Undervolt & Co

Still from Dazzling Odysseys: The Electric Mind by Johnny Woods

Undervolt & Co is a new experimental video label founded by Yoshi Sodeoka, only saying this it already sounds promising, but Johnny Woods and Nicholas O’Brien joined the team as director and senior editor respectively, something like that had to happen someday and it's just here. Have a look to the website and check out how they have launched the label > there are six great titles from artists such  as Jennifer Juniper Stratford, Spectral Net (Birch Cooper, Brenna Murphy, Sabrina Ratté and Roger Tellier-Craig), Cristopher Cichocki, Jimmy Joe Roche and Yoshi Sodeoka and Johnny Woods are also part of the artist line up. Each title has different pieces or it depends how the artists have decided to do it, but you will get an average of 20 min title for $5 each! Into the post you can see one minute trailer from each title which gives you an idea about how are them, but to be honest 1 min is nothing compared to what can happen in video from 15 min to for example one hour that it's the one by Johnny, it's a great opportunity to buy and download some great video art that you won't find online as the label keeps the exclusivity of. See more;

Read more about Undervolt & Co, how it was created, aesthetics featured and more in an interview with Yoshi Sodeoka by Benoit Palop here. FAQ about  here.

Lost In Linear Valley: Jennifer Juniper Stratford

Spectral Sequences Vol. 1: Spectral Net

Liquid Static: Cristopher Cichocki

Distortion III: Yoshihide Sodeoka

Greetings From Baltimore: Jimmy Joe Roche

Dazzling Odysseys: The Electric Mind- Johnny Woods

www.undervolt.co

Shift by Media Lab

Shift, an interactive audio visual installation created by Media Lab in 2011. 

"Shift is an array of machines shifting bits and bytes informed by simple and highly repetitive algorithms. Shift pays attention to its environment through the ever-watchful eye of a built-in camera and responds to movement. Changes in state are expressed through audio and visual abstractions." See more;

"During the exhibition, the audience was able to interact with Shift through the build in web-camera of each individual computer. Activity sensed by the camera would result in visual and audible changes animating the audience to further explore the underlying system of the work through different forms of gestures. 

How did the software work? To get started, Andreas prepared a software template, a sketch, that would be used by each individual member of the project. By tweaking and changing parameters and the structure of the software code, new and different mutations of the initial program would emerge. We ended u choosing 20 variations to be displayed. In the next step interactivity was added to the sketches. Since each computer that we were using was equipped with a web camera, we added a code that would allow us to capture, analyze and translate the camera feed into an additional parameter for our sketches."

The algorithms are shaped by Andreas Schlegel, Benson Chong, Darrick Ma, Dhiya Md, Felix Sng, Marvin Liang, Mike Chen, Sid Lim.

Scans by Bruno Levy

Interesting digital scans made over reflective surfaces such as aluminium wrap and plastic wrap created by Bruno Levy who moved the surfaces during the scanning process in order to capture the analogue distortion. See more;

POLYVINYLIDENE CHLORIDE / scans, 2013

ALUMINUM / scans, 2013

Video Death by Henry Driver

Video Death by Henry Driver_

"The documentation of a monitor as it deteriorates and loses all grounding. Forced to repeatedly display footage of its own decay, it slips into insanity. Confronted with mortality and the falseness of eternity, it self-destructs. Unable to be human and create an illusion of immortality or stability. It is consumed." - Henry Driver. See more;

(Glitch) Art Genealogies essay by Rosa Menkman

Gridfont by A Bill Miller Image and interlaced Helvetica font by Rosa Menkman

Last March the (ᴳ̐litch) Art Genealogies exhibition took place at LEAP Gallery in Berlin. The exhibition statement said; "[...] The exhibition focuses on the different threads that interconnect generations of the different communities of visual (glitch) artists and their working methods, conceptual themes and problematics.

(glitch) Genealogies fragments Glitch history into multiple (historical) categories, such as ’NES-Aesthetics’, ‘Enigmatic realities’, ‘GUI, Politics and Prose’, ‘psychedelia and the new psychedelia’ and ‘discontinuous systematicities’"
Rosa Menkman, who curated the show together with Daniel Franke and John McKiernan went deeper, analyzing and writing about (Glitch) Art Genealogies. She launched the essay yesterday as a downloadable file  In this post you can see some fragments from the different categories and some references from artists who are part of the essay. See more;

NOTE All the information and references below are courtesy Rosa Menkman from (Glitch) Art Genealogies essay. The complete essay can be downloaded here.

(Glitch) Art Genealogies essay by Rosa Menkman

«Over the last 10 years, glitch, a perceived break from a flow in a technological system, has become a more and more popular subject matter in the (new) media arts. Today, Glitch Art is indeed so popular that theorists often feel the need to categorize and historicize the genre. Dada, Futurism and de Stijl are just a couple of historical Avant-Garde movements that have been used to delineate ‘the history’ of Glitch Art. But this teleological principle defies and confines glitch’ procedural and fragmented nature.

The exhibition (ᴳ̐litch) Art Genealogies does not focus on glitch art from a historically singular point of view, nor does it attempt to give an all encompassing historical or causal overview. Instead, (ᴳ̐litch) Art Genealogies recognizes the complexities and processes of glitch arts’ many affiliated, interconnected and (geo-)fragmented discourses: it tries to shine a light on why particular glitches develop social-political momentum in a specific point in time and how this momentum changes over time. 

(ᴳ̐litch) Art Genealogies is an effort to show just five of the many threaded glitch discourses that play a role in the curators subjective understanding of glitch art at this present. In these threads, generations of different communities of (visual) glitch artists and their working methods, conceptual themes and politics are (inter)connected and/or juxtaposed.» [...]

Psychedelia and New Psychedelia

[...] Psychedelic arts’ original aesthetics such as hallucinatory patterns, recursion, fractals and bright colors are illustrative to glitch, not necessarily because glitch artists have similar convictions or esthetic vision as 1960s psychedelic artists, but rather because of glitch arts’ algorithmic nature which was often referenced in 1960s psychedelic art. However, some glitch works seem to draw direct lines of inspiration or even knowledge (in the case of Anton Marini through collaboration) from these early times of counterculture. What does it mean to re-fabricate a genre 50 years after its coming about? And what is this ‘new’ in new psychedelia? 

gridSol_altar2 by A Bill Miller

Sect 7 N-E, 2013 by Anton Marini vs Rutt Etra

AURAE, 2012 by Sabrina Ratte 

GUI Politics and Prose

The collection Graphic User Interface (GUI) Politics and Prose shows glitch works that expand and explore the meaning and materiality of the GUI. Traditionally, the GUI functions to enhance the efficiency and ease of use of a computer program - in short: to enlarge 'usability'. But in these videos the GUI is exploited to enact a battle at the boarders of system and entropy, standardization and corruption, expression and code, and meaning and non-meaning, thwarting the viewers’ expectations and conventions of the ‘usability’ of a GUI.

JODIs early work My%Desktop (2002-2010) for instance, is best understood as a rejection of what can be referred to as GUI based ‘determinism’. At first sight, this series shows a collection of OS_systems going haywire, ruined and void of meaning. But the GUIs formal fragmentation or what seems to be a remarkably well choreographed spasming, forces the spectator to consider the work more closely. It seems like there is actually something more than just GUI-chaos on display. After reflecting upon the work for a while, it becomes clear that JODI is actually performing the GUI. The conventions I am conditioned to approach a GUI with, are left behind and instead the GUI has been deconstructed into a performance tool and maybe even something close to a writerly software. [...]

OS Desktop from the My%Desktop series, 2002-2010 by JODI

Plugin Beachball Success, 2012 by Jon Satrom

Post_it_desktop_Feedback, 2012 MiYö Van Stenis

NES circuitbending esthetic

Circuitbending is the customization of the circuits within electronic devices such as children's toys, to create new musical or visual instruments generating output beyond their original capabilities. It involves a certain threshold of knowledge and expertise - ie. a basic understanding of electronics and its tools. [...]

The concept that a glitch can be designed or distributed through a standardized glitch software, seems at first maybe a-typical, but has in fact become a more and more common tendency and even important tradition in recent glitch art. More and more ‘new’ glitch art is being modeled after original glitches within older media, perpetuating a shift from destabilizing breaks within technology or information-based processes towards the generic and associative display of more and less ‘retro’ effects. [...]

The Punch-Out! Variations, 2007 by noteNdo

glitchNES, 2009 by no_carrier

Enigmatic Realities

A video card barfs misunderstood RAM, all clipping modes are off, navigation causes environments to warp into all kinds of impossible angles while traces of passed imagery seem to get stuck in the sky and color modes have chosen to celebrate the 60s psychedelia once again. In these six game engine based ‘realities’, the rules of the frameworks that the player normally uses to make sense and navigate their videogames with, are intentionally ruined. [...]

The fact that the game environments still ‘function’, while programmed to ‘glitch’, makes them critically challenging. The gaming platform is in fact redefined to not follow its genre, form or technique and force the user to reflect upon her conventional frames of reference for the particular platform. Finally it becomes clear that software is more than just a preprogrammed tool: it is a materialization of social modalities, that can endlessly be re-modified into different interpretive or social conclusions. [...] 

RANDOM SEED, 2013 by Rick Silva

Psych and Seek 2013 by Kevin Carey

Authorship // Openness

Primarily active during the 70s as both activist and video artist based in and around Chicago, Phil Morton (1945 - 2003) wrote "Distribution Religion", a manifesto based on a conviction best understood as what today is known as ‘copy it left’ (but which Morton dubbed COPY RIGHT). Distribution Religion included the first DIT ‘open sourced’ schematics for an image processor, made by Dan Sandin. Mortons legacy also includes the film and video department of the the School of the Arts Institute Chicago, which Morton instigated and which is believed to be one of the earliest institutionalized film and video departments in the world. 

Mortons convictions still resonate in current video art practices of (SAIC/Chicago based) artists such as jonCates, who initiated the Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive in 2007, and Nick Briz whose Apple Computers (2013) is a [re]mix of Phil Morton's 1976 video tape 'General Motors'. In these (dirty) new media manifestos, Briz and Cates perform their take on issues of ‘Hystories’, planned obsolescence, upgrade culture, technological self-reliance, control and copying.

General Motors, 1970 by Phil morton

!"⟲#3! ⟒Ɍ3"""⟳Ɽ̂ ồ (AKA: Broken Records: Hystories i Of Noise && Dirty New Media), 2011 by  jonCates

Apple Computers, 2013 byNick Briz

Rosa Menkman, July 2013

The exhibition and essay include works by : Kim Asendorf, Nick Briz, jonCates, Kevin Carey, Anton Marini filter inspired by Bill Etra, Emilio Gomariz, Jodi, Nick Kegeyan, Alex Myers, Phil Morton, A Bill Miller, Brenna Murphy, no_carrier, noteNdo, Julian Oliver, Bryan Peterson, Sabrina Ratté, jon.satrom, Rick Silva, Yoshi Sodeoka and miYö Van Stenis.

Visual documentation about the show at LEAP Gallery; pictures here and videos [1] & [2]

Arte made a nice short documentary about check it out here, in german though.

Modulate 5.1

I'm discovering good stuff by renting some video art lately. I will post here my favorites still images or videos if they are also online. This one called Modulate 5.1 is a collection of sonic visual pieces, exploring movement, colour, shape, non-verbal expression, internal journeys and spatial awareness. A collaborative project released in 2006 between Mark Bunegar, Mark Harris, Scylla Magda, Bobby Bird and Joseph Potts. 

It is great that all the pieces from this project are online, I put all of them in order into the post, anyway they still sell the DVD by contacting with Modulate. See more;

01 wave

02 red

03 motion

04 twist

05 embroidery

06 green

07 sunblind

08 create

09 blue

10 temple garden

Ryoichi Kurokawa

Ryoichi Kurokawa has created a new minimalist and beautiful audiovisual sculpture called Oscillating Continuum where the digital visual and physical structure merge perfectly together.

He has also uploaded this week an audiovisual concert from 2011, performing with two channel  projections and 2.1 channel sound. You can see an excerpt of each project into the post;

Previous post of Ryoichi Kurokawa; 1, 2

oscillating continuum, 2013

2ch HD suqure display, 2ch sound - 08'00" loop

syn_, 2011

2ch projections, 2.1ch sound - 30'00" - 45'00"

Zugzwang by Rosa Menkman

Zugzwang is a nice series of images generated through feedback from the videomixer, aliasing artifacts as a result of digitization. Created by Rosa Menkman last year, I have just discovered it at the great digital and games based blog by Daniel Rehn. See more;

Lauren Pelc

I like the similarity between Lauren Pelc's digital paintings and real ones made with oil painting or acrylic painting. It's interesting to see how she gets similar strokes, textures, colors, gradients, forms, etc in both ways. Lauren works the digital pieces using several softwares such as Cinema 4D and Photoshop, first she works with the three-dimensional program creating 3d volumes and forms and composing them, then it is altered using Ps. As O Fluxo says; Lauren uses images of sections of her paintings as references or textures to map onto 3-D objects.  For Lauren, the goal is to create images that maintain various dualities.. That can sum it up her interest in the many ways that paint and brush strokes can be altered and remapped with the aid of digital imaging programs. See more;

Digital paintings

Oil paintings and Acrylic paintings

via | O Fluxo

Mo Marie

http://momarie.com/works/bukowskisleeping/

Mo Marie, a painter from USA tells us about how she has introduced her painting into digital and website;

"Having a website is a new experience for me, yes. While working toward it, I began making digital scans and photographs of my paintings and discovered that transforming my traditional paintings into digital files on the computer screen made them feel very different. To me, they feel like completely new works of art. This experience inspired me to try digital painting, and my current practice of using various brushes and styli with touch sensitive devices like iPad and iPhone grew from there." See more;

Mo Marie maintains an ongoing selection of her iPad paintings at http://momariewood.tumblr.com/ . She is also member of Phone Arts where she collaborates throught her iPhone paintings, have a look here. A general studio diary of her can be seen at http://diaryofmomarie.tumblr.com/. Mo Marie is  also part of the great collaborative collective Computers Club Drawing Society where she periodically makes beautiful drawings.

Mo Marie is continually in the process of documenting new and old traditionally made paintings for her website, where she displays them using Google Maps. If you click any of the 3 following screenshots it will open a huge photograph of a real painting (acrylic, watercolor) on a map, you can interact with the painting by exploring and zooming into it, it is a great experience, I really enjoy to appreciate such a texture!  If you click the zigzag shape under the map controls on the right it will open the original high resolution file of each painting. To see other paintings through the map option go here. 

iPad Paintings

iPhone Paintings

The t-shirt below is part of a new project by Mo Marie where she also uses the the computer and scanners to make clothing out of her paintings that appear in the google maps webpages on her website. The painting used for this t-shirt is called "Tropical Yokai" you can explore it here.
It is possible to buy it here.