and the 2011 festival in Birmingham. What quickly became apparent to me from this festival was the international appeal of glitch art. While the bulk of participants physically present at the 2010 festival in Chicago and the 2011 festival in Birmingham were English speaking, the contributions of art came from an international community of creators.

The popularisation of glitch art on the internet, the increasing number of festivals featuring sections devoted to glitch art and the overwhelming response to the GLI.TC/H festivals since 2010 only highlights its international appeal and suggests that the visual language of glitch art transcends languages, cultural differences and location barriers. Glitch art needs no common language. The process of throwing a camera into the air in order to produce glitches requires no proficiency in any language — programming or spoken — or professional qualification. The shattered screens, errors on computers and broken things will always evoke the same feelings of panic, frustration, annoyance, elation or glee no matter where in the world you are.

I have some artwork in the online exhibition of the 50th Issue of Interartive, which looks specifically at Art and Copyright

Art & Copyright is the result of a selection of texts and works among a great number of proposals received in an open call for submissions. Also included are some texts directly selected by the editorial committee due their relevance to the topic. In this issue, our Virtual Gallery hosts the work of several artists and is presented as a group exhibition.

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.

[...]

The works and projects presented in the online exhibition create an open and all-encompassing path: Copyright laws and rights, violation and piracy, ownership and dialogue with art history and cinema, literature and language itself, Copyright versus open culture.

I have several gifs from the upcoming Copyright Atrophy project, which is due to launch next month, as part of the issue.

See the whole issue here.

Here’s a selection of photos taken by Pete Ashton for Dirty New Media.

The full album can be seen here. If you took any photos or videos please upload them and tag them with “DNM” and “Dirty New Media”. Or just send them to me and I’ll upload them

Dirty New Media took place on Thursday 21st March at The Barber Institute of Fine Arts. It was one of the most adventurous exhibitions that I’ve curated!

Thanks go out to:

• The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, for taking a chance and including something wildly different to their usual programme
• Vivid Projects, for asking me to curate this exhibition
• University of Birmingham for including Dirty New Media as part of their Arts and Science Festival, and for including videos in their Illuminate outdoor projections
• Pete Ashton, Sam Underwood, Leon Trimble and Ben Neal for providing lots of support and equipment at the last minute
• Keith Dodds, for his awesome work on the programme and other graphic design
• All of the performers, lecture-deliverers and artists that got involved (more below)
• And last, but not least, thanks to you, the audience, for travelling from the far reaches of England to attend Dirty New Media! You helped to make it a success!

Here’s a list of all of the works/pieces/artists included in the programme, should you want to check out more:

Exhibition

Benjamin Gaulon [aka Recyclism]- KindleGlitched
Jeff Donaldson – 16bit Edition Glitch Scarf – source: Atari ST emulator read error
Dec Ackroyd – Cityscape #46
Jason Soliday – Harbinger Variations
Charlotte Frost and Rob Myers – #arthistory
Kate Pemberton – Tacert
Jamie Boulton – C:\Users\5629a7\Pictures\IDDisplay.jpg
URRRGH – __KWEEN_CLARISSURRRGH, __YOUCHOOB_4_EVA, __ALADDINZ_CAT
Stef Lewandowski – Data Necklace

Super Special Essay

Shawne Holloway + Steven Hammer – 1_approach.dnm: (inter)active viewership in dirty new media. The whole text can be read in the Dirty New Media programme

Lectures

Jon Cates – WTF?! is D1RTY N3W M3DI∆?!
(For those that didn’t get one, Jon’s PDF, 1337 ¥³4Γ$ øƒ D1RTY N3W M3DI∆: 2005 – 2012 CH1C∆Gø, can be downloaded from GL1TCH.US)
Dan O’Hara – An Irregular and Spasmodic History of Glitches and other Systemic Stutterings

Screenings

(in order)
Modulate- O>L>S
Nick Kegeyan – i went home this winter (or my friends, lights, a game, and the last time i saw my childhood home)
Antonio Roberts – I Am Sitting in a Room
Carrie Gates – A portrait of a portrait of a portrait of nn
Bryan Peterson – [Dirty] inputs/processes.outputs
Theodore Darst – Approach
Jennifer Chan – [[[ I'll Show You HD ]]]
Kevin Carey – OTC/DXM [256_l4y3rz_0v_sYrVp_r3m1xxx]
Sian Macfarlane – /ˈzi(ə)rˌäks/ (xerox)
Michael Lightborne – What Did The Duck Say To The Pig?

A/V Performances

Minuek
Norah Lorway
Circuit Ben

There’ll be videos appearing soon, but in the meantime check out the photos from Pete Ashton:

Till next time…

Dirty New Media will be making its way to The Barber Institute of Fine Arts on 21st March as part of the University of Birmingham’s Arts and Science Festival.

Super Special Essay

Shawne Holloway + Steven Hammer – 1_approach.dnm: (inter)active viewership in dirty new media

The invisibility of various technologies, interfaces, and wares, via their often seductive and seamless interfaces, fosters a kind of cultural ocularcentrism[1] vis-a-vis capitalist consumerism. Dirty New Media (DNM) seeks to disengage our perception of screen-based activity from the two-dimensional, and critique material production of objects and systems that produce, curate, and guide reception of various texts.

In this way, DNM is both responsive and anticipatory to the proliferation of a culture uncritically enamoured with digital/web/device-being. By absorbing a wide array of amateur and artisan generated media artifacts, the (anti)genre “once anticipated and now brings us”[2] a form of technophenomenology, a cyber-ouroboros, allowing fluidity between our consciousness and digital media. This recursivity begins to weave a distinctly humanistic[3] perspective alongside the non-human data streaming from network to network, window to window.

[[[Read the whole essay in the Dirty New Media programme, available on the day]]]

Meta

Dirty New Media // REVOLUTION 02

THURSDAY 21 MARCH | 4-10PM | THE BARBER INSTITUTE, BIRMINGHAM

An engaging day of performances and interactive installations from digital artists, hacktivists and new media explorers from the West Midlands, Chicago and beyond. Artworks take the form of hacked and customised hardware, accessories, demos, lectures, data-mangling, projection and more!

This eclectic, expectation bending event is presented by Vivid Projects in association with artist/curator Antonio Roberts and The Barber institute of Fine Arts.

Free admission, no booking required. Dirty New Media. For further information and times, please contact 0121 414 2261 or email education@barber.org.uk. Facebook event link.

Dirty New Media will be making its way to The Barber Institute of Fine Arts on 21st March as part of the University of Birmingham’s Arts and Science Festival. Over the week I’ll be providing an overview of the upcoming event.

AV Performances | 7-10pm

Minuek

Circuit Ben

Norah Lorway

Meta

Dirty New Media // REVOLUTION 02

THURSDAY 21 MARCH | 4-10PM | THE BARBER INSTITUTE, BIRMINGHAM

An engaging day of performances and interactive installations from digital artists, hacktivists and new media explorers from the West Midlands, Chicago and beyond. Artworks take the form of hacked and customised hardware, accessories, demos, lectures, data-mangling, projection and more!

This eclectic, expectation bending event is presented by Vivid Projects in association with artist/curator Antonio Roberts and The Barber institute of Fine Arts.

Free admission, no booking required. Dirty New Media. For further information and times, please contact 0121 414 2261 or email education@barber.org.uk. Facebook event link.