The Aesthetics of Imperfection Glitch Art in Three-Dimension Forms As a Creative Design Tool
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363 Omnia Salah Eldin The aesthetics of imperfection Glitch art in three-dimension forms as a creative design tool Omnia Salah Eldin Lecturer in Faculty of Applied Arts, Helwan University Abstract: Keywords: Since computers depend on digits and their particular combinations, they explain, Glitch Art resolve, perform everything by numbers. This tendency leads to perfection since the Computer Art Aesthetics user has to think too much about numbers, units, fractions, ratios, matrices, etc. and Code Softwares this premeditation lessens the likeliness of ending up with accidental developments. Those accidental actions are called “Glitch”. While glitching as a medium for art is established, there is still much room for discussion on how glitching practice may be carried out. How can we apply accidental errors to form digital three-dimensional forms? is it applicable? in how much those errors can improve creativity and open new paths for three dimensional artists? in what ways may software development, made conducive to this kind of artistic creativity? This paper aims to explore glitching in three-dimensional forms as a creative design tool that can help artists and designers to follow new paths in digital aesthetics. Paper received 18th May 2019, Accepted 13th June 2019, Published 1st of July 2019 Introduction unexpected surge of electric power. Glitch have Glitches have become a vital part of computer many forms, such glitch music which is created culture; sometimes diverse phenomena could be using electronic instruments that have been altered perceived as a glitching artworks although it is not in a process called ‘circuit bending’, whereby glitches if we take it from technical terms. as electronic parts are removed or short-circuited. commonly known that glitches had been always Other forms of glitch music originate from a defined as an error, or reduction, or imperfect art variety of techniques that are labelled ‘data (will be discussed later in further). This term had bending’, taken from the hardware equivalent been used commonly in electronic industries and ‘circuit bending’. In data bending, digital data is services, among programmers, circuit-bending manipulated in unexpected ways to create practitioners, gamers, media artists, and designers. surprising, novel output. The idea of altering a the meaning of glitch had many negotiations and digital component to influence the analogue output held diverse definition, but we can say that a glitch soon travelled from the music domain to the visual is an unpredictable change in the system’s domain. Visual glitch art also uses ‘data bending’ behavior, when something obviously goes wrong. whereby artists and programmers use hex editors That change can arise normally from a function of to open digital images, alter the binary content a program such a low image-processing speed or (often at random), save the result and view the low bandwidth when displaying video or can be visual effect. (Heijir, 2013, p. 112) . There are few planned and used as a creative artwork. (Olga scientific publications on the topic of Glitch art, goriunova, 2008, p. 111) but there are some very useful online tutorials. In recent years, the aesthetics of glitch have grown Several authors have suggested that the name in both visibility and popularity, with a number of ‘Glitch’ is a misnomer, since many glitch artists artists adopting techniques for producing glitch in deliberately manipulate digital content, and do not a variety of visual works to both critical and rely on accidental errors, or glitches. aesthetic ends (Gaboury, 2018, p. 485) In our paper we present a number of basic Related works glitch practices that commonly practiced by artists. Glitch art We use these practices to shade light on new Glitch Art is often aestheticized and fetishized techniques on code manipulation in order to technological (human) errors or anticipated achieve a design toll for three-dimensional form. accidents that can produce unintended (desired) Backgrounds results. Originally, a ‘glitch’ refers to a false Perhaps one of most essential question that came electronic signal that has been caused by a short, to mind that is Glitch Art actually Art? But isn’t This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License The Pictographic Codes in Al-Sadu Weavings of Kuwait 364 any new medium having its suspensions at first? I Jasper Johns, and Ed Keinholz, among others, all mean it happens before with the idea of of whom position art as either a process- based abstraction in general. aesthetic or as a dematerialized form awaiting By going back to the beginning of modern art actualization by a spectator. Perhaps that can be history, it can be found that the introduction of noticed in the 1960s, when Fluxus artists produced photography in the nineteenth century forced new anti-expressionistic, anti-museum artworks that questions into the domain of painting and art- included happenings, chance, experimental music, making. Photography could achieve in a fraction and audience participation. (Carolyn l, 2014) of a second what took hours to paint or draw, and Early net art artists such as the European thus painters sought new directions for their art collective, Jodi, have, since the 1990s, used practice. we can see that critics at this time look markup languages and videogame modification as to abstraction as it lowers aesthetics, particularly platforms for disruptive play). This interest in the rectangular forms of de Still works like shattering the illusion of a medium by laying bare Mondrian’s earlier composition pieces and some the processes and materials that produce its Bauhaus or Expressionist works of Klee, Rothko, technical form is a longstanding tradition in and Kandinsky. These artists avoided direct visual modernist art and the avant-garde. Nonetheless, representations of figurative reality, in favor of the glitch offers a unique engagement not simply experiments in spontaneity, absolutes, or studies in with the specificity of its medium, but in its form, color, or shape. Glitch art, however, is negotiation with failure as unexpected fundamentally representational in concept, since transformation in the function of computational most glitches are direct depictions of (mangled) devices. (Gaboury, 2018, p. 485) . data. (Downey, 2002). Since computers depend thoroughly on digits and If we chase the concept of glitch, it can be found their particular combinations, they explain, that it goes back to evolving machine in art resolve, perform everything by numbers. This history. In the beginning of twentieth century tendency leads to perfection since the user has to Avant -Garde artists had admired machine, think too much about numbers, units, fractions, specially some early art movements as cubism, ratios, matrices, etc. and this premeditation lessens futurism, supermatism, Dadaism …. Etc.). Avant- the likeliness of ending up with accidental Garde artists have poeticized new machines for developments. “It is failure that guides evolution; their speed, energy, and dynamics admired by perfection offers no incentive for improvement” movement, light power and speed, and dealt with said Colson Whitehead in 1999. Alternatively, those characteristics of machine as a new “Leonardo Da Vinci insisted ‘that painter who has aesthetics. no doubts will achieve little’, and he advised It can be found that analytical cubism analyzed artists to seek out inspirations for their paintings in natural forms and reduced the forms into basic the stains on walls” . (German, 2008) geometric parts on the two- dimensional picture in the same context Olga Goriunova and Alexei plane. This analysis and concept of reduction can Shulgin negotiate about the machine admiration be easily compared to the process that an that had been held by avant-garde artists , with algorithm executes when encoding a media file. In machine functionality, as machine produced this way glitch art is like Cubism. (Brize, 2011, distinct aesthetics , in their discussion they pp. 55-56). The images of Futurism, as well , asserted on the value of “dysfunctionality “as a taking inspiration from the speed and movement strike against machine perfection. They saw that of the motorcars and machines of the industrial this imperfection takes art once more to era. Examples of this revised aesthetic include humanistic level. they discussed that in the Giacomo Balla’s Dynamism Of A Dog On Leash technological era, society became organized (1912), Carlo Carra’s The Red Horsemen (1913), according to the logic of machines, conveyor belt and Umberto Boccioni’s sculpture Unique Forms principles, “rationally” based discrimination of Continuity (1913), all of which attempt to theories, and war technology, with an increase in compress multiple perspectives and temporalities fear, frustration, refusal, and protest. As a into a single image- space (Carolyn l, 2014) . response, errors, inconsistencies of vision, of In the postwar period, the Duchampian method, and of behavior become popular legacy of chance, glitch, critique, and modernist artistic methods used in Dadaism, appropriation finds expression in the work of a Surrealism, and other art movements. What they number of modern artists. This includes key mean by Dysfunctional machines was not only players like Jackson Pollock, Robert broken images and figures of crashed cars and Rauschenberg, John Cage, various Fluxus artists, other mass-produced imperfections figure in the July 2019 International Design Journal, Volume 9,