The Glitch

There is such a thing as glitch art. It consists of willfully manipulating a computer as to cause image processing errors. My 1997 graduation thesis was called Painting in the Digital Era in which I explored how a computer interprets visual data. Within my experiments I was especially interested in the so-called 'glitches' that happened when data were interpreted differently from my expectations. Whimsically I concluded that there were forces at work inside the machine that were unintended by the creators of them. Those forces were perhaps archaic structures that could be found anywhere in nature and in the products created by nature, including humans, something like Turing patterns or fractals. The thesis was a text supporting various paintings and digital art works I created at the time. The paintings were a reversal of the pattern of digital image processing programs (such as photoshop) that are based on the history of image processing (graphic design) of the material world. I'm interested in the glitches of a computer handling images, more so than the willfully manipulating of it for aesthetic pleasure, although I recognize how people are drawn in by these glitches and want to control them. They are beautiful in a way that the outcome of surrealist games are beautiful, and any result of chance operations are beautiful, exactly because they're unexpected. The unexpected will delight anyone.

Stanley Diamond/Anaguta drummer

Above is one result of my experiments with this concept. It's done with a little hesitance. I've done a few others with results that did not satisfy me. That's the problem of the glitch; it doesn't always do what you want it to do. The machine is in nature formal, it acts on forms rather than ideas. The opposite of formal is not informal (in art) but content. Form and content, the ingredients of an artwork. When I try to impersonate a machine, I obviously can't be 100% objective (formal.) The argument is here that the machine isn't 100% formal either. Stanley Diamond, btw, is an important anthropologist. Surprisingly there aren't many pictures on line, so I used the same as last year, illustrating a song that was there last year too: Women with mortar and pestle, a recording of Nigerian Anaguta women. On the LP Music of the Jos Plateau and Other Regions of Nigeria, the track is coupled with Two Anaguta drummers. Olga Diamond (love that name) took a photograph during the performance, on which I based the musician on the right.

An Armenian Case

Adrina Otero/Zabelle Panosian

Zabelle Panosian was a Armenian-American soprano born in Turkey in 1891. She recorded eleven songs in 1917 and 1918 that have recently been reissued together with a book titled I am a Servant of Your Voice. The CD has 21 tracks, I don't own it (just bought the one track in my Top 100, Groung, from bandcamp), which means the authors probably found some alternate takes from the Colombia sessions. The song Groung (meaning 'crane') is reputedly a secret song more than 400 years old and sounds truly mesmerizing. Zabelle Panosian, the Armenian refugee from Turkey, continued through her long life (she died in 1986), supporting the Armenian case, and at the end of her life, left a significant amount to the Amenian-American community. The left half of the painting is modeled after a publication shot of the dancer/actress Adrina Otero, daughter of Zabelle Panosian. The image depicts her as a flamenco dancer. After a twenty year hiatus there is once again flamenco music in the Top 100 (see this post from a month ago.)
 

I.M. Gal Costa

Caetano Veloso/Gal Costa

Gal Costa died just a few months ago at the age of 77 in Sao Paulo. I only learned about it a week ago when preparing for this painting and updating my archive. Back in my old radio days in the Netherlands I used to know it quite fast when a musician had died, my friend Wim, once a year, in January, did a radio special playing music from musicians who had died that year. He kept a list all year, and of course I was being kept up to date. Not so much anymore, if it isn't news for the big media, I probably won't hear about it. I'm actually surprised the passing of Gal Costa was not newsworthy enough, as she had been an important figure in Brazilian, and world music. I had never painted her before and her Relance, a b-side of her hit Milho Verde, written by Caetano Veloso, is her first ever listing in a Top 100. Together with Veloso, Maria Bethania (Veloso's sister), Os Mutantes, and Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa formed the core of the Tropicalia movement in Brasil, a mix of bossa nova, samba, and rock 'n' roll. The version of Relance in my list is a live TV performance with the group Dumingunhos from 1970.
 

Positive Body Image

Janis Ian/Nina Simone

Janis Ian and Nina Simone were friends at some point. Then they fell out. Who knows what happened exactly but Simone was known to have a bad temper and was later diagnosed with bi-polar disorder. While in the process of finishing the above painting, I re-listened to Simone's cover of Ian's song Stars, and Maria, my spouse, commented "she must be on drugs." I never considered that and thought of the song, that Simone paired with the famous hit Feelings at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1976, as a brilliant and intense performance. Maria was right though, towards the end of the 17 minute rendition, Simone herself alludes to drug use. A review on the Guardian confirms that Simone was sometimes incomprehensible and unsteady during the performance. Ian's original, from 1974, is a manifesto of what is called today "positive body image," as was her most famous hit At 17. The message spread by Ian and Simone had been analogous at times, and Simone acknowledges Ian in the performance by mentioning her name in the same breath with Janis Joplin and Billie Holiday.