ADAD1002 Assessment 2 Statement
Continuing on from the idea of glitch, my assignment carries over elements from my previous assignment where human influence affected glitch through chance. Instead of merely focussing on the end product of glitch, a greater emphasis was placed on the processes behind the creation of the glitch or looking at the mediation between the original subject (be it either analogue or digital) and the final product.
The first experiment was more of a testing the waters work, it examines glitches presented in a physical analogue form that were subtle and required effort to search for them. This experiment was motivated by an interesting work I found on Creators Vice which documented a collection of canvas printed works by Luca Luggero called Google Art on Canvas (2014-ongoing) that takes subtle flaws in famous paintings and blows them up to expose them. [1][2] At this stage I was not completely sure about what my main focus would be for the topic on glitch.
Through doing some research on subtle hidden glitches, I stumbled upon the Pac-Man kill screen glitches. [3] Although the concept of the subtlety of the glitch was present in the Pac-Man kill screens, I thought that the notion of mediation from a one medium to another, in this case physical to digital resonated to me more than subtlety of glitch. The human error being mediated into a digital glitch in Pac-Man motivated the second experiments onward which involved using a scanner.
The second experiments onward are the ones that really started to explore the mediation of an analogue physical object to a digital image which was glitched. These experimental results were achieved through the use of a scanner which took on the role as the mediator between the physical object and the glitch image.
The second to fourth experiments revolved around the traditional method of scanning paper documents. However, the additional element was to disrupt the mediation process and observe what would happen. Just by the act of moving the sheets of paper around the scanner, one can confuse the computer into how it interprets the document. It is this movement of the document in the scanner that introduces a chance element which is present in works such as Ellsworth Kelly’s collage on paper Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance II (1951).[4] The fourth experiment, in my opinion enhances the meaning of the work through the mediation process, as if the computer can recognise the document is from a book about bushfires, thus glitching up the image to make it more despondent and bleak.
The last two experiments deviated away from traditional scanning techniques, instead opting for more physical objects and some intangible ones as well to scan. The experiments were a bit more difficult as this time since the surface area of the objects were smaller, I had to make sure the subject was directly above the scanner light otherwise it would not register. Nevertheless, the movement of the object over the scanner still disrupted the mediation process of digitising the subject, resulting in the glitch results.
The final work is considered the zenith of the scanner experiments. As those experiments all involved human influence to introduce a chance factor into the glitched images produced. This final work explores glitches that can occur without human influence which adds an additional layer of chance. This idea is motivated by Tracy Cornish’s emission glitch (2006) audio-visual works that uses chance that is introduced digitally instead of by a human.[5] Thus in the work using an iPad, I scanned music videos that were playing whilst they were being scanned without moving it physically to introduce that digital influence to glitch. The scanner then interprets and mediates the movement in the video as a glitched image. The resultant glitch images reflect the effort that the scanner reaches when trying to mediate a moving image into a viewable static image.
From the experience in research and experimentation of different mediums and materials (tangible and non-tangible) in the assignment, the mediation process of the original subject matter to the glitch is very important. If practitioners conformed to plain mediation processes without experimentation to make it irregular, the creative potential of glitch would not be nearly the same as it is today.
[1] D Pangburn, ‘The Flaws in Iconic Paintings Get Exposed in ‘Google Art on Canvas’’, in Vice. April 2016, viewed on 22 August 2017, https://creators.vice.com/en_au/article/z4q7v8/google-art-on-canvas-luca-leggero
[2] L Leggero, ‘Google Art on Canvas’, in Leggero Studio. 2014, viewed on 20 September 2017, http://www.leggerostudio.com/google-art-on-canvas/
[3] J Pittman, ‘The Pac-Man Dossier’, in Gamasutra. 2017, viewed on 22 August 2017, https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3938/the_pacman_dossier.php?print=1
[4] F Lucarelli, ‘The Aesthetics of Chance: Ellsworth Kelly’s “Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance I to VIII”’, in Socks. March 2014, viewed on 7 September 2017, http://socks-studio.com/2014/03/05/the-aesthetics-of-chance-ellsworth-kellys-spectrum-colors-arranged-by-chance-i-to-viii/
[5] T Cornish, ‘emission glitch’, in Tracy Cornish. 2012, viewed on 20 September 2017, http://www.tracycornish.com/emission-glitch/
