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.