MGMT - OPTIMIZER

Still image of Andrew Benson visual for the Optimizer

MGMT has released their third album, a self-titled LP and along with two psychedelic visual projects which have been launched together, one is called "Optimizer", an immersive audio and visual experience to accompany the new album for its full 44 minute run time. It has been directed and edited by Alejandro Miguel Justino Crawford by mixing the visuals produced by Andrew Benson, Chris Timms, Geoffrey Lillemon and Emilio Gomariz. The Optimizer comes together by buying the album on iTunes.

The second visual and interactive project it's their own website whoismgmt.com whose background features a classic already distortion and melting aesthetic created by Chris Shier who has built an interactive painting website working in multiuser mode which means that everyone who is on the website will be painting together over the same canvas in real time. For this occasion Chris has put several easter eggs in your keyboard keys to change colours and aesthetic of the different strokes, also there is another one to create "G"ifs of cropped areas of the painting process.. try it! See more;

Multiuser painting website by Chris Shier

"Optimizer" directed and edited by Alejandro Miguel Justino Crawford

(Below are some still images from the individual works from the different artists to create the Optimizer, courtesy MGMT)

Andrew Benson
http://pixlpa.com/

Chris Timms
http://chriscotimms.com/

Geoffrey Lillemon
http://www.geoffreylillemon.com

Emilio Gomariz
http://emiliogomariz.net

(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.

Colorful Colorado Revisited by Yoshi Sodeoka

Colorful Colorado Revisited, 2013, is a new great work by Yoshi Sodeoka. The piece it's a a remix of "Colorful Colorado (1974)" by video pioneer Phil Morton. It was made for REMIX-IT-RIGHT: Rediscoveries in the Phil Morton Archive, commissioned by Jon Cates. See more;

Mesmerizing websites

Gifmelter, by Chris Shier & Tim Baker

I'm impressed about several websites I have discovered recently. They create a crazy abstract visual experience, I like the flow by interacting with them, how fast and well they work and also the chaos they generate by submitting a source. 

Into the post you can see 3 pieces, each of them created by a different artist, the first one is called Gifmelter, by Chris Shier & Tim Baker, where you can upload an animated gif and let it flow by interacting with it. I'm really looking forward to see what's next from Noisia, he has created so much good work in the last months (check out these 2 previous posts; 1, 2).

The second image into the post is from a website by David Kraftsow aka dontsave, called yooouuutuuube.com, where you can enter a Youtube video url and select three different modes such as feedback, zoetrope and mosaic, which is also awesome to see an entire video being distorted through all these modes in real time. Btw I didn't know before the work of David Kraftsow, and I didn't like only the piece I just mentioned but several of them lined up on his website, I like how he works visually but also conceptually, this is quite beautiful piece http://dontsave.com/waterfall_tracking/.

The last image is from a new work by Andrew Benson, called Radical Paintings, this piece doesn't take external imagery source, but I love it as I do with the visual work by Andrew working through video, it's great to interact with his acid visuals finally on the web! See more;

Gifmelter

by Chris Shier, gif.js by Tim Baker

http://csh.bz/gifmelter/

Yooouuutuuube

by David Kraftsow

http://yooouuutuuube.com/

Radical Paintings

by Andrew Benson

http://pixlpa.com/webgl/radicalpaintings.html

Substrats by Thomas Ruff

Substracts 2002-03 by Thomas Ruff_

"The Substrat series is a logical extension of the nudes series. With the nudes, Ruff appropriated existing imagery from pornographic sites off the Internet and then proceeded to enlarge, distort and transform them. The Substrats are again taken from the Internet, this time using Japanese manga and anime cartoons. However, he alters and manipulates the source material such that the work becomes an abstraction of forms and colors with no visual memory of the original source material. The resulting images are wondrous, undulating abstract fields. Thus, after the nudes, Ruff tackles yet another genre, one certainly not at the heart of photography: abstraction." - David Zwirner. See more;

OSSITY #4 - KLAXING FLUXION by KOKOFREAKBEAN

KLAXING FLUXION is the latest piece by KOKOFREAKBEAN who continues working on his OSSITY series, being this the issue #4. As he describes it is another pseudo-glitch ragtag funk rampage designed for maximum ocular molestation. KOKOFREAKBEAN tells us more about this work and its process;
"The creation of an OSSITY involves an uncomfortable degree of nudity, a bevy of random violence that usually culminates in murder, and the occasional assistance of a Leyak. Of course, those are merely the preliminary details. The intensive labor begins with short 5-10 second animated loops created in Maya. My first concern is the visual beauty and balance/ imbalance of what is contained in these little scenes. From there, I animate the shapes and/or camera in a rhythmic way that I know will be ripe for sonic accompaniment. I create the sounds piece by piece (sometimes working from one small group of frames to the next) trying to achieve as closely as possible what I think what I'm looking at sounds like (I use Reaktor, Reason, a Micron keyboard, Kaoss pad, etc. for this task), eventually finish, and repeat the process with another loop. When I have a nice little farm of well-manicured loops at my disposal, I bring them all to the slaughterhouse (Adobe Premiere and Adobe After Effects) and have vicious, unhinged editing-sex with their mangled corpses." See more;

Click images to enlarge_


See also previous posts about KOKOFREAKBEAN's works published here 1, 2, 3.

Youth In Trouble by Yoshi Sodeoka

This is the latest work of Yoshi Sodeoka, you will recognize it easily because it shows a mix of his previous animations (variations from those previous animations), including those great psychedelic GIFs which were featured on his interview here. This video is also quite special because Yoshi has mixed his own animations with a found GIF and a random Youtube footage, all this put together and filtered through an analog and digital glitchness. The video called Youth In Trouble is commissioned by Modular Records. See more;

Fatima Al Qadiri - D-Medley

The last video from the Fatima Al-Qadiri's Genre Specific Xperience was created by Thunder Horse Video for the track "D-Medley" which is inspired by Brazil’s Tropicalia movement and the video shows different psychedelic effects such as melting surfaces, acid organic textures and forms and also others which remind us of some visuals from the iTunes (cmd + T). In fact all these visuals seem to be the perfect background to dance on your desktop! See more;

Al Qadiri’s GSX Remixes EP in iTunes.

via | DISmagazine