Journal #6: Moar Gl1tches n Stuf
For this entry I’d like to focus on a piece I made a couple years ago that involved heavily glitching Photoshop using a 2d design I made. This first piece is not glitched, in the traditional sense, but is here as a contrast to my glitched piece. Some of the techniques used were shared across pieces particularly in the use of color. However, this first piece is more deeply in the “Glitch-Alike” style discussed by Ferreira, attributed to Moradi(Ferreira, pg. 8). As such, it functions as a good way to contrast between the pieces their experiences in creating them. While I made “glitchy” effects, Photoshop behaved more or less exactly as expected while constructing “Reflections”, and as such did not contribute to the same feelings as “The Sigil” did. While I did not necessarily know exactly how the piece will turn out in either, the corruptions I used to make the effects in “The Sigil” were not present here, and as such constituted a fairly normal experience with Photoshop. However, due to the corruptions used to create “The Sigil”, I oftentimes felt what could only be described as a perceptual paradigm shift, the ability to see that the digital is capable of breaking the confines of its program (but not really… a glitch technically is just the natural consequence of a set of code, inputs, outputs, like a normal program.). What’s important about the experience of the glitched piece is less that a program does weird things when you do weird things to it, but rather that a program can do unexpected things that were not intended, or in other words, constitutes a form of critical rebellion against the hegemony put in place by the institutions that lead to the creation of these programs. I did things I wasn’t “supposed to”, the image was rendered in a way that it wasn’t “supposed to”, yet is there not validity here?
In order to make this piece I basically did everything Photoshop really doesn’t want you to do. I don’t actually know a good way to describe my process, I put on trippy music like Rufflefeather’s Waking Dream (check it out) and “glitched” my own human operating system and let the chaos flow through me. Specifically on the technical side of things, I manipulated things like the scratch disk and how much memory was allocated for this image, I overloaded the number of calculations it needs for the colors (there’s literally hundreds of layers here with varieties of blend modes), and so on. As part of the process, I don’t have an intended end goal other than “I know it when I see it.” Now, this image is actually malfunctioning, or more accurately the program that rendered it is. But I intentionally went out of my way to malfunction it, and I knew it would behave in some of these ways, although I had no certainty on how the end product would actually look when I started. So, there was an intentionality here, and as such would not warrant the same kind of “experience of the unfamiliar” that regular use leading to a glitch would incur. None the less, I do believe that this image captures the “Aesthetic of Failure”, although I would argue it’s more an Aesthetic of Rebellion. In other words, what this represents to me is the ability to accept paradigms outside what is expected, what is “computationally correct”, and yet still be valid. Through the process of making this piece, I believe there to be a severe blurring of the lines between “Pure Glitch” and “Glitch-alike”, (Ferreira, pg. 8) as some of the elements are likely what one would reasonably expect from the results of the rendering, and others are actual malfunctions.
Work Cited:
Ferreira, P., & Ribas, L. (2020). XCoAx 2020: Post-digital aesthetics in Contemporary Audiovisual Art. Retrieved February 24, 2021, from https://2020.xcoax.org/pdf/xCoAx2020-Ferreira.pdf