For those of you in or around Chicago..

From: Beth Capper (email suppressed)
Date: Thu Nov 05 2009 - 12:45:37 PST


*//Glitch: Investigations into the New Ecology of the Digital Age
*//Jon Satrom in person! Jon Cates in person!
(Curated by Nick Briz)

Monday, November 9, 2009
6.00-8:00pm, FREE and Open to the Public
Flaxman Theater (room MC1307), 112 S. Michigan Ave
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago

For Immediate Release
Contact: Beth Capper
email suppressed
*
“The genre [of glitch] has no recognizable center. No handle. It keeps
moving, shape shifting. It blurs when it’s recognized and then only sharpens
for brief periods. It is not a genre so much as a tactic for subversion that
has become a fashion statement.”* - Kim Cascone

Glitch art is aetheticized and fetishized technological [human] errors or
anticipated accidents that can produce unintended [desired] results. It
functions as a microcosm for new media art, forgrounding a critical
relationship to the digital culture in which we find ourselves mired. This
program initiates a conversation between glitch artists from all over the
world with common concerns. These artists demonstrate the diversity of ways
in which glitch can be used to address pertinent issues within digital
culture, and in culture at large.

The artists in this program take the otherwise irritable and undesirable
erroneous occurrences and malfunctions and embrace them as form. In their
practice, as well as in many of their writings and research, errors and bugs
are reshaped at times into elegant painterly digitalism, at others into a
poetic and essayistic discourse, and often into spastic abrasive assaults of
visual/audible noise. These works critically address issues of time,
deconstruction, memory, and chance with regards to society’s relationship
with technology. They attack the media systems that have been assimilated by
popular culture and subvert the slick, sterile, and seemingly perfect
surface of technologies propagated by special interests.

Glitch lends itself to pedagogy as much as it serves as a ruse to
traditional modes of artistic instruction that codify random acts of
creativity. Thus, glitch art is not exclusively technical: the most basic
methods utilized by glitch artists can be easily taught, learnt and
executed. Methods such as datamoshing and wordpad glitching have opened a
potentially democratic space for conceptually and aesthetically exploring
our amorphous identities in our new digital ecology.

As technology exponentially evolves and naturally occurring ‘glitches’ are
being phased out, the natural aesthetics of digital technology are at risk
of obsolescence. A mutual threat is currently being posed between the new
technologies/upgrades which seek to nullify glitches and the glitches which
attempt to expose these technologies/imposed systems. This program is an
attempt to address this threat and generate dialogue about the critical
importance and potential of glitch. - Nick Briz

*Artists included:* *Achim Stromberger, Evan Meaney, Jimmy Joe Roche, Johnny
Rogers, Jon Cates, Jon Satrom, Karl Klomp, Nick Briz, Nick Salvatore, Rosa
Menkman, Takeshi Murata, *and* Tatjana Marusic.*
*trt. approx 80 mins*

*The Eye & Ear Clinic is a free bi-weekly film series run by SAIC graduate
students in Film, Video and New Media; Art History, Theory, and Criticism;
and Arts Administration and Policy. Contact us at
(address suppressed) be our friend on Facebook!
*

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For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.