Saturday, November 14, 2009

'Glitch Aesthetics' Iman Moradi

Glitch Aesthetics (available here) is adissertation documenting and analysing the glitch as an art-form. Iman Moradi categorises the visual glitch in two criteria: 'The Pure Glitch' and 'The Glitch-Alike', defined below..



This was interesting because I imagine like many art forms the glitch would have been discovered by accident, like no-one 'invented' the glitch, I guess there was just an increase in appreciation for the aesthetics of the glitch. And of course now people like myself actually seek out ways to create these accidents. Moradi spends some time discussing the glitch as a communication, or a way of representing a meaning. An example he uses is the corruption of the 'perfect' image in a media portrayal celebrity (see below)..

Moradi traces the glitch back to cubism and references artists like Jackson Pollock in relation to the planned accident of Glitch-Alikes. He makes interesting comparison to both art forms (cubism and the glitch) as a fragmentation of reality, but in what context is the 'real' imagery reality? To me, Picasso's later work is as real as his earlier more 'true-to-life' etching work, in cubism, reality is just represented in a different form. The exploration of communication error between man and machine - that causes the sort of glitches I have generated - creates a visual from what is to the human-eye a non-visual, it is merely the computers visual interpretation of data.
Moradi makes a really good point that kind of sums up the way I'm feeling about the exploration I've been doing recently. When talking about the aforementioned 'representational' glitch-alikes, he makes the point that without a "...source image the glitches would simpy not exist."
Basically I just feel kind of like I'm corrupting, or in an even more pessimistic sense, tinkering with ready-made work, which I guess is why I was desperately using work I'd previously created rather than someone else's. I can't decide whether or not this is a good way to start understanding a computers programming language.

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