GlitchKraft: Ode to the Interrupted Image by McIninchArtGallery

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INSTALLATION VIEW FROM GLITCHKRAFT: SEPTEMBER 18—OCTOBER 6, 2019 EMERSON CONTEMPORARY, EMERSON COLLEGE, BOSTON, MA

INSTALLATION VIEW FROM GLITCHKRAFT: MARCH 7—APRIL 30, 2022 MCININCH ART GALLERY, SOUTHERN NEW HAMPSHIRE UNIVERSITY, MANCHESTER, NH

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GlitchKraft: Ode to the Interrupted

Image by Dr. Leonie Bradbury

GlitchKraft

is an exhibition of digital glitch art that celebrates the aesthetics of interruption as it transforms the gallery with bright abstract patterns, techno-colors, and dynamic moving compositions. Images that are usually limited to be viewed on a screen—mobile or otherwise—here are projected larger than life onto the full surface of the gallery walls to create a technicolor ‘glitch-world’ that will surround visitors and allow them to be fully immersed in light and sound. Glitch art is the creative practice of interfering with or intentionally altering image files for aesthetic purposes. The display of the images can take many forms including LCD monitors, CRT TVs, and projections directly onto gallery walls. For GlitchKraft, Allison Tanenhaus collaborated with color-bending new media artists Ben K. Foley, Alex Kittle, Lauren Klotzman, and J. Bagist and DebStep. The resulting exhibition is an immersive, ephemeral ‘glitchscape’ made to overload the senses and inspire a sense of awe.

In our day-to-day lives we are surrounded by thousands of digital images, and we take the fact that they ‘work’ for granted. Glitch art is a practice of intentional data bending, of altering images, that results in an image aesthetic that echoes accidental mistakes or errors in a system’s operations. Finding glitches in the wild can be exciting, whether at an airport terminal, sports bar television, or a home computer screen. With their admirable geometric forms and unique jagged edges, glitches present a surprising aesthetic intervention into the drudgery of visual image culture that evidence systemic failures of communication systems, both in analog television and now digital broadcasting. Technically, the word ‘glitch’ refers to a technological failure or error and stems from the German word ‘glitschen,’ translated as slipping or gliding. Spontaneous glitches are ephemeral, often lasting only a few seconds or minutes as the device tries to correct the error and move on. In fact, glitches are quite prolific in our ever-increasing interactions with the digital world and are now perceived as representing an aesthetic of the digital age. Once known as the art of a digital underground, glitch now has mainstream representation and has become widely acknowledged as an artform. A quick search on Google Play reveals over 240 applications that you can use to glitch your content. Thinking of glitch as an art form is also not new and the practice has been around for decades under a variety of terms. An early notable example of glitch art is Digital TV Dinner featuring video footage created by Jay Fenton. Fenton ‘interrupted’ the normal functioning of a Bally Astrocade (a home video game console) to create an audio-visual glitch event by removing the game cartridge while it was playing content, causing it to glitch.[1] Another early innovator worth mentioning is the Dutch/Belgium artist collective JODI (Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans) who are known for using error messages and digital glitches as a form of early interactive glitch art as part of their computer-based artistic practice. Their visually stunning, yet mysterious website http://wwwwwwwww. jodi.org/ is hailed as a beacon of net based art, a laboratory of media art that celebrates the renewable expanse of the glitch aesthetic. Other well-known glitch artists are Ant Scott and Cory Arcangel known for their glitched stills and hardware hacking respectively.

causing hardware to spontaneously create. The artist’s hand no longer dictates the outcome the way it does with conventional fine art. Instead, conditions are created to bring forth something unpredictable, inasmuch as the set parameters are capable of producing.”[2] When considering the relationship between the artists, the data, and the process of creating the visual glitch imagery, it’s one of collaboration, or perhaps even symbiosis. The outcome of the process, although intentional and deliberate on the artist’s part, is always unexpected and unique after its machinic transformation. As a curator, I was introduced to the world of glitch art through the writings of Dutch artist and glitch theorist Rosa Menkman and her Glitch Studies Manifesto (2010). In reference to her manifesto’s creation, Menkman explained: “I tried to underline

In fact, glitches are quite prolifIc in our ever-increasing interactions with the digital world and are now perceived as representing an aesthetic of the digital age.

An early glitch art technique known as ‘data bending’ is one that involves the manipulation of file data through a variety of processes both analog and digital. Although the artist controls what information is entered into the machine (read: computer, phone, synthesizer, or application etc.), in the form of a digital file (video, photo, or text etc.), the outcome is unexpected. Glitch artist Jeff Donaldson in his essay Glossing over Thoughts on Glitch. A Poetry of Error, states in regards to the artist hand that, “Provoking glitches is also pushing electronics to their limits,

that there is more to glitch art, and more at stake, than just design and aesthetics. The work addresses themes such as planned obsolescence, built-in nostalgia, critical media aesthetics and the gentrification and continuing development of a glitch art genre.”[3] In fact, glitch art has an international community of artists, creative technologists, and theorists who are experimenting with new techniques, processes, and who are also trying to intellectually capture what it is that glitch offers not just the artworld, but think of it as a reflection of a socio-cultural experience. For example, in regards to the dominance of the digital image, Donaldson wonders about the cultural significance of the glitch: “Perhaps some find in the fragmented aesthetic of glitch imagery a metaphor for what can be considered our fractured, modern socio-spiritual climate. Maybe it is the aleatoric element, the attraction to chance imagery. Then again, the allure could be that of a novel digital age psychedelia.”[4]

For GlitchKraft, Tanenhaus creates color-saturated pieces of all manner of variations, both figurative and abstract, in a seemingly infinite set of visual iterations with repetitive lines, shimmering cats, and retro graphics. Source materials consist of Tanenhaus’s original images, collected artifacts, and crowdsourced clips. The artist uses a range of applications via her smartphone (and occasionally AI) to create moving image glitches, drawing on digital intervention as a creative partner. Her projected pieces offer abstract kaleidoscopic ‘landscapes’ that when seen large-scale on a gallery wall—rather than on a handheld screen—surround the viewer to create a dreamlike and surreal atmosphere. Made with equal parts deliberation and experimentation, the results are rainbow-hued compositions that take on a psychedelic life of their own. Perhaps the most psychedelic looking work of the exhibition is Glitchfield (infinity box), 2016–2022. For this three-dimensional installation, Tanenhaus combines her digital imagery with one of Ben K. Foley’s optical sculptures, consisting of a rectangular glass cube created by four reflective mirrors with a top down projection. Glitchfield embodies the infinite possibilities of the world of glitch art. Visually mesmerizing, its dynamically shifting patterns hold one’s attention with ease as they disappear into seeming infinity while visually extending the gallery space in all directions. Nearby, both the stack of CRT TVs and the wall projection are showing Alex Kittle and Tanenhaus’s collaboration Screen Queens/Screen Dreams, 2019–2022, featuring Grace Jones, the ‘80s icon of queer culture. For Kittle’s 2019 zine project “Grace Jones x Philip Treacy,” the artist explored the decades-long collaboration between iconic Jamaican performer Grace Jones and Irish hat designer Philip Treacy, creating 11 digital illustrations of Jones modeling strange and wonderful haute couture headwear. Kittle invited Tanenhaus to remix and reimagine the portraits—plus additional icons of (back) stage and screen: Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, Joan Jett, Siouxsie Sioux, Agnes Varda, Sofia Coppola, Penelope Spheeris, Mira Nair, Maya Deren, Ida Lupino, Jane Campion, Greta Gerwig, Dee Rees —making them abstracted and animated by adding her energetic and eclectic visual vocabulary.

DebStep and J. Bagist create hypnotic works using modular video synthesizers and a process called ‘datamoshing,’ whereby the artists manipulate—or corrupt— the data of media files in order to achieve enhanced visual effects. J. Bagist’s piece Pills, 2017, offers a study of datamoshing techniques. The artist digitally ‘chopped up’ some recorded footage of a sculptural installation of pills floating in water and colorized it to a monochrome abstract effect. DebStep’s Scan Bound, 2019 offers a glitched exploration of a landscape. The vibrant glitch blooms are the result of a displacement of bits through a scripting process that shapeshifts the imagery to its new digital materiality. For the 2022 edition of GlitchKraft, J. Bagist and DebStep collaborated to create a new work entitled Sunrise/Sunset with Rain, 2022, which jams together two pieces: footage of a sunrise by DebStep and footage of an Arizona desert by J. Bagist. The artists edited their footage together by mixing and distorting two analog video signals together for added dramatic effect. Similarly abstract, Lauren Klotzman’s digital video-paintings are part of a recent series of

What happens when a glitched video becomes a video-painting, a digitized landscape, or an infInite sculpture? works that explore new experimental video techniques using a modular video synthesizer as a composition tool. The works simultaneously explore the history of computing— telephone switchboard operators and early computer programmers—and the history of painting. Klotzman questions what is needed for something to be considered a painting: Can it be a moving image and still be considered in the discourse of painting? In light of the works on view in GlitchKraft, several ideas and questions emerge. What happens when a glitched video becomes a video-painting, a digitized landscape, or an infinite sculpture? One big question is the concept of collaboration between the artist and the machine, whereby the technology emerges as an active agent, perhaps even a partner? The exhibition offers a further decentering of the singular artist as author, since the artists are also in collaboration with one another. GlitchKraft questions the monitor as a mode of display of the glitch as an aesthetic image, seeing as it is the location where we most often experience glitches ‘naturally.’ As a device in the gallery, it presents both a familiar limitation and a creative reframing of the ubiquitous screen. Lastly, and perhaps most dramatically, what happens when the glitched image becomes spatial, and generates an immersive environment rather than being confined to a screen? In closing, rather than highlighting a collection of digital errors, GlitchKraft offers a celebration of a relevant contemporary visual aesthetic and expands the dynamic, ever-evolving process of glitching as an artform. As these so-called malfunctions are intentionally created to be enjoyed, the glitch here is celebrated, embraced, even elevated to a grand scale, and as such stands as an ode to the interrupted image.

[1] A visual process Fenton discovered accidentally while tripping on acid, and then recreated with the help of the other two artists: the recorded footage that became the work was edited by Raul Zaritsky with an audio track by Dick Ainsworth. As noted in Glitch Art in Theory and Practice: Critical Failures and Post-Digital Aesthetics by Michael Betancourt, 2016. [2] Jeff Donaldson, “Glossing over Thoughts on Glitch. A Poetry of Error” in Art Pulse http://artpulsemagazine.com/glossing-overthoughts-on-glitch-a-poetry-of-error [3] Rosa Menkman, Glitch Studies Manifesto, 2009/2010, page 9. [4] Ibid, page 4.

Dr. Leonie Bradbury Henry and Lois Foster Chair in Contemporary Art Theory and Practice Distinguished Curator-in-Residence, Emerson College A respected authority on the creative and scholarly aspects of contemporary art, Leonie Bradbury has 20+ years of experience creating compelling and innovative exhibitions, developing new artistic works, and promoting artists as thought leaders. She currently serves as the Henry and Lois Foster Chair in Contemporary Art Theory and Practice and Distinguished Curator-in-Residence at Emerson College, Boston. She directs Emerson’s platform for visual art “Emerson Contemporary” focused on presenting and commissioning new media art, performance art, and art engaged with emergent technologies. Dr. Bradbury holds a B.A. in the History of Art from the University of Minnesota and a M.A. in the History of Art: 20th Century Art, Theory, and Criticism from Boston University, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Art Theory from the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts in Maine. emersoncontemporary.org @emersoncontemporary @dutchgirlleonie

A L L I S O N

TANENHAUS

Glitchfield embodies the infinite possibilities of the world of glitch art.

-Dr. Leonie Bradbury

Al l i son tanenhaus + AL EX KI T T LE Screen Queens / Screen Dreams

DEBSTEP + J.BAGIST

About t h e Artists 31

ALLISON

TANENHAUS

Romantic Comedy, which came out in February 2022 from Dey Street/ Harper Collins.

Allison Tanenhaus (she/her) is a New York–born, Boston–based digital glitch artist. She specializes in bold geometrics, kaleidoscopic color fields, trippy op art, anachronistic tech mashups, and unexpected dimensional qualities. Her primary formats include retrofuturistic GIFs, loops, and music videos; abstract public art; street art cat stickers; and large-scale video projections. At a time when platforms pervasively cull personal data, Tanenhaus views creatively reclaiming files and devices as a radical act of autonomy, mindfulness, and personal ownership.

Her major project since 2018 has been devoted to women filmmakers, creating portraits and zine biographies as a way to share their stories and works in an accessible way. She also co-hosts a screening series and discussion group called Strictly Brohibited, which highlights movies by non-male filmmakers in a welcoming community for women, trans, and nonbinary film fans. She plans to continue using her artistic and social media output to promote lesser known and disenfranchised filmmakers, musicians, artists, and performers in ways that reach diverse audiences.

Allison graduated from Harvard University and has studied at Emerson College, MassArt, and the School of Machines, Making, and Make Believe. She is a grantee of the 2019 Somerville Visual Art Fellowship and the 2021 City of Boston Transformative Public Art Program, and is a member of electronic music group The Square Root of Negative Two and optical installation duo bent/haus.

You can follow Kittle’s art doings on Instagram at @panandscan.

Allison’s work has been showcased in 16 countries via galleries, public art, media festivals, and guerrilla street art postings. Notable commissions and exhibitions include the ICA Store at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Boston Convention & Exhibition Center, Boston Cyberarts, SaveArtSpace, “GlitchKraft: Allison Tanenhaus + Friends” at Emerson Contemporary, “Empowered Women Empower Women” curated by Paris Hilton, and she was honored on 2021’s Alternative Power 100 Music List by shesaid.so and Patreon.

BEN

FOLEY

Ben K. Foley (he/him) creates real-life 3D optical illusions designed to challenge and consume the viewer’s visual perception, and acting upon curiosity is the key to his process and practice. What he offers to those who engage with his work are new visual tools, previously unknown to them, but part of their very nature. He wields found, recycled, and repurposed industrial materials, along with electronics and glitch art, to focus his primary medium—light—on interactive and kinetic installations and sculptures that take error to the nth degree. His practice involves hypothesis, experimentation, natural observation, and an alchemical twist to the scientific method to find the very line that spans the definitions of what we see as art, what we understand through science, and what we find mysterious through mysticism. Memory, mindfulness, exploring the unconscious through dreams, mythology, and aspects of Zen define his interests, where he seeks to find commonalities between the microcosmic and the macrocosmic. Ben brings forth work that seeks to highlight ethereal and fleeting moments of physical reaction that we seldom see—yet surround us every day.

ALEX

KITTLE

Alex Kittle (she/her) is an illustrator, art historian, and film fanatic based in Somerville, MA. She graduated from Boston University with a Master’s in Art History, focusing on modern and contemporary art, going on to be assistant director at Uforge Gallery in Jamaica Plain, and a buyer for the ICA Store in Boston. Since 2010, she has been developing her art practice inspired by film, teaching herself digital techniques and creating her own movie poster designs. Today, she is an independent artist whose work encompasses posters, portraits, pins, stickers, and zines related to various niches of pop culture. She has collaborated several times with the Brattle Theatre, designing enamel pins for Suspiria and Jim Jarmusch as well as a tote bag for their Tilda Swinton Retrospective. Recently, she illustrated Scott Meslow’s book From Hollywood With Love: The Rise and Fall (and Rise Again) of the

D E B S T E P DebStep is an interdisciplinary artist working in glitch, video synthesis, photography, and embroidery. Their art practice explores the physical and digital manipulation of media. Their work pulls from personal source materials typically related to the landscapes and still lifes surrounding them as well as the iconography and characters frequently by those themes. In their most recent internet artwork, Trails (https://debstep.com/trails), they used iPhone applications to generate and collage video clips that mimic glitch image subversion and lost frames in order to present the corruption and mania of America’s expansion west.

BAGIST

J. Bagist is an interdisciplinary artist primarily exploring video, net art, and electronic music. Their recent work studies privacy and obfuscation in cyberspace and the reconfiguration of the natural world through digital technologies. They take inspiration from the early pioneers of internet interactions and the history of electronic music and film. J. has shared their work in presentations throughout the internet and in performance spaces and around New England. You can find them at https://bagist.info.

L A U R E N K L O T Z M A N Lauren Klotzman (they/them) is an interdisciplinary art practitioner based in Marfa, Texas. Klotzman has studied at Sarah Lawrence College, Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and Bard’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. Their recent work examines gendered histories of computing and the nature of the screen via textile production and lensless video techniques. Additionally, Klotzman serves as Gallery Director of LTK ENTERPRISES, an experimental curatorial initiative with physical roots in West Texas. They have published with Hyperallergic, Salon, TROLLTHREAD, and The Operating System, among others. Klotzman’s recent work examines gendered histories of computing and the nature of the screen via both textile production and modular video synthesis, examining the legacies of marginalized techno-ancestors via physical, gestural labor. In using lensless video production generated by raw energy, the work embodies forgotten legacies via video performance sessions in which Klotzman channels marginalized predecessors in the history of computing: telephone switchboard operators, early computer programmers, and experimental musicians, among others.

GlitchKraft is curated by Dr. Leonie Bradbury in collaboration with Allison Tanenhaus and organized by Emerson Contemporary, Boston, MA. Originally on view at Emerson College Media Art Gallery, September 18–October 6, 2019. This exhibition was made possible with support of the Emerson College’s School of the Arts. Special thanks to Exhibitions Manager James Manning for his help in realizing this ambitious project. Additional thanks to Debbie Disston, Director, McIninch Art Gallery. GlitchKraft was on view March 7–April 30, 2022, McIninch Art Gallery, Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, NH.

Cover illustrations include Reminisce About Now by Allison Tanenhaus; Glitchfield by Ben K. Foley + Allison Tanenhaus; Screen Queens/Screen Dreams by Alex Kittle + Allison Tanenhaus; and video still from IAmAliciaTV, a music video project written and produced by Alicia Walter with video art and editing by Allison Tanenhaus. Cover design by DebStep. All illustrations in this catalogue include video stills by respective artists and photographs by Allison Tanenhaus, Nathan Lewis and respective artists. Compiled and designed by DebStep. Artists include: Allison Tanenhaus https://allisontanenhaus.com @atanenhaus (Twitter + Insta) Ben K. Foley http://www.benkfoley.com @kid.crystals (Insta) Alex Kittle https://linktr.ee/panandscan @panandscan (Insta) @alexxkittle (Twitter) J. Bagist https://bagist.info DebStep https://debstep.com @walkinlikeelvis (Insta) Lauren Klotzman http://www.laurenklotzman.com @joanjonasbrothers (Insta)