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Hardware Hacking

Video Electronic Glitch Artwork Made by 'Weirdos Within the Weirdos' (Video) 58

Posted by Roblimo from the software-that-may-or-may-not-exist dept.
Video no longer available.
Jake Elliott and Jon (not Elwood) Cates are the ones who describe Glitch Art people as 'weirdos within the weirdos' in the context of Notacon 9, which was recently held in Cleveland. It's 'an annual event that focuses on people who like to build, make, break and hack stuff,' and even in the Notacon context the Glitch Artwork crowd stands out. Sit down with Jake and Jon and share their joy in working with "feral glitches... before they are domesticated," and see some of the output from artist Dave Musgrave's circuit-bent consoles.
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Electronic Glitch Artwork Made by 'Weirdos Within the Weirdos' (Video) More

Electronic Glitch Artwork Made by 'Weirdos Within the Weirdos' (Video)

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  • Crap Video (Score:5, Informative)

    by O('_')O_Bush ( 1162487 ) on Friday April 20, 2012 @08:57AM (#39744727)
    I'd much rather see their "art" than listen to them blabber on for 7 minutes.
  • I'd hope the companies that own the underlying programs that are the basis for the art see in it in the spirit of "Variations on a theme by "insert famous composer." rather than "Hey, that's a derivative of my product..." Ideally it would be a fair use similar to some sampling.
  • The technical term is " GL-GLITCH [youtube.com]".

  • Definition of "artist" has changed... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by zakaryah ( 1344891 ) on Friday April 20, 2012 @09:24AM (#39744939)
    It now means dabbling in an engineering discipline... poorly. The nouveau team could probably exploit glitches to interesting effect. Although the video does an impressively bad job of conveying what these "artists" do, mostly they are shorting or breaking various connections on video cards to mess up the graphics.

    • Re:Definition of "artist" has changed... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Nidi62 ( 1525137 ) on Friday April 20, 2012 @09:36AM (#39745033)
      It seems to me that art has gone from creating something beautiful (well, usually beautiful) and letting the work speak for itself to now just making something and then having the artist tell people himself what kind of statement he's trying to make, or why it should be significant. Just like if you have to explain a joke it's probably not funny, if the artist has to explain his work then it's probably not art. People can look at the Pieta, or the Sistene Chapel, or Starry Night and figure out what it is. Much of what is passed off as "art" today requires explanation.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tibit ( 1762298 )

        I don't think that figuring out the 'what' is all that interesting. You look at this glitch-"art" and if you know relevant engineering, you'll easily tell what it is. You look at the Pieta and of course you can easily tell what it is as well (a carving of some people, duh). As far as *what* is supposedly said -- now here's where it's hairy, because social context and prior experiences are a big part of getting the message. That's the problem with art: it tells everyone something, but it's hard to know in ad

      • The best explanation I ever saw for this is that with the advent of the photograph, art felt threatened. What was the point of spending a month or even a year painting realism if you could just photograph it? I know, it's different for the high end fine arts, but just to want to know what Edgar A. Poe looked like, it used to be a ritual to try to commission a portrait. Now it's just "Click on a phone camera".

        So then with one of its original purposes swept away, Art has ever since moved out of Realism and in

      • This isn't anything new unfortunately. Our state art gallery has a "painting" amongst the many wonderful works that is completely black. COMPLETELY BLACK. Apparently according to the really lengthy blurb about the artist who painted it in the 60s he couldn't figure out what to paint so he kept painting and then painting over it, and trying again, and painting over it, and in the end his masterpiece was just painted black to represent his state of mind or some shit like that.

        And that's not even taking into a

      • Sometimes explanations are helpful in visual art to expose deeper meanings and relationships. Check out: http://www.markdotzler.com/Mark_Dotzler/more_information.html [markdotzler.com] http://www.markdotzler.com/ [markdotzler.com]

      • It seems to me that art has gone from creating something beautiful (well, usually beautiful) and letting the work speak for itself to now just making something and then having the artist tell people himself what kind of statement he's trying to make, or why it should be significant. Just like if you have to explain a joke it's probably not funny, if the artist has to explain his work then it's probably not art. People can look at the Pieta, or the Sistene Chapel, or Starry Night and figure out what it is. Much of what is passed off as "art" today requires explanation.

        Actually, much art has both a allegorical and artistic component. You can enjoy a piece by looking at it; but the meaning behind all of it's symbolism may require explanation to understand what the artist is saying. For example, the National Gallery has many pretty pieces of art and you can simply walk around and admire them; but as one docent explained you really need to stop and look at what's in the work, consider the times and what various things meant, to understand a piece. he then went on to explain

      • As much as some people like to disagree, beauty is largely objective. This "glitch art" is objectively *not* beautiful. However, some people find the *concept* beautiful. But once you have moved from objective beauty based in traditional, objective artistic craftsmanship to pure concept, the execution of the concept is less relevant than the concept itself.

        Think about it. What was more interesting in this article? The idea of "making art from computer glitches" or the actual 7 min video and few seconds o

    • No, the definition of "artist" has not changed. As has been the case throughout civilized history, people of wildly varying degrees of talent and vision are choosing to call themselves "artist".

      Caravaggio was a "circuit bender" when you see the crazy stuff he did to get colors and textures in his paintings. The sublime Mark Rothko was a "circuit bender" when you consider his abstract landscapes and philosophical paintings. But they had the talent and vision to make something transcendental.

      Noise Art, Gli

      • I agree with your post - I think the relatively minor point I was trying to make was interpreted as a condemnation of any post-Renaissance art, which it was not. My point was that work which is driven by a gimmick is often overtaken by the gimmick. My evidence in this case was that the artists talk much more about "hacking" and "glitches" than showing what they do. Although this could be the fault of the filmmaker, imagine Rothko dwelling on how his collaboration with the books of DJ Nietzsche inspired h

        • . However, from the video, it seems the potential is not quite being reached...

          Man, that's the truth.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Trepidity ( 597 )

      I find the idea interesting, though in actual practice it can be done in more or less interesting ways, like anything. I don't care all that much whether it's "art" or not, but I tend to categorize it like that because it seems to fit more there than as "engineering" per se, since the goal is to produce interesting aesthetic effects or investigate some kind of conceptual idea, rather than to produce practical devices that accomplish some goal.

      It's been done for quite a while, in any case. Here's [youtube.com] a classic p

    • Boring artist statements aside, arts and engineering/sciences have always been fused together. The music we take for granted today (Well Temperment) with different keys and chromaticisms wouldn't have been able to exist without developments of mathematics in the Rennaisance, and likewise the instruments we take for granted today are the results of engineering, metalwork and so forth (the piano would not exist without such developments). Likewise all the electronic music we listen to today is the result of

    • Art is a selective recreation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value judgements.

      By a selective recreation art isolates and integrates those aspects of reality which represent man's fundamental view of himself and of existence. Out of the countless number of concretes -- of single, disorganized, and (seemingly) contradictory attributes, actions, and entities -- an artist isolates the things which he regards as metaphysically essential and integrates them into a single new concrete that repres

  • Glitch is right (Score:2, Funny)

    by cruff ( 171569 )
    I tried watching the video and Flash crashed. Talk about a real glitch!
  • I'm not elitest but I really expected more from /. and their videos. I got to about 3 minutes in before actually seeing anything and the stuttering and stammering of the guy with the modded PS1 and PS2 crippled any remaining interest. For a tech site the production of the video was really low too. Up your game folks!

  • Went to Notacon 9 / PixelJam, had a great time (Score:5, Informative)

    by infomodity ( 1368149 ) on Friday April 20, 2012 @10:55AM (#39745831)

    I want to thank Froggy for running Notacon for 9 years. I used to help out with Phreaknic in Nashville and I know a little bit of what it takes to run a con. It's thankless work. This year was my third Notacon, always have a good time. It's a great mix of technology, hacking, and art.

    The accompanying PixelJam ran flawlessly and had a lot of great entries in the competitions. Friday night there were great performances. Highlight of Friday was Morgan Higby-Flowers' performance on a circuit bent video mixer. All the audio and video was coming out of one box. He coaxed more sub-bass, fractured noise and glitch visuals out of one piece of antiquated hardware than I've seen other artists get out of racks of expensive modular equipment costing tens of thousands of dollars. More is less.

    Good starting points for learning more about Glitch:

    Nick Briz's site. He's been at this a while and co-founded the GLI.TC/H festival in Chicago.

    http://nickbriz.com/ [nickbriz.com]

    Nick's Glitch Codec Tutorial. Also available as a DVD ISO.

    http://nickbriz.com/blog/?p=441 [nickbriz.com]

    Evan Meaney teaches at the University of Tennessee, is a founding member of GLI.TC/H, and also works on projects at Oak Ridge National Laboratories supercomputers.

    http://www.evanmeaney.com/glitches.html [evanmeaney.com]

    For all the haters on the thread, I totally understand how this might not be your thing. That's what's great about great art: it is polarizing. Your hate makes me know I'm enjoying something special.

    • Your hate makes me know I'm enjoying something special.

      I really hate racism and midget Hitler sex clones, too. Maybe you should check out those scenes (oops, sorry, I meant SC.ENE/s) for some groovy feralized vibitutde.

    • Forget about the low-brow haters. They will never be able to enjoy something like this. You can have an IQ of 170 and still be a complete idiot about anything outsite your field of expertise.
  • At least, it's not new in the long view of what art is. Art need not be representational of real life, a fact that was explored in great detail after the invention of the camera. The view that art needs to be beautiful is simplistic. Beauty is subjective, and it's entirely possible to make beautiful art out of ugly things and ugly art out of beautiful things. While I agree with another poster who said that art should be able to stand on it's own without explanation, that's just my opinion. There's nothing w
    • Exactly. It's long-term thinking for long-term gain as opposed to short-term. You can't get to new and exciting places if you don't experiment and fool around. None of the things we listen to or observe today would exist if not for countless experiments that led nowhere in the short term. Such is the history of art. You can't be afraid of everything that comes with experimentation, and that includes successes and failures, and things that are a mix of both (eg things with redeeming qualities). And of

  • Everypony toke now! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Quiet_Desperation ( 858215 ) on Friday April 20, 2012 @12:37PM (#39747183)

    Is this a 4/20 post? it's a 4/20 post, isn't it?

    That's 20/4 for those of you on the metric calendar.

  • Title: Glitch Art Made by 'Weirdos Within the Weirdos'
    Description: notacon is 'an annual event that focuses on people who like to build, make, break and hack stuff,' and even in the notacon context the Glitch Artwork crowd stands out as slightly odd...

    00:00) <TITLE>
    The tune from 'Twilight Zone' plays in the background as the video displays the following titles over a garbled video, with the 'notacon 9' logo appearing vertically on the left:
    There is nothing wrong with your monitor

    Do not attempt to adju

  • Just thought I'd clear that up. No, I'm not bitter, I just want to set the record straight.

    - Froggy

  • Sorry, but this is some of the most boring, least artistically creative "art" requiring the least ingenuity and the least imagination that I've ever come across, ever. I'm not even going to do the "hip" thing and give these "hipsters" the benefit of the doubt that they're trying to be ironic. I just think they're genuinely toast.

  • It's nice to see slashdotters struggle with contemporary art that hits them where they live. Having seen the work being discussed (glaringly absent from the video, I agree), these artists are eroding categories and roles like "artist", "non-artist", "hacker", "tinker", "provocateur", "voodoo witch doctor", "weirdo", etc. One person's "bad engineering" is another's thought-provoking art. . . go figure, personal taste is involved. As for my personal taste, I agree with art historians that the purposes of a

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