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Hey Ben
The article is nice, it looks very good and its cool to see the different perspectives. Nice job and thanks for including me.
To take things to another perspective however, I wonder if there is only a decrease of activity in the pool, or if this decrease is also at least partially the result of the changing / leaving of admins. In this pool i think a lot changed when Stephanie left. She used to moderate or kickstart a lot of questions that inspired me to think more.
for some history look at this threat: www.flickr.com/groups/glitches/discuss/72157616135729354/
when you are doing research in groups on internet i think it is important to also look a bit into the older history to understand development of the group. I think in hindsight it is a shame you did not incorporate any of the admins perspectives.
The stop in posting (the silent times) was i think due to admins stopping to accept photos to the pool, and not because people stopping posting (i know my photos were queued for a long time). This is due to the ever tricky "does this count?"-glitch question that asks for time consuming moderation of photos (which i also do in Noise artifacts on vimeo - and know can be an annoying daily task)
One more thing: do you really think it is necessary for a collective /group to be centered on one internet platform? For the sake of a subject like glitches, is it not that more interesting / necessary to move fluid through groups, platforms and other sites?
People that look for resources when they just start glitching have to search a bit, and i think thats the nature of glitch, it would be a shame, impossible, contradictory to try to capture it all in one platform maybe?
(i+karl klomp and gijs gieskes have been talking about a glitch portal for a while and I know jon satrom and jon cates are also interested, but because of this reason - i think we keep wondering if it is really necessary/possible/a good choice - its just a way to get lazy)
Maybe for discussing a topic it could be useful, but for glitches, i think its useful to keep the discussion also a bit decentralized.
For the future, what about doing similar kind of research/interviews on different platforms?
Posted 23 months ago.
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A glitch portal is an interesting idea. But since we don't have one now, I'm curious what websites / mailing lists / other resources are out there for glitch art now.
There's your vimeo channel of course, for video-based work. Also, the Bent Festival, which focuses on circuit- and data-bent music and art.
What else?
Posted 23 months ago.
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I still wonder if a centralized glitch portal is a good idea, or if it kind of defies the most 'interesting thing' about glitch, which to me is a defused, multidisciplinary, always moving and not stationary search for new exploitations and taking this potential to a next more conceptual *although that word is not the right one perse* level.
If there would be a portal, then artists wouldn't have to search any more, cause all info was accessible from one center. On the other hand, the field of glitch design has obviously become quite static, and is maybe something completely different then what I am referring to.
Anyway, in a piece on Critical Glitch Artware I wrote for Furtherfield I named just a few places that have info/high concentration/way to find a list of glitch artists
www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=391
(Flickr, Vimeo, Yahoo groups, Youtube, NING, Blogger and Delicious - but there are obviously many more).
Originally posted 23 months ago.
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Rosa Menkman edited this topic 23 months ago.
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Hello Rosa,
Thanks for the feedback. I 100% agree that the admin(s) should have been included in this piece, that was an unfortunate oversight on my part.
In regards to the glitch portal idea, no I don't think that it is necessary for a collective to be tied into a single location. Over-concentration can lead to stagnation, so it is probably healthier for glitch art in the long-term if there are multiple sub-communities working in different directions.
That said, I don't think that splitting these sub-communities along media format lines accomplishes this, which is the situation we are in today. The majority of video glitches are still centralized around your group on Vimeo, the majority of still image glitches are here on Flickr, and I would guess a lot of audio ends up on 8 Bit Collective.
I think that true media-hosting websites (as opposed to video- or image- hosting) would benefit glitch artists as well as many other "new media" (sorry for using that term) groups. Not having the option of properly displaying still images alongside related audio and/or video projects is a problem. Obviously, custom-built websites are the most obvious solution, but they are an individual solution - not community oriented - and also not as accessible to people whose artistic practice doesn't include web design.
I see some of the benefits of decentralization (particularly the "lazy" argument) but I also wonder if this is an instinctive attempt to keep an "underground" movement out of the mainstream. Like how punk isn't punk after it gets popular. There are, of course, solid reasons for this. Punk in the mainstream tends to slow down in forward development, while simultaneously taking on general "mainstream" qualities as a result of higher budgets for recording/mixing (not to mention the benefits of simply giving the people what they want/expect). Similarly, is a glitch still a glitch once it has become an accepted and widely used process?
To continue the analogy, this popularization is not all bad. The punk bands that make it big may lose the respect of the hard-core fans of the genre, but they also attract a lot of new fans that otherwise wouldn't have known the genre existed. This increased attention also inspires more people to experiment with that style of music. Sure, many of these will be teenagers learning to cover the same tired hit single on their new electric guitar, just as many glitch newcomers spit out wave after wave of uninspired databends (from hellocatfood: 8bc.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=17695). However, there will also be a lot more experimentation. After punk hit the mainstream it began to disperse and take from/influence a diverse range of other styles of music.
It seems that your reference to the "field of glitch design" (http://www.flickr.com/groups/glitches/discuss/72157624200681695/) may be as close to this sort of popularization as currently exists for glitch art. While it may be "quite static", if it is attracting an audience then some of this audience will inevitably dig further and discover other, more dynamic forms of glitch.
I feel like I'm advocating trickle-down economics...
Anyhow, I think there will always be artists doing more interesting work at the fringes. Not all of them will be sucked in and overwhelmed by a central space, and in fact I'd bet that many of those who rely entirely on a single location would do so because it is their first introduction to a medium that they wouldn't have discovered if it wasn't for that very space.
Posted 23 months ago.
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To continue the bit about 8bc (which may also be reflective of the state of glitch art overall) recently one glitch artist gave up on it citing a few people on "Databending blogs" as the reason (http://8bc.org/images/I+Need+A+Medic/Deaf+do+us+heart/ <--towards the bottom).
In another thread he posted a databending tutorial and then a month later removed it (http://8bc.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=15392 ) I can only guess that it's because he felt that revealing the databending 'secrets' has resulted in a flood of images that removed all uniqueness from glitch art (perhaps my tutorials have contributed to this as well)
Of course, this caused outrage on 8bc, with the topic I mentioned earlier causing quite a fuss. If you go back to the image submissions on 8bc now you'll find that hardly any glitches are posted anymore. This is both a good and bad thing.
To me it says that the glitch art "fad" period is over. Just like Datamoshing, it's had its time in the spotlight, but I think we now need to see how this informs other art forms. Similar to how Evan Roth has brought graffiti off of the streets and onto our computers with Graffiti Analysis I think there are now a few artists who are bringing glitch to other art forms, such as print (glitch irion), video and film making (rosa menkman) and gaming/programing (dtemkin). Personally I'd like to see it come into performance and traditional/fine art, but that's an area still yet to be explored.
Glitch isn't dead, it's just evolving into something a lil' bit different, which takes a bit of time
Posted 23 months ago.
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Here's the full interview with Daniel Temkin: bitsynthesis.com/2010/07/daniel-temkin-full-interview/
Posted 23 months ago.
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Full interview with Rosa Menkman: bitsynthesis.com/2010/07/rosa-menkman-full-interview/
Posted 23 months ago.
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Full interview with Max Capacity: bitsynthesis.com/2010/07/max-capacity-full-interview/
Posted 22 months ago.
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Full interview with Stallio: bitsynthesis.com/2010/08/stallio-full-interview/
Posted 22 months ago.
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