Because of the indeterminate results, I was not able to see the effects until I opened the image again. Take the "pied-de-poule" scarf, for example: that motif was created by opening a pied-de-poule image file with a hex editor, randomly editing the source code and then saving. JD: When using shapes in textiles, the forms are created through either the prepared video systems, hexedit techniques, or display resolution errors. For the Stuxnet throw specifically, binary digits are grouped in two where each group equals a different colour: 00 = white 01 = light grey 10 = tan 11 = dark grey. For example: 0 = black and 1 = white at the most fundamental, binary level. With my data knit/weave textiles, binary data is colour coded giving colours a new significance. The more colours available for knit and woven textiles, the more data can fit due to colour coding binaries. JD: 32KB fits when colour is compressed at 2BPP, which is how the Stuxnet and Melissa motifs were created. Photo by Daniel Temkin, used with permissionĪrs: How did you encode source code into textile metaphors? What grabbed my attention was how a broken video game system could create motifs similar to conceptual art tapestries. The output from my " prepared NES" (pictured top) could also produce patterns that reminded me of contemporary textile motifs found in the Bauhaus movement. JD: Also in 2001, when I began preparing Nintendo video game systems to intentionally short, I noticed similarities between the broken 8-bit graphics and traditional textile motifs. What I did was apply these ideas to video devices.Īrs: How did the whole textile art thing come in? I saw this as using Cage’s “prepared piano” technique and concepts of indeterminacy to electronics. Circuit-bending as a practice requires the addition of wires to existing circuits to create different “shorts” to produce sounds. “Prepared guitar” relates to Cage’s “prepared piano.”Īlso in 2001, a friend got me interested in “circuit-bending.” Back then this involved the intentional short-circuiting of battery-powered audio toys to create novel sounds. Being a guitarist, I was doing my own compositions with prepared guitar or “extended techniques” for guitar. Back then, I was studying music composition at a college in Maryland and was heavily influenced by jazz and contemporary composers like Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and of course, John Cage. I began in 2001, four years before I had my own computer with access to the Internet. Jeff Donaldson: Well, I started before “glitch art” became the umbrella term that it is now. Ars talked with Jeff about his art, the meaning of malware-inspired scarves, and much more besides.Įnlarge / A photo of John Cage's prepared piano - a piano with various things attached to the strings, to modify its output. His latest attempt to bring tradition into modern times is called "malwear," scarves and throws whose knitted motifs encode famous malware. Jeff Donaldson, aka Glitchaus, interprets the movement by weaving computer software glitches into textiles. Outside of the simple quest for aesthetics, glitch art questions the cultural values that are associated with technology. Take Poxparty by Jon Satrom for instance: it develops "funware," Apple-inspired software products which have flaws before reaching to the market and are sold with those unchanged. Glitch artists take it further, and attempt to challenge the common belief that technology and algorithms are flawless and cannot malfunction. Multiple initiatives have already sprung from, inspired, and built on the idea that errors are human-and beautiful. Glitch art is therefore the contradictory relationship between man and machine losing his functionality." At the same time, this kind of art exploits the glitch and uses it, so its nature is also entropic, dadaist. In an attempt to explain this nascent artform, Martino Prendini wrote: “The error becomes image and movement, system errors are exploited, and it has a certain punk nature. Errors, and by extension the changes, that can occur within software source code and data can provide a fertile foundation for the imagination. Glitch art resonates with the increasingly complex love-hate relationship humans have with technology. Photo by Raquel Meyers, used with permission reader comments 41 with
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