What is Post-Internet Glitch Art?
Data-moshing was a term I became aware of later. Initially it was just an aesthetic tool at my disposable. I didn’t consider opening a jpeg in a text or hex editor to be in anyway philosophical, non the less political. At no point did I find myself reflecting on the dimensional implications of turning a png or bmp file into raw data and importing it into audacity. Glitch aesthetic was a technique oriented interaction. Digital material abstracted for the sake of form. Form over content or meaning. Changing bytes or misusing applications never meant a resistance, nor was it an attempt to fracture a simulation. Similar to the Romantic Era of adding chromaticism and extended mixed modal progressions into a composer’s harmonic vocabulary and complexity of expression, glitch was just a method of interacting with and extending a medium. Did Clare de Lune have a social statement about the nature of Power embedded in the use of chromatic motion in both the harmonic outline and melody? Was there a critique on hyperreality inferred somewhere in a transition or dynamic shift? To me, glitch was just another dialect of a visual language used both independently and commercially. I associated no deeper meaning than an aesthetic result from an agnostic process.
Glitch Art has been a hobby of mine for sometime. Before I was interested in data bending raw data and file formats, I was experimenting with circuit bending. Often experimenting to make something from a broken keyboard of an electronic toy with the idea of sampling the textures. When I came across the terms: “Post-Internet” , “Post-Data” , “Post-Digital” — I was intrigued to find a whole community of people who glitched files and rerouted circuit boards. It didn’t surprise me to recognize a strong Post-Modern , Post-Structuralist ideological origin at the base of the Post-Internet mission.
In this blog I take a look at some main figures in the Post-Internet glitch movement and the overall messaging of the aesthetic. And ask: What is the point? How does it help? What is its impact?
Post-Internet simply means since the internet has been around. With art it more specifically refers to Internet Art that was made of or about the effects internet has on society and culture in the early to mid 2000's.
Influential Thinkers in Glitch
Explained in her 2011 The Glitch Moment(um) — glitch art is something which both exists as artifact and process. That while there may be a movement within the aesthetic’s development, it is not the defining results that hold any significance, but rather the process and the method of interaction. Aesthetic is a result of process, result of the machine language used to store the pre-glitched data. It is about what is learned in the moment of the glitch. A fleeting moment which illuminates, via something unexpected, an insight and furthered access to understanding the digital environment.
To Menkmen, glitch means an interruption to a conventional stream. The glitch is a symbol for a way of life. A way of interacting with digital power structures, both psychologically and architecturally, which surround and assimilate us while interacting with a digital environment. Glitch is not just an aesthetic. Glitch is an operation to Menkmen, a process. The results are irrelevant, as the experiment is the act and investigation of a medium, format or file type through deviance of context.
“[a glitch teaches us]the taxonomy of the machine language’s system to store data” — Menkmen.
She stresses the positive outcome of imperfection. She describes a glitch as an imperfection. To see the positive outcome is to recognize new possibilities revealed by the imperfection.
2. Nick Briz:
Nick has a series of video essays that very clearly explains the aims and mission of glitch. His Glitch Tutorial is a refined elaboration and tutorial to get one introduced to glitching.
Rather than glitch being a mere temporal manipulation of raw data, Nick Briz takes the act beyond the limited formalist view point and assigns a larger ideological function for glitch.
Briz’s main focus is that people come to understand digital literacy and want to learn it. He stresses that digital literacy is prerequisite to digital agency. Through glitch, Briz states, it is brought to light the politics embedded within digital systems. He goes to explain that file types, applications, languages and operating systems are all embedded with cultural and social conventions. These conventions begin to assimilate us. He explains that if we do not disrupt the conventions then we agree to them.
“An iphone is a package of conventions…culture politics masquerading as modern technology”
Social media has developed a type of self awareness, a set of actions and social perceptions that did not exist prior to the early 2000’s. It is not a single post that matters, but rather that the act of posting is a social communication now.
Through glitch, two things are accomplished:
First, a convention is challenged. Knowledge is gained through disruption. Knowledge is power. Embedded culture exposed in the structures.
Second, the disruption also exposes the exploits in the system. Interacting with the exploits teaches digital literacy over time.
Together these two results empower a tactical user of digital environments to both learn and master digital agency.
Agency empowers a user to harness the modalities of a digital environment.
3. Jon Satrom:
Satrom has a big influence within the glitching community. He’s very active. He is known for live desktop melt downs and lectures about the process of ‘Creatively Problem Creating’ .
In general, between these two, the main glitch philosophy is outlined. First, that glitch is a systematic way to disrupt streamlined conventions. In order to examine imperfect results and to discover new possibilities that were, beforehand, unnoticeable. Secondly, that the digital environment is a product of the cultural politics of those who developed it. Therefore through cognizant, tactical interactions one is able to achieve agency. Through agency, one can help transform the digital environment’s landscape. glitch becomes a way to further learn about and master digital agency.
Doubts
Okay, okay, okay. I get the idea. I can appreciate it. Infact I like it. But is glitch the academic appropriation of ‘Hacktivism’ or a companion aesthetic to help people understand theoretical and ethical views of ‘Hacktivist’ mentality? It is still difficult for me to latch onto the philosophy as an active component. The philosophy feels more like an after thought; a ribbon tying the ideas together, justifying the relevance of glitch. Is Post-Internet, just an ironic reference to taking this mechanical abstraction of computer malfunctions and casting a Post-modern explanation on the process of glitching?
What is the ideal outcome? Where is the application of this digital agency? When I try to imagine this glitched post-internet content’s future, I see an abundance of absurdity. I see glitch commoditized and digital agency forfeited in order to get a name brand glitch. Is digital agency analogous to accessing the html of your myspace and changing the color of the font and margins — or is it more? Where does the agent take action? Is the aim to have a glitch inspire someone to build a personalized operating system or challenge the bias in a machine learning model?
A Few Ways To Glitch
The first way I learned how to glitch was by opening a jpeg in TextEdit. You get the ASCII characters of all the bytes and can disrupt the file in any way you’d like. You might find yourself copy and pasting sections of ASCII or writing in your own messages. The results vary but here are some examples.
The image is a building in downtown manhattan. There are three methods of glitching that I used. Here is the final result.
The first method I showed above. Accessing the ASCII and rearranging, adding and omitting characters. The second method I went in a little deeper and used a hex editor to more manually change with intention rather than purely by chance. The third method, more reliant on chance, was running the file through audacity as an audio wave file then exporting back out as a jpeg.
The Image I Started With
Here’s an example of using the first two methods side by side.
For those unfamiliar
Hexadecimal looks like this:
Here’s how Hexadecimal works.
In the picture above you will see 4 columns. Starting on the left:
- Line number from my IDE (VS Code)
- Data Position
- Binary Data as Hexadecimal
- ASCII encoding of Data
Each hex represents one byte, which is binary — so each hex is divided in two. Both of the characters in hex represent half of the byte with 4 bits, together equaling eight bits. In short, the reason for using hexadecimal instead of decimal is as follows:
Highest number 8 bits can express2^8 = 2560 -> 255 = 256
Here is how hexadecimal looks alongside decimal.
Decimal
0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 = 10Hexadecimal
0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,A,B,C,D,E,F = 16A = 10
B = 11
C = 12
D = 13
E = 14
F = 15
The relationship between 0–255 = 256 (highest number expressed with 8 bits). The hexadecimal system is so convenient. It’s beautiful.
So if,
0x0 = 0
0xF = 15
0xC0 = C0 = 192
Which hex equals 255?
0xFF!
This allows for the byte to represent the values of possible numerical expressions (0–255 ) in two digits rather than using three. So each half of the byte can be represented for its entire numerical possibilities 0–0xF side by side creating a larger scale representing all possible numerical expressions in the total byte, 0–0xFF.
ASCII
ASCII is another level of encoding. More readable. It results symbols of the english alphabet, punctuation etc. However, it can not read this file in a way that informs us. Well, at least not easily.
I have two images above that show the glitch and ASCII side by side. Here I want to show the ASCII read out closer.
Editing is essentially the same in theory as it would be in a hex editor, but rather manipulating ASCII representation of bytes: ‘Copy, Paste, Delete, Write in Your Own’
In these two types of glitching, you’re doing the same thing; but with hex, you’re accessing interpretable code that allows you to see the structure of a file. ASCII does not appear easily interpretable. However, I do feel they produce different results. The file type also effects how the data is bent. A .jpeg and a .png corrupt differently.
A Third Method
Beside inspecting and manipulating the structure of a file to corrupt expressively, there is another process that leaves more to chance but is interesting. Rather than changing the design, this process has you change the file type all together and run the file through an application that would have not been able to read the file as its original type. For example, taking a .jpeg and putting reverb effects on it via Audacity. Below is a brief tutorial how to that.
Then in Audacity:
Now I want to use functions that are native to Audacity and effect the data as if it were audio, then convert it back to an image.
I continued to play with the three processes until I came across something that struck me. The final_version, shown earlier, to me is an accident — however supervised it may be. Im not sure it represents anything. The process of it was entertaining as usual. And to some degree I can see the silhouette of the Post-Internet Glitch Art’s impact on literacy and awareness in the digital environment. It has the potential to empower agency. I think the next thing I would do is save the .jpeg as a .wav file, then open the hex editor and see how many layers of transitions can be bent, and how far you can push the imperfection to reveal something beautiful in the machine language.
PhotoShop a WAV file
Let’s take the process from the third method and reverse file type. We’re going to start with Debussy’s ‘Clar de Lune’. Rather than take an image and send it through audio effects, let take audio and put it through an image editor.
From there, change the file into raw data then open it in Photoshop.
Each pixel is a byte. The beginning of the piece is at the top left corner, and the end of the piece is at the bottom right corner. Thinking of the image as a surface, like the magnetic dust on tape or the bottom of a cd, you can imagine the idea of scraping or scratching that surface. The same idea works here.
Eerie and somewhat comical once returned to a .wav — the glitches start at 1 min and have a duration of ~2mins35s. Turn sound on low at first. There are some spikes
While I didn’t find the glitched audio particularly listenable, I wanted to look a little closer at the data. I wanted to more clearly see where the data had been corrupted and where in the audio file would it be visible — and how it would be visible.
Here you can see the disruption pretty well. Below, I’ve changed the color to see if a different contrast would clarify where the glitch is occurring.
You can see the piano notes of the piece pretty clearly. You can see that at 1 min the glitch begins. You can see all the spikes. And where the corruption ends and the coherent music returns. I still wanted a closer more detailed look.
Above is the beginning. This can act as the base model of normalcy. Each note is distinct. The shapes and spacing are very clear. Overall there is a sense of simple and relatively uniformity.
Depicting a fifteen second frame shortly after the glitch begins, we can see a drastic change in the data. There is much more activity. Seems more chaotic and choppy. There seems to be a change in timbre. We can see that it is louder as well.
2min15s to 2min30s. These 15s show the tail of the glitch. You can see indications of uniformity the more you look right, while the left is still distorted.
So What is Post-Internet Glitch Art?
While I find a lot of this very interesting to play with, I struggle to find meaning. I’m vaguely reminded of Michael Foucault and Jacques Derridas. I’m entertained with the notion of digital agency. But I lack to connect any sense of empowerment. To me, Post-Internet Glitch Art is an aesthetic resulting in our current time and based in a deconstructionist interaction with machine language. The act is enjoyable, but I feel the niche is somewhat exclusive and not inviting or sensical to anyone who doesn’t have a grasp of binary or file formats.
I notice more and more a commercial accessibility of glitching via phone applications and photoshop tutorials to help get the ‘glitched’ look. If there is something empowering, then maybe the commoditization of the aesthetic is good. Good in that in that it makes available for everyone to break their jpegs and signal a messaging of resistance. Or maybe it undermines the idea completely because the fracture is not made with intention, but rather automated by a third party. Nonetheless, I’m sure I’ll continue to play and build pythonic utilities to distort and rearrange bytes.
