Glitching The System(s)
A Conversation with jonCates
jonCates is an academic, open archives, festivals and educational programs founder, and a world-renowned artist, curator, filmmaker and game developer. In 2005, he gave life in Chicago to a branch of New Media Art known as Dirty New Media and introduced the concept of post-glitch in 2012. Dirty New Media creates a stark contrast to the clean look of digital art and design that is frequently associated with commercial and corporate styles. It achieves this contrast by employing an approach that is noise-based, raw and draws on unconventional and (often) provocative subcultures.
Cates’ work critically explores technology and addresses the glitch as an almost cathartic way to deconstruct and reconsider systems — be they cultural, political or social.
In this interview, the artist presents his conceptual Metaverse project and talks about his approach as a glitch artist to NFT and blockchain. He also offers an overview of his latest works that take into consideration his life in Taiwan, his love-hate relationship with the Western gender and issues related to settler colonial-racism and white supremacy that have plagued and still afflict indigenous peoples.
Finally, Cates offers us a scoop by publicly disclosing some personal information for the first time and allowing us to publish three unreleased works.
Our exchange took place via email in July 2022.
Beth Jochim (B): The manipulations typical of Glitch Art create a constant tension between destruction and reconstruction or, if you like, between chaos and control. However, although each of us may perceive the glitch differently, your work offers meditative experiences through the use of noise. These experiences investigate issues such as digital capitalism or our relationship with systems including socio-economic and cultural ones. In your latest work, Ghosttown, the glitch aesthetic is used to bring settler-colonial racism and white supremacy under the magnifying glass. From idea to design, how is a new project born?
jonCates (jC): thank you so much for framing the conversation this way! my current projects are born from my love-hate relationship with the Western genre and my life in the nation of Taiwan. i haven’t spoken about this aspect publicly before, but my love for Westerns really comes from my Dad. when he died, many years ago, i began to watch and rewatch Westerns as a way to reconnect with him, even though he was gone. so it actually comes from a very personal place.
i love the aesthetics of those classic Western films and tv shows that my Dad grew up with in the 1940s. still, i know that, as N. Scott Momaday says: “Always, when people came into this landscape we call the West, they brought with them a necessity to imagine it.” i grew up in and have benefited from settler colonial culture, so now i attempt the deconstructions you find in my Glitch Western whirlds.
while i love the old black and white gritty aesthetics and landscapes of classic Westerns, i almost always hate their underlying politics. folks call the Western a quintessentially American genre. like the nation-state now known as the United States of America, the Western genre is founded on settler-colonialism and ongoing attempted genocides of Indigenous Peoples and Nations. my project is, as you say, to look closely at all of this, so that i can critically address my own involvement and desires. this way i can unpack my ‘whiteness’ as a social construct (in my art and life). my goal in doing this work is to take responsibility. this is why (and how) i’m glitching the Western.
Glitch Art gives us opportunities to show something (a genre, aesthetic, ideology) is broken or wrong. as Santiago X says: “colonialism is a glitch”. or as Bree Newsome Bass puts it: “the system is not broken but rather operating as designed”. so, we can look at how the Western operates, the political positions the Western assumes, call them out, and then take them apart. this is what i mean by ‘deconstruction’.
i feel very blessed and lucky that my Glitch Westerns are recognized as decolonizing, feminist, and queering the Western. i’m careful not to make these kinds of claims for myself, about my own work, because that assumes too much about what the work is achieving or not. rather, im just saying that i feel very fortunate that my Glitch Westerns connects with folks in these ways, (for folks interested a few examples of my work being understood this way come from the Feminist Border Arts Film Festival, Here and Queer at Athens International, and the Sensefield 感野 Sovereign Worlds 主權世界 exhibition in collaboration with the Taiwan International Ethnographic Film Festival. other examples include what people have to say about the work in writings, reviews, and scholarship on the subject.)
so my current project is born from the death of my Dad; road trips Out West, on stolen lands, traveling into the imaginary real Americana; discussions with Indigenous artists and scholars Pearl Marie Salas, Dr Bethany Hughes, and Ciwas Tahos (Anchi Lin); absorbing hundreds of Westerns; playing Red Dead Redemption endlessly; and refining my Glitch Art approaches.
B: Defining the glitch or attributing meaning to it is a complex topic. Since establishing the branch of Dirty New Media in 2005, how has your way of relating to the glitch changed?
jC: great question! so much has changed. i’m one of the oldSkulls who is always trying to stay young-at-hearts && curious like cats. so for me, i’m always interested in the new directions folks go in, especially when these new directions are super surprising. sometimes people take what they call Glitch Art in directions that really take me by surprise and redefine Glitch Art. so that’s exciting.
right now TRASH ART inspires me in relation to Dirty New Media Art. TRASH ART shares sum ethics and aesthetics with my original ideas of Dirty New Media (from 2005, lol!). TRASH ART is (of course) totally different and specific to our technosocial times now. still, we have so much in common and so many connections! low cost distribution, ‘cheap’ production values, fast & loose styles, dirty digital punk resistance, a love of broken bits of raw data that are thrown out or left over, attachments to Duchamp, all of this connects TRASH ART back to Dirty New Media. we’re also especially directly connected via very specific glitch aesthetics, lo-fi, and obsolete computing (i.e. old operating systems, graphics displays, and such).
B: Can you introduce us to The Glitch Art Gallery and the idea behind it?
jC: yes! The Glitch Art Gallery is exactly that: a gallery for Glitch Art :) Glitch Art Gallery began with our Twitter account exhibition of Letsglitchit, followed by our first exhibition room showing Kiss by vespertino, a new window installation to exhibit Window Still Life 100 .gif by jjjjjohn, then our next Twitter account exhibition of SquintDev. our upcoming exhibition is work by TheToshio. we’re also going to introduce features like a Garden, Gameroom, Library, and of course the Glitch Kittens’ Cat Cafe 😸⚡✨☕.
i founded the Glitch Art Gallery online and in 台北，台灣 (Taipei, Taiwan). exhibitions, like those listed above, are drawn from my collection. the collection is active and ongoing, including works i’m collecting right now. the collection also includes my own personal databank, a dynamic archive that i’ve built up over the years. in my archive i have collected decades of Digital Art. i have extensively chronicled art from the start of what we now call Glitch Art, to document those moments for glitcHystories.
B: You are bringing your body of work to NFTs. If we think of the blockchain not only as a technology, but also as a medium and a subject matter, how do you relate to it?
jC: this is a really big question, and a difficult one. for me, the important part is always to remember that our technosocial systems are simultaneously both technological and social. blockchain in general or specific crypto/chains/marketplaces, distributed and/or decentralized protocols, all are social constructions. over time, context and content are intertwined as we develop these (and as they develop us). we live in a vast technosocial tingleTangle of protocols and people, interacting with nonhuman agents (including artificial systems) and shaped by natural forces. many of our worlds now, that we inhabit, are almost totally technologized.
we may consider all of this to be ‘natural’ or to be ‘nature’. peoples’ devices may be always on. even when the people are asleep, they may be or feel themselves to be always online, just a click away. my point is just that there is so much, and always more in our ever-expanding technosocial artspace of Digital Art, NFTs, CryptoArt, and/or chain-specific projects. sure, i connect with some more than others. sometimes i relate to a work in ways that are hard for me to explain, even to myself. other times, i know that i cannot or will not relate to areas of activity because i’m either intentionally or circumstantially just not a part of them. with Internet, we have these opportunities to select communities, to join Discords, to dive into hyper specific superniche scenes that convene in nonlocal spaces. it’s like J.C.R. Licklider and Robert W. Taylor said in 1968 (when they wrote The Computer as a Communication Device) we are selecting connections with each other “more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity.”
B: The concept of Metaverse and its way of coming into being is igniting many discussions. Your work called 來自 金山 的 女孩 (The Girl from goldMountain), which employs NFTs and is on the blockchain, is a conceptual Metaverse. How do you imagine this space?
jC: this is another big question!! 來自金山的女孩, 當機藝術 武俠 (The Girl from goldMountain, the Glitch Art Wuxia), is a metaverse of my own, based on my life and extending from/into 鬼鎮 (Ghosttown), the Glitch Western. 來自金山的女孩 tells the stories of a few fictional characters living their lives in a parallel world of 金山 (goldMountain), capital city of 台 (The Platform), an islandNation who is facing war with 花刀国度 (The Nation of the Flower Knife). this is all in very direct reference to my life in Taipei, the capital city of the nation of Taiwan. currently, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) publicly plans to invade and occupy us here in Taiwan.
PRC is actually very direct about their violent ambitions, clearly, publicly threatening to overthrow the sovereign democracy of Taiwan. realities of life here in Taiwan, where we face these very real imminent threats and constant violence from the PRC everyday, are the context for my project 來自金山的女孩.
in my conceptual metaverse, as you accurately say, 3 main characters, let’s call them spectralAgents or imaginaryFriends, live their lives in this alternate version of present day and present time. they are parafictions surviving a global pandemic and existential threats. they have dreams and desires. they make art, drive motorcycles in the rain, and eat midnight snacks. while i imagine them, they imagine what life used to be like in the before times. 來自金山的女孩, 當機藝術 武俠 is all about people living on Internet, cultures, hystories, Glitch Art, philosophy, traditions, and refinding what we lost or was stolen from us. that’s the short version of this exclusive sneak peek into my never-before-released upcoming whirlds of 來自金山的女孩, 當機藝術 武俠 (The Girl from goldMountain, the Glitch Art Wuxia)!
B: Are there any topics or conversations you would like to focus on through your work as a dirty new media artist in Web3 ?
jC: all of the above :) it’s a lot already. i will say: i’ve been around for a bit but i feel new again, mayhaps because we’re all early. 🔆🌞😎
To follow jonCates:
The game 鬼鎮 (Ghosttown) Spirit Simulator is available to purchase on itch at this link: https://systemsapproach.itch.io/ghosttown-spirit-simulator
