I’ve always found glitching to be uncanny, but haven’t always been able to pin why exactly it evokes that feeling. Now I know it’s a ubiquitous reaction and I’m not alone in that. I was ready to “face the glitch” and it definitely involved a bit of trial and error. 

I used Bill Morrison’s film “Decasia” (2002) as a reference for my own work. I like that the observances and objects in the film were being obscured by the liquid and deteriorating and all the grains were getting bigger and ripping away to reveal another sequence. In “Facing the glitch” theres the use of the term “pixel bleed” used to describe the visceral sensation of pixels, which perfectly encapsulates the uncanny nature of glitching. I wanted my piece to have similar grain and grit that Bill Morrison’s film did so naturally. 

The seducer – by Magritte 1950 also influenced me to use the ocean as a starting point for this ‘glitched’ work. The painting reminded me of how when I look at the ocean from a plane or significant height I see the ripples in the water and the boundless space where the waves aren’t breaking. It makes the world seem like some sort of simulation and the waves are the moving ‘static’ of this earth. That feeling of being at a height or far away from something so large has an eerie-ness to it.  Sort of like an actual glitch, our perception is changed. I don’t get the feeling from looking out the horizon when I’m at the beach, it’s more when I’m at a height looking down at the sea. 

The track in the video is an old recording of a demo I wrote for a synth progression, funnily enough I remember feeling that the progression had a clumsy awkwardness to it that exposed my heavy handed keyboard playing in that instance. I thought it would compliment this video work well due to those unintended ‘weird’ features.

Each time I made a glitch, I had to force-quit the app, open it again and start from scratch. Ironically, was the glitch app experiencing an internal glitch or crashing? I wanted to originally glitch a photo, but then I had issues doing that so I created a work in premiere and made it appear like it was glitching throughout. I wanted it to have a supplementary jittery-ness about it that felt uneasy. It made me question why glitching has become harder, big companies like apple and android don’t want to make it easy to access the internal servers and understand the intricacies of what’s behind what we view as a JPEG or MP4, it’s a matter of making something ‘appear’ as if it’s glitching as I’ve done as opposed to it being a legitimate glitch due to interfering with the code behind an image or mov file. This reminded me of when we looked into digital archeology and how ‘hacking’ and ‘cracking’ code is hard, even when it’s to do with a platform or device we rely on so much and ‘know so much about’. 

I’d like to elevate this work by having more content within it to alter and interfere with, I can imagine exhibiting it in a space where I separate the music from the video in a tangible way where there’s a projection of the video on loop and I have a CD player on the floor playing a burnt disc of my own ambient yet distorted synth progression, also going in a loop.

Cameron, A. (2017). 19. Facing the Glitch: Abstraction, Abjection and the Digital Image. In Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty (pp. 334-352). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781474407137-022

When I think of “big data” I think of atoms. Atoms can’t be seen by the naked eye, hard to interact with but are literally everywhere. They make up all matter, data is the same. All things we do online and beyond that with other devices are full to the brim of data. It’s sporadic and can be hard to “crack” Beyond the three v’s in “What makes big data, big data” there is so much to the data and even use of the word that makes it all seem limitless and not even graspable. It induces a feeling of overwhelm and brain numbness for me.

Big data, small data, tables and graphs, it all looks mathematical and access to it is intrinsic to finding out more and more, and in a lot of ways knowledge is power, especially when it involves ourselves and others.

I enjoyed looking through my Spotify listening history, similar to when I scroll on social media, I found myself stopping and really investigating why and when I listened to specific music. The process of looking back at what I had listened to over the months gave me a really clear understanding of what I’ve been doing, even more so than reading my journal! The albums, singles and podcasts I listen to are always diverging. I could stop and see what I listened to mainly in July for example and know exactly what things I had on in that month, at least vaguely. I feel like my Spotify playlists and liked songs are an extension of me, my mood, my engagement with the world and the things I do with my spare time.

For the form of this experiment, I made a little collage of things I did to get the data as well as miscellaneous things I associate with listening to music, like my car. I found the process of accessing my own data from places quite difficult, I tried getting all of my youtube data from google but that ended with me clicking ‘next’ and a pop up box saying I’d receive an email in a matter of days/weeks. I did the same with my google maps time-line, that was also a bit of a headache.

I want to go into my future making, being more aware of the abundance of data being used and stored in the cloud and beyond. I want to use that to my advantage when researching and generating ideas for other work. I look forward to my email from google about my youtube data, If it ever gets to me.

Matthew Brehmer (2023) Visualizing The Weird And The Eerie https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.01763v1#:~:text=https%3A//doi.org,to%20learn%20more

Produce a work with “dialogue” EXP 4

Produce a work that “glitches” EXP 5

Produce a work with “big data” EXP 6