{"id":6227,"date":"2022-09-30T08:48:55","date_gmt":"2022-09-30T08:48:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-blog-lb-526867726.eu-central-1.elb.amazonaws.com\/?p=6227"},"modified":"2022-09-30T08:48:57","modified_gmt":"2022-09-30T08:48:57","slug":"disrupting-flows-museum-of-glitch-aesthetics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.niio.com\/blog\/disrupting-flows-museum-of-glitch-aesthetics\/","title":{"rendered":"Disrupting flows: Museum of Glitch Aesthetics"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Pau Waelder<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mark Amerika<\/strong><\/a>\u2019s Museum of Glitch Aesthetics<\/em><\/strong><\/a> <\/em>(MOGA), <\/em>commissioned in 2012 by Abandon Normal Devices<\/strong><\/a> for the London Olympics, brings together a series of artworks created between 2005 and 2012 that explore the creative and aesthetic possibilities of glitch through various media. Amerika, with a group of collaborators that included Aaron Angello, Saoirse Crean, Mary F\u00e9, Will Luers, Ruth McCullogh, Chad Mossholder, Julie Rooney, Rick Silva, Joel Swanson, and Steve Wade, among others, set up this fictional institution devoted to the work of The Artist 2.0, an equally fictional character whose oeuvre is profusely described and analyzed in a 73-page catalog<\/strong><\/a> that not only elaborates a complete profile of the artist, but also suggests critical reflections on digital culture, the IT industry, and the art world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ten years after its creation, MOGA comes to Niio in the form of a selection of six key artworks<\/strong><\/a> from the museum, and the following review of the work of The Artist 2.0, which participates in the fiction created by Mark Amerika and his collaborators.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
Still from Lake Como Remix <\/em>(2012)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Image compression<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

In 2005, The Artist 2.0 presented in an exhibition titled Pixelmash, <\/em>in the Northwest of England, a series of animated GIFs, a (now lost) internet art work, and a digital video projection, all of which referred to the practice of appropriation and remix, so dear to early net art practitioners. The GIFs, part of the .gif(t) economy series <\/em><\/strong>(2005-2006), featured pixelated excerpts of early works of video art, photographs of pop stars, and paintings by Goya in dizzying loops that some would now identify as the work of a post-Internet artist or a cryptoart OG. These works already spoke of The Artist 2.0\u2019s interest in the condition of the digital image in its online distribution: the image as a file that is constantly reused and re-contextualized, and more importantly, compressed.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Image compression formats were initially developed for the first digital cameras, but became crucial to the development of online content in the 1990s and have been popular ever since. Even recently, in 2021, Beeple\u2019s infamous artwork Everydays: the first 5,000 days, <\/em>which <\/em>was sold at auction for $69.3 million, has been criticized for using the lossy compression format JPEG instead of the lossless PNG. While file formats can be said to have become part of our digital culture, they were particularly important for artists putting their work online in the 1990s, as they had to deal with the limitations of a 56kbps dial-up modem and create highly compressed images and 256-color animated GIFs. Pixelated images and fast-paced loops of grainy photographs or video sequences became an integral part of the aesthetics of early Internet art.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI was one of the first artists of my generation who self-consciously bought a shitty mobile phone with first generation video recording technology embedded in it and just went, \u00abWow, that looks totally fucked up and I love it. This is better than painting.\u00bb\u201d<\/strong><\/p>The Artist 2.0<\/cite><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Before the dot-com bubble and the fascination for the new millennium brought a fleeting attention to Internet art that had major art institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, or TATE Modern acquiring web-based artworks, net art was identified with a renegade attitude towards the art world. It proclaimed the possibility of bypassing the gatekeepers and hierarchies of the art world 1.0 by using the web as an uncharted territory in which everything was possible and the roles of the actors could be reimagined<\/a>. However, its proponents knew of the utopian nature of this proposition, as they knew that the art world 2.0 would still be ruled by institutions, corporations, and institutional corporations, and dominated by ever more sophisticated technologies and systems of data transmission. The pixelated image, in this sense, was also a form of rebellion, as well as a nostalgic reminder of a time when the resources were limited and the web was free, as in free speech and free beer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n