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/ Hardware hacking and recyclingstrategies in an age oftechnological obsolescence

Planned obsolescence was first explicitly ormulated in the 1920s and 1930s as parto a strategy to promote recurrent consumption [1]. Te term “planned obsolescence”already appears in the 1930s, as exemplified by Bernard London’s pamphlet o 1932Ending the Depression Trough Planned Obsolescence [2]. In the 1950s, urtherevidence o this dynamic can ound in statements by designers such as Brooks Stevens[3] and retailing experts like Victor Labow [4].

Planned obsolescence may be described as a design strategy that pre-emptively restrictsthe liespan o a commercial product, building-in actors intended to promote earlyreplacement (o the object or intrinsic part thereo) beore usability is ully exhausted.Tese built-in actors may be o a technical or material nature, e.g., some inkjet printermanuacturers uses smart chips in their ink cartridges to prevent them rom being usedafer a certain threshold like the number o pages or time. Apple’s iPod, iPhones andiPads are manuactured with no user serviceable parts inside, including their batteries.Afer approximately three years o use, the lithium-polymer battery will no longer workand the device will either need to be proessionally serviced or discarded. Sometimesthey may comprise a marketing strategy in which the appearance o “new” modelswithin the same product range relegates older models to obsolescence [5].

Planned obsolescence is an especially notable strategy in the consumer technologyand personal electronics market, where there is a clear premium on the novelty anditerative development o new generations o the same underlying technologies (e.g., thepersonal computer and the mobile phone). Darren Blum, a senior industrial engineerat Pentagram Design, which builds portable devices and computers or companieslike Hewlitt Packard, says “We joke that we design landfills” [6]. Te combination oshort term design and marketing strategies and ast consumption behaviours tends togenerate a ast increasing amount o electronic waste [7].

A counterpoint to the development o planned obs olescence is evidenced by the work oartists, hobbyists, hackers, activists an d sustainability-advocates who explore the latentpotential o apparently “obsolete” devices. Early indications o this tendency are in thework o Reed Ghazala [8] who initiated and first conceptualized the practice o “Circuit

Bending” in the 1960s which has not been widely documented, studied or theorised[9]. An other emerging practice is the recycling and hardware hacking processes thatare driven by necessity by Hackers and Hobbyist in westerns and developing countries[10]. Tough driven by entirely different motivations, these practices can inorm eachother. Furthermore these practices have the potential to make significant contributionsinto the debate o technological obsolescence.

Hardware hacking as an art practice has emerged very recently, notably in the fieldo electronic music as the technique o ‘circuit bending’ where cheap music toysand instruments are modified to create new and unique music instruments. Whileless prevalent or visual artists, perhaps because it requires more specific skills andknowledge, it is a practice, which has seen a growth in popularity.

While it is a new practice, it’s art historical precedents can be traced back to thecybernetic art movement o the 1960s best known through the Jasia Reichardt curated‘Cybernetic Serendipity’ exhibition in the ICA in 1968. Key influences would includethe installation work o Nam June Paik, the machines o Jean inguely and the lesser-known work o French cybernetic artist Nicolas Schöffer.

Examples o artists and artists groups involved in hardware hacking would include theInstitute or Applied Autonomy, Peter Vogel, Casey Smith (Junkunnel Lab), GebhardSengmüller, Karl Klomp, Gijs Gieskes, Rosa Menkman, om Verbruggen, JonahBruker-Cohen & Katherine Moriwaki (Scrapyard Challenge), Ben Castro and MiguelRodriguez o Basurama, Garnet Hertz, Niklas Roy, odd Holoubek, Gordan Savicic,Harold Schellinx, Peter Edwards, Martin Diamant, Günter Erhart, Nicolas Collins,Cory Arcangel, Natalie Jeremijenko, roika, Phil Archer, Michael Golembewski, JohnBowers, Julius von Bismarck, Caleb Coppock, Lesley Flanigan, James Houston, AleksKolkowski, Alexis Malbert, David Wills, Brian Duffy, Jeff Boynton, om Koch, ArcangelConstantini, LoVid, Stean Jankus, Phillip Stearns, and many more.

New technological developments such as the availability o low cost micro controller

boards like Arduino [11] made specifically or artists and designers and the sharing otechniques and inormation via the Internet have made hardware hacking easier and asa result the popularity o hardware hacking is increasing as an artistic technique.

Te significance o this type o artistic practices is clear when one considers t volume o waste electronics being disposed round world. Moore’s law dictatecomplexity o computer chips doubles each 18 months. By consequence everto 50 millions tones o E-waste is generated worldwide [7].

Notes:

[1] It is worth noting that some critics have suggested that the root concept o punnecessary consumption through the premature “wearing-o ut” o a commodity is evidence in the 17th century, pointing to sources such as Discourse on rade (1 690) bBarbon in which he argued that, “Fashion or the alteration o dress is a great promoterbecause it o ccasions the expense o cloths beore the old ones are worn out”.(See Edwards, 2005, pp.24)

[2] B ernard London, “Ending the Depression Trough Planned Obsol escence” (p

1932. Reproduced by Adbusters Magazine, “How Consumer Society is Made to Breakonline at <http://www.adbusters.org/category/tags/obsolescence> (Last modified Oc2008, last modified October 18th 2009.)

[3] “desire to own somethin g a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessarStevens, alk at Midland (Minneapolis) in 1954, audio recording available at<http:// www.mam.org/collection/archives/brooks/biography.asp>.

[4] “Tese commodities and services must be offered to the consumer with urgency. We require not only ‘orced draf’ co nsumption, but ‘expensive’ consumptioWe need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever ipace.” Victor Lebow, Price Competition in 1955, Te New York University Journal oVolume XXXI, Number 1, Spring 195 5, page 7.

[5] Although the term has wide currency in popular discourse, considered defin“planned obsolescence” are not very common although both Vance Packard (TMakers. Simon & Schuster. 197 8) and Tomas Frank (Te Conquest o Cool: BusinesCounterculture, and the Rise o Hip Consumerism, University o Chicago Press, 1attempted to provide these. Tese definitions tend to ocus on the question o consumnot specifically about electronic waste..

[6] Compa nies Slash Warranties, Rendering Gadgets Disposabl e, uesday, July 16, 200Spencer Staff Reporter o Te Wall Street Journal

[7] Te average liespan o computers in developed countries has dropped rom si1997 to just two years in 2005. Mobile phones have a liecycle o less than two years in dcountries. 183 million computers were sold worldwide in 2004 - 11.6 percent more tha674 million mobile phones were sold worldwide in 2004 - 30 percent more than in2010, there will be 716 million new computers in use. Tere will be 178 million new users in China, 80 million new users in India. Te e-waste problem, Background - MayGreenpeace International. http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigelectronics/the-e-waste-problem/

[8] Q. Reed Ghazala , “Te Folk Music o Chance Electronics, Circuit-B ending thCoconut,” Leonardo Music Journal Vol. 14., MI Press.

[9] Some interesting work exists such as Zombie Media: Circuit Bending Media ArchaeoAn Art Method Garnet Hertz & Jussi Parikka. July 10th 2010. Vilèm Flusser Teory Aw

[10] Shenzhen – Phone recycling -1 via echtravels Blog by David Kousemaker.http://techtravels.wordpress.com/shenzhen-phone-recycling-1/

[11] Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platorm based on flexible, eahardware and sofware. It’s intended or artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone intecreating interactive objects or environments.http://www.arduino.cc/

Benjamin Gaulon



/ Five Principles of Zombie Media [1]

Garnet Hertz & Jussi Parikka

Zombie media addresses the living deads o media culture. As such, it is clearly relatedto the earlier calls to investigate “dead media” by Bruce Sterling and others: to mapthe orgotten, out-o-use, obsolete and judged dysunctional technologies in orderto understand better the nature o media cultural development. And yet, we want topoint to a urther issue when it comes to abandoned media: the amount o discardedelectronic media is not only the excavation ground or quirky media archaeologicalinterests, but one o the biggest threats or ecology in terms o the various toxins theyare leaking back to nature. A discarded piece o media technology is never just discardedbut part o a wider pattern o circulation that ties obsoleteness to recycling centers,dismantling centres in Asia, markets in Nigeria, and so orth – a whole global politicalecology o different sorts where one o the biggest questions is the material toxicity oour electronic media. Media kills nature as they remain as living deads.

Hence, we believe that media archaeology – the media theoretical stance interestedin orgotten paths and quirky ideas o past media cultures – needs to become morepolitical, and articulate its relation to design practices more clearly. We are not the onlyones that have made that call recently – or instance imothy Druckrey writes:

“Te mere rediscovery o the orgotten, the establishment o oddball paleontologies, oidiosyncratic genealogies, uncertain lineages, the excavation o antique technologies orimages, the account o erratic technical developments, are, in themselves, insufficient tothe building o a coherent discursive methodology.” [2]

We would want to add that in addition to developing discursive methodologies, weneed to develop methodologies that are theoretically rich as well as practice-oriented –where ontologies o technical media meet up with innovative ideas concerning designin an ecological context.

As such, the other part o the zombie media call is the work o reappropriationthrough circuit bending and hardware hacking methodologies – to extend the mediaarchaeological as well as ecosophic interest into design issues. By actively repurposingthings considered dead – things you find rom your attic, the second hand market, oramongst waste – the zombiefication o media is to address the planned obsolescence omedia technologies which is part o their material nature. In reerence to contemporaryconsumer products, planned obsolescence takes many or ms. It is not only an ideology,or a discourse, but more accurately takes place on a micropolitical level o design:difficult to replace batteries in personal MP3 audio players, proprietary cables andchargers that are only manuactured or a short period o time, discontinued customersupport, or plastic enclosures impossible to open without breaking them. Whether youcan open up things – the amous black boxes o media culture characterized by iPhonesand iPads – is one o the biggest political and ecological questions acing our mediatheory and practices too.

As a maniesto, five points o zombie media stand out:

1 / We oppose the idea o dead media. Although death o media may b e useul as aoppose dialog that only ocuses on the newness o media, we believe that meddies. Media may disappear in a popular sense, but it never dies: it decays, rots, remixes, and gets historicized, reinterpreted and collected. It either stays as in the soil and in the air as concrete dead media, or is reappropriated throughtinkering methodologies.

2 / We oppose planned obsolescence. As one corner stone in the mental eccirculation o desires, planned obsolescence maintains ecologically unsupdeath drive that is destroying our milieus o living.

3 / We propose a depunctualization o media and the opening, understanding ando concealed or blackboxed systems: whether as consumer products or harchives.

4 / We propose media archaeology as an artistic methodology that ollows in the to appropriation, collage and remixing o materials and archives. Media archhas been successul in excavating histories o dead media, orgotten ideas, sideminor narratives, but now its time to develop it rom a textual method into amethodology that takes into account the political economy o contemporarculture.

5 / We propose that reuse is an important dynamic o contemporary culture, ewithin the context o electronic waste. “I it snaps shut, it shall snap open.” Wethat open and remix culture should be extended to physical artiacts.

Notes

[1] Tis short essay is a part o our wider project which will be published in Leonardo-j2012: Garnet Hertz and Jussi Parikka, “Zombie Media: Circuit Bending Media Archaean Art Method”.

[2] imothy Druckrey, “Foreword” in Siegried Zielinski, Deep ime o the Media (CMA: Te MI Press, 2006), ix.



/ The moment(um) of voidRosa Menkman

Te first encounter with a glitch comes hand in hand with a eeling o shock; beinglost and in awe. But to find onesel within these ruins is also to experience a eeling ohope: a negative eeling creates space or an intimate, personal experience o a machine(or program), a system showing its ormations, inner workings and flaws. Tese ruinsreveal new opportunities, sparks o creative energy, that indicate that something new isabout to be created. Questions emerge; what is this utterance, and how was it created?Is it perhaps... a glitch? But once the glitch is named, the moment(um) - the glitch - haspassed... and in ront o the perceiver’s mind-eye, suddenly a new orm has emerged.

A glitch is the most puzzling, difficult to define and enchanting noise artiact; it revealsitsel to perception as accident, chaos, or laceration and gives a glimpse into normallyobuscated machine language. Rather than creating the illusion o a transparent, wellworking interace to inormation, the glitch captures the machine revealing itsel. Te

glitch is a powerul interruption that shifs an object away rom its flow and ordinarydiscourse, towards the ruins o destructed meaning. Tis concept o flow I emphasizeas both a trait within the machine as well as a eature o society as a whole. DeLandadistinguishes between chaotic disconnected flows and stable flows o matter that movein continuous variations, conveying singularities.1 DeLanda draws here on Deleuze andGuattari, who describe flow in terms o the belies and desires that both stimulate andmaintain society. Tey write that what we perceive as flow is something that comes in toexistence over long periods o time. Within these periods, conventions are established

while deviations tend to become rare occurrences and are ofen (mis)understood asaccidents (or glitches). Although the meaningulness o every day lie might in act bedisclosed within these rare fluctuations (as I have suggested through the theorization othe accident), their impact or relevance is ofen likely to be ruled out, because o so cialtendencies to put emphasis on the nor m.2

elevision is arguably the most flow-centric, ideologically ‘transparent’ media orm.In elevision: echnology and Cultural Form (1974), Williams describes a viewerrequently caught up in a nonlinear flow o technology and its contents. He emphasizesthat the process o this flow seems natural, but it is strictly guided by larger corporationsand powers.3 When a flow breaks, the user witnesses only shreds o the flow throughwhich the message is normally transmitted, as the mechanic unctions that areconventionally relied upon are obuscated. When a supposedly transparent interaceis damaged in this way, the viewer is relocated to a void o meaning. Interruptionslike these are ofen perceived as disastrous, threatening and uncanny. Sometimes theycreate a moment where seemingly anything that could be said about a situation iseliminated rom thought or possibility. On other occasions, the metaphorical impact othe unspeakable disaster also brings with it the tendency to think, in terms o extremedifferentiations rom the norm. Eric Kluitenberg describes how this was or instancethe case on September 11, 2001, when the CNN website temporarily went down anda black screen repeatedly interrupted the flow o the television broadcast. He reers tothese moments in time as

the rupture o proessional media codes, which signaled complete panic and disarray[…], the infinity o possible alternative discourses, o other possible modes oexplanation and interpretation.4

What is challenged or brought orward in the case o the void is the idea o authorshipitsel, which, prior to this moment, was seemingly neutralized rom media-culturalexperience, Te convention o “the seamless surace o the networked media spectacleitsel, and its illusion o stability” 5 tends to oreclose (we realize belatedly) anysense o authorship whatsoever. In media accidents like these, the void involves theunknown - that which can not be described or planned or. Tese empty spaces onon-understanding trigger a horror vacui. A ear o voids to which nothing else can be

compared and that is beyond all possibilities o calculation, measurement or imitation.6 However, these terriying voids also create a orm o counter-experience, a negativepleasure that is not so different rom the proto-modern, aesthetic conception o thesublime described as early as 1963 in John Dennis’s writings on the Alps: contradictoryand immense, “delight that is consistent with reason” but yet, “mingled with Horrors,and sometimes almost with despair”.7

Like this ‘nature’-generated sublime, the glitch is an uncanny experience o unoreseenincomprehension. Experiencing a glitch is ofen like perceiving a stunningly beautiul,brightly colored complex landscape o unexplainable, unathomable and otherworldlyimages and data. A glitch represents a loss o control; the computer does theunexpected, it goes beyond the borders o its known and programmed territories. Itchanges the viewers assumptions about the technologies and its unctional conventions(as was or instance the case during the September 11 broadcast), and acts as i it is nolonger logical but instead prooundly irrational in its ‘behaviour.’ Te glitch suddenlymakes the computer itsel appear as unconventionally deep, in contrast to the boring,conventional surace-level behaviours o ‘normal’ machines. In this way the glitchannounces a crazy and dangerous kind o moment(um) instantiated by the machine

itsel (‘Will the computer come back to “normal”?’ ‘Will data be lost?’). Trodistorted images and behaviours o the machinic output, the viewer is thra more risky realm o image and non-image, meaning and non-meaning, trinterpretation. Te machine no longer behaves in the way the technology was sto: the glitching interace, strange sounds and broken behavioral patterns inttensions into user intentions; an astonishing image must b e somehow negotiatea normally much more boring masquerade o human computer relations.8 Tfirst the viewer reacts with shock and perceives the experience as a loss, the glbe subdued as a solid state o perception. Just as the understanding o a glitchonce it is named, so does the notion o equilibrium supposedly damaged by titsel. Te ‘original’ experience o rupture moves beyond its sublime moment vanishes into a realm o new conditions. Te glitch has become a new modeprevious uncanny encounter has come to register as an ephemeral, personal ex

o a machine.

Notes

[1] De Landa, Manuel. War in the Age o Intelligent Machi nes. New York: Zone Books,

[2] Deleuze, Gilles and Pierre-Félix Guattari. Tousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schiz

rans. B. Massumi. London : Te Athlone Press, 1988. p. 219

[3] Williams, Raymond. elevision: echnology and Cultural Form. Hanover: UniversityNew England, 1974.

[4] Kluitenberg, Eric. Delusive Spaces. Essays on Culture, Media and echno.logy. RNAi Publishers and Amsterdam: Institute o Network Cultures, 2008. p. 357

[5] Kluitenberg, Eric. “ransfiguration o the Avant-Garde / Te Negative Dialectics o 23 Jan 2 002. <http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0201/msg00104.htm

[6] Kluitenberg, 2008: p. 333

[7] Barnouw, Jeffrey. Te Morality o the Sublime: o John Dennis. Comparative Litera35, No. 1 (Winter, 1983), pp. 21-42 Tese quotes come rom the very first appearance ino the concept o the ‘sublime’ by John Dennis in 1693, in his account o crossing the Al

[8] Goriunova, Olga and Alexei Shulgin. “Glitch.” In: Matthew Fuller, ed. SofwarMassachusetts: MI Press, 2008. p. 110-119.



/ Circuit BendingRepurposing The Past

/ The Aesthetics Of RepresentationIn Circuit Bending

Alessandro Ludovico

Eduardo Navas

I there’s any proper “music hacker” he also has to be a “circuit bender”. But what reallyis “circuit bending”? o put it simply it is the process o creating sounds out o toys bymaking new connections in their electronic circuits. Creating new sounds out o almostnothing is compelling and all the initiates are always busy in experimenting with theircheap and crackling machines.

Who started everything.Te recognized (grand)ather o the circuit bending movement is the American ReedGhazala. His bendings are not only made by plastic toys rom the eighties (as it is ormost o the people), but also rom stuff that’s even two decades older. In act he startedin the late sixties afer observing a shorted out amplifier emitting sort o “synth” sounds.He asked himsel a key question: “i this can happen by accident what can happen bypurpose?.” So he began to careully join different internal components o electronic

stuff, then adding control through switches and buttons. He dedicated huge amount otime in this practices, reflecting also on the theoretical implication o such a practice.His long experience was explained in a series o articles or the Experimental MusicalInstruments quarterly rom 1993 to 1999. He had the chance o trying toys rom differentperiods, with different results, and as he noted, circuit bending is more difficult on themost recent sound toys because o the circuit’s scale o integration: now most o the timeall the sound processing is contained in a single chip.

Repurposing the toys.Circuit Bending has definitely nothing to do with nostalgia. It’s a not a question oreviving orgotten stuff with old-style melodies and then sinking in an ocean omemories. It’s much more close to the opposite. It’s about cannibalizing this old stuff,building new, unny and bizarre reak toys that sounds like an alien electronic orchestra.

It’s “hacking” in the most proper meaning, so it is also reusing and, more imprepurposing that little machines. Everytime a piece o wire, soldered at eithenew logic relationship is established in the machine’s structure, and the electricsoundwaves start to speak a new language. Tis language is suddenly and rainvented and so ofen it’s out o the owner’s control. Even i sometimes the toyblow up afer a wrong connection, the process is almost addictive, the benFurthermore every toy is made on its own electronic scheme and there are no guidelines or them, so every bending has good chances to be unique. Afethe ‘heart’ o these diverted toys starts to beat in a different way, liberating anpotential. It’s a game in which the players are busy with obscure circuits’ conmaking alive sounds that are not supposed to be there. It’s cheap and it brings o an exploration and the excitement o a discovery in a new soundscape, immediate eedback (“what will happen i I do this?”) and a promised uniqu

a reward. Not bad or just playing around with old toys and a solderer. Te gesounds and noises have a new role, rom being an entertainment or kids t“music”. I the shiny handmade analog devices has become the luxury o digcircuit bending is the geek’s revenge, where the dusty machines resurrect andunder the limelights. In the annual “Bent – Circuit Bending Music and Art in New York, the crowd o enthusiast benders gather in the same style o theicolleagues. Tey have pure un (concerts, perormances) but also many tworkshops, or sharing precious knowledge, learned through pers onal experie

or thinking at new strategies. Teir creations will take part o urther expecomposing studio sessions and uture live gig until armies o semi-autonomoand Spell, Furbys and Barbies will take over the stage.

Neural #23

One might wonder what is the concrete definition o “circuit bending.” In a way, thename does not completely connect with the actual activity o appropriating sound rompre-existing sources, ranging rom electronic toys to hacked radios, or even hal -brokengenerators. When I first heard the term, I thought it reerred to strict manipulationo electronic signals. Tis possible definition hints at a certain purity in sound withspecific electronic technology; yet, in 2009 circuit bending is quite the opposite, eveni in the beginning it may have had a leaning towards hacking electronic gadgets oall types. At the moment, it is a hybrid practice that appropriates any type o sound,reshly recorded or pre-recorded; re-recorded or significantly manipulated; even erasedor retraced–or captured live rom the environment in which a perormance is takingplace to be bent immediately, on the fly.

My most memorable perormance o circuit bending took place in Uruguay, on July28, 2006. I attended a soundtoys event organized by Brian Mackern, one o the firstnet-artists rom the southern cone, active since at least the mid-nineties. Mackern

more recently has become a major supporter o sound perormances o all types. Teperormance took place at the French Alliance o Montevideo, where I saw Mackern

and a number o other sound artists perorm on customized sofware interaces. Acouple o perormers used Max MSP and Jitter, while Mackern presented a series o visual platorms built in Flash that remixed well-known movie clips rom Hitchcockand arkovsky.

I saw a connection with the aesthetic o sound manipulation ofen ound in circuitbending in these perormances; yet, it was the perormance o Szkieve (Dimitri dellaFaille), a Belgian-Canadian Sociologist that lef a lingering impression on me. He isobsessed with collecting toys that produce noise in any shape or orm with the purposeto use them in circuit bending perormances. In act, that afernoon, beore theperormance, I was invited by both Mackern and Szkieve to join them on a walk indowntown Montevideo. At the time I knew that Szkieve perormed with toys, but didnot know exactly how he developed his sets.Tat evening Szkieve used a green plastic fish toy which he had bought rom a street vendor during our walk. He pulled and released a string rom the fish, which thenemitted an expected fish-like sound that Szkieve slowly distorted into an echoishabstract noise, somewhat reminiscent o dub. Szkieve then combined the loop with the

distorted sample o a toy train that moved on a circular track. Te pitch o tmotion was drastically lowered several notes, turning it into a cacophonousbass sound that directly contradicted the petiteness o the actual train. Szkmixed loops rom various electronic devices through a mixer. I the audiencexperienced the visual development o the perormance, the sound could eabeen mistaken or just another experimental electronic mix, careully develomusic studio–rather than rom toys ound at any corner store.

Szkieve’s perormance is a good example o how the key to creativity is not sthe ability to produce sound rom scratch, or have an advanced skill in perobut actually to be able to conceptualize the potential o material that mayhave a unction, or holds particular cultural value. In this sense, circuit benunique link between individuals who believe that all production should be deand manipulated rom scratch, and individuals who are primarily investedo sampling and recombining material, as commonly understood in Remix

bending exposes how in the end it is not important i something is perormedlooped, or is a mix o the two, but rather whether or not what is perormed ch

the audience’s perception o the source material. Tis is true not just or sonoise perormers, but artists in all fields.I must admit that I ofen view circuit bending primarily as a perormanmedium. My case in point is Szkieve’s perormance, in which the sound mayinteresting on its own but in conjunction with its visual development.However, Circuit bending is becoming more diverse. In 2009 it is closely lphysical computing and all types o art installations. What is promising abobending is that it can be a medium, as well as a tool: it can include sofwhardware, or exclude either one, as long as its only requisite is met: that percebent. Most importantly, like Remix, circuit bending can also be an aesthetic, toin literary terms:Te snare o a wet red elastic nylon wire licking the bass-line o grey woodbound with the blind screams o a last name never to be amous and alwamentioning; the beat o graceully scratched hair longer than the history o pushing the finger that struggles to penetrate its own castration; the speed o the Internet, showing off its color as it begins to understand its dependence on



/ Error, Noise, GlitchThe Art of the Algorithmic Unconscious 1

Phillip Stearns

Tis article is a meditation on the underlying substrate (the material) o artworksproduced by human/machine collaborations where the uniqueness o the machineis an integral element; the “imaginative” or creative properties o its algorithms are vital in the completion o the artwork. Te idea that the machine can unction as acollaborator is based on the premise that humans have embedded their thoughts, ideas,and abstract notions into these machines—that they are a kind o unny mirror wherewe see reflected a distorted image o ourselves is central to the ideas presented within.

Intervention

Somewhere on the ar side o the known universe, a wrinkle in the abric o space-time ripples through empty space, traveling at the speed o light towards what romits perspective appears to be a tiny speck o dust in the vastness o the cosmos. Tiswrinkle, a highly energize photon, a gamma ray, speeds towards its destination: a lonely

blue planet orbiting a tiny yellow star drifing in the void between the arms o a spiralgalaxy. Te world rushes up beore it, and high in the upper atmosphere, our travellercollides with an oxygen molecule. Te impact creates a antastic explosion, echoingthe events o the big bang, but on a much smaller scale. Particles are produced romthe energy o the impact, translating momentum into matter, exotic matter lastingor the brieest o instants: gluons, quarks, proton and anti-proton pairs, electronand positron pairs, pions, muons, neutrinos, anti-neutrinos, each unique wrinklesin the abric o space-time. As the particles scatter, the neutrinos and their counterparts leave the scene o the accident unimpeded by normal matter; gluons coalesce

into quarks, which coalesce into highly energized protons and neutrons. One o thoseneutrons ejected rom the heart o the subatomic mini-big-bang collides a short timelater with a nitrogen atom, jettisoning a proton rom the nucleus, resulting in analchemical transormation o nitrogen into carbon. Particles produced in the micrournace o the gamma ray collision meet similar alchemical ates, smashing into DNAmolecules o the terrestrial beings below, driving random mutations in the evolutionarydevelopment o lie. Another o those neutrons produced in the original collision tearsoff at near light speed, penetrating the hull o an aircraf, and slicing into the heart oits navigational computer where it reacts with the nucleus o an atom in the ceramiccasing o the core processor. Another cascade o transormations occur, producing ashower o positrons which annihilate electrons in the silicon o the processor itsel. Tisneutralization o electrons is interpreted by the navigational computer as a legitimatepiece o inormation: a bit flipped rom zero to one (an alchemy o data?). It doesn’tknow that the changed inormation is anomalous, the algorithms responsible or takingin data, processing and analyzing, and ultimately guiding the aircraf, run it throughthe mill. Te aircraf rolls sharply in the n ight sky and descends into the clouds below.

A Failure o Materials

o err is human and to glitch is machine. Do these two characterizations o behaviorparallel one another, is there are a metaphorical relationship between them? I so, canit be hypothesized that there is an innate connection between human and machine

which explains this parallel? A possible explanation which may allow or such aconnection to be inerred is that a tool or technological object is a projection o humanintentions, desires, and ideas onto an object. I the ashioning o a complex tool canbe understood as the maniestation o the dreams guiding those desires and intentionsinto a technological object, then it can be inerred that encoded and inscribed withinthe physical orm o the technological object are the ideas, the bodies o knowledge,and deeper still the cultural values and structures o belie which orm a dynamicrelationship between a society and its environment (conditions o existence). Whatollows is an understanding o the glitch as an inevitable eature o technology, theresult o imperect machines building imperect machines in the pursuit o perection(rom what we can tell, a uniquely human ideal). Te glitch, thereore becomes a wayo examining the allibility o what is essentially a human desire or perection; the

pursuit o this goal through infinite improvement and revision, however, implies thatperection is an unobtainable goal.

I a specific tool or technological object ails, it can be agreed that it has encounteredsome kind o limit—environmental, unctional, or otherwise—which has caused it tounction short o or outside the scope o its intended utility. Although ailure itsel is aoreseen consequence o any undertaking (though many unwisely curtail preparatoryactions in ace the ace o its eventuality), the specific outcome o a ailure has the potentialto breach the limit o what is humanly imaginable. Te most catastrophic example inrecent memory demonstrating the limits o human imagination is the eruption o “Mt.Fukushima” ollowing the massive magnitude nine ohoku-aiheiyou-Oki earthquakeand resulting tsunami, which flooded the backup generators at the Fukushima Daiihinuclear plant, disabling the emergency cooling systems. It was not a question o themagnitude o the earthquake breaching the limits o the conceivable (the seismic activityresulting rom the off-shore ear thquake did not exceed the Fukushima Daiichi’s designlimits), but the sequence o events in the wake o the tsunami that ollowed, which ledto the ull meltdown o reactors 1, 2, and 3 and the explosion o reactors 1, 3, and 4 2.Te notion o ailure is thus a question o limits, both o material: the actual physicalsubstrate, the arrangement o that substrate to represent codified actions, the specific

relationships with it environment (its situation); and imagination: the conflperception and practical knowledge with insight, interpretation, intention and

As artists working within a much larger tradition o material interrogatimportant to ask ourselves: “What are the materials we are working withrole do they have in creating a space where metaphorical relationships can to meaning?” For the time being, we’ll overlook the question o meaning aloutput media—net art, displays on video monitors, projections, prints, texts, peactions, etc.—and zero in on the primary material. o do this we will have tomaterials in the traditional sense, the primary material o the so cal led “classicwood, paper, stone, metal, textiles, paint, canvas, photographic paper, film, lighmovement (this list is by no means exhaustive). In the established field o diour primary materials may be considered to be data and code. Te generalizaI’m making (which may prove to be a dangerous one), is that any art works whidigital systems (based on binary logic) in their production involve the generacquisition, and processing o numerical inormation, which is dictated by insets or code (which we will see is indistinguishable rom numerical inorcontained in programs. Te conclusion that is drawn rom this, is that digitaa “material” which distinguishes it rom other disciplines, and any discussimaterial o digital arts (o which glitch art is a sub genre), must include nodata (as inormation) and its source but the means by which data that is gener

processed: the code or underlying instructions/algorithms.

Re-imagining Architecture o Error

Assuming that to err is human, is to glitch really the machine equivalent to er

Our brains are massively parallel biological interpretive engines built rom a diveo neurons. Tey contain roughly 100 billion neurons with somewhere near 1 quconnections between them. Although they can be classified in unique types—a

to unction, structure, and other parameters—each neuron is completely unsingle neuron may contain hundreds o synapses, or connections rom other and may also connect to dozens o others. At these synapses, neurotransmchemical messengers, open or close close ion channels, por tals through which as sodium or calcium may pass. Opening and closing these ion channels has o altering the electrical properties o the neuron, which is normally polarizrespect to its surroundings, typically resting at a slightly negative voltage. It is osufficient “stimulation” (de-polarization), that the neuron releases neurotranat connections with other neurons. Tis is a gross simplification o the pronumber o different neurotransmitters and ion channels, together with their edifferent neurons produces myriad ways or “inormation” to be gathered, panalyzed, and stored—but serves to illustrate that computation in the brainsimple binary operation. Despite the temptation to look at the computationawe create as metaphors or the brain, the reality is that they are vastly differenarchitecture and unction. However, as a consequence o these machines havibuilt and designed by us, there are detectable ragments o our logic, languaimagination embedded within.

Te basic building blocks o our present day computing systems are junctionstwo pieces o silicon with specially engineered properties. Tese junctionsto build transistors, the smallest computational unit rom which our most ccomputational machines are built. A single processor may contain a billion

transistors, each unctioning as a switch: it is either on or off. Although trcan be designed to provide a continuously variable output (as in analog elechere their unction has been limited to provide an unambiguous two-state outbenefits o designing a two-state system are that inormation encoded in a o ons and offs is highly immune to noise, and that Boolean algebra, a symathematics represented by true/alse logical statements, can be easily buconfigurations o transistors unctioning as on/off switches.

Microprocessors are collections o vast numbers o transistors configured in suthat an instruction ormed out o a sequence o on and off messages (1s and 0can select commands, which perorm certain operations on a data set. Saidway, instructions are arrangements o bits which correspond to certain com

embodied and represented by physical arrangements o transistors. Code tharrangement o instructions which orm a program. oday, code more closelinguistic structures; we use programming languages to instruct computers tocertain tasks. Tis development has occurred out o necessity as a string o representing a set o instructions is difficult or most humans to read and undat a glance. A solution was to group 4bits (a nibble) together and represena hexadecimal counting system where symbols 0-9 represent zero through nA-F represent 10-16. Machine code is this binary machine language, whichmost commonly in its hexadecimal representation. Upon this is built an language, where instructions and commands in machine code are calledmnemonic code which resembles actual words. Built on this basic oundmore complex programming languages: FORRAN, Pascal, Basic, and C to nthe smallest action o the many existing languages today. What this means ithe complexities o today’s programming languages, all code reers back toinstructions (specific to the processor), which at the level o the machine is set o numbers. Everything done inside the computer is then a mathematical orepresented by two-state (binary) logic, and it is because o the act that instruand data sets are both arrangements o bits that, at the most basic level, code indistinguishable rom data—the two can be interchanged at will.



ormats effectively keep inormation or data and instructions separate andw us to distinguish between data types. By overriding file ormats the potential

changeability o code and inormation can be actualized, enabling the productionteresting mis-interpretations or re-imaginings o previously established data sets.ude example o this process o disregarding ormats and protocols is best illustratednnecting an audio amplifier directly to points on a computer’s motherboard while

perorming a set o instructions (do not attempt unless you are willing to sacrificecomputer!). Here data is sonified in a direct one-to-one ashion: a 1 pushes the

ker out and a 0 causes the speaker to return to its resting position. Other possibilitiesde manually re-wiring an output pin an input pin on a microprocessor, which mayt in any number o outcomes (one o which may be converting your computera door jam). Tis manual re-wiring or short circuiting is the hall mark o thetice o circuit bending. By converting data sets rom one ormat to another, it isble to render instruction sets (program files) as images, images as sound files,d files as incomprehensible strings o characters, back into images. Tis practiceta-bending takes advantage o this technique o orced data processing by openinge or video files in text or hexadecimal editors, changing a ew characters, andopening the resulting file in an image viewing program. Rosa Menkman, in her

Vernacular o File Formats” demonstrates the potential o various data-bendingniques perormed on a wide range o file ormats3. When these transormations areormed using standardized file ormats, the results take on the signature noise o the

ithms used in the translation rom one ormat to another. Tis orced rendering oonventional” (altered, corrupted, ormat inappropriate, or mismatched) data canal the architecture o the machine; the grid work o the algorithmic unconscious isaled.

m Error to Noise

interpretation rom the perspective o machines has no meaning without theext o conventions devised by their human operators. Error is relevant only in the

ext o an intended purpose. o dive urther into the nature o machine error (i weven call it that anymore), we now turn to the introduction o noise—here taken to

nomalous or undesired data.

example in the opening paragraph illustrates one natural process capable oducing noise into a digital system by changing the state o a bit rom 0 to 1. Were

to happen in a data set representing a bitmap image, the effect may be as subtleanging slightly the color o a single pixel, or as drastic as corrupting the file ina way that it is no longer recognizable as an image file; it’s all a matter o what

bit’s unction is. On the level o code, a change in the instruction set could causenumber o effect ranging rom incomprehensible output to the entire system to ading halt. What is important here is that errors do not appear to machines as errors; all that is really happening are mathematical transormations, numbers actingumbers via different physical configurations o transistors. Unless a device hasdesigned to detect and suppress anomalous output, return an error message, thegates are perectly capable o churning out bits as ast as they can be pumped in.age in, garbage out, or so they say.

esigning a system built around two-state logic and numerical representationormation, the effect o intererence and noise—random electronic variationsduced by thermal noise—on signal fidelity is minimized. In this sense, digitalms are by design anti-noise. In the shif rom ana log (or rather physical or chemical)

s o art making—where physical agents operated on physical materials—to digital,nherent noise o physical material and its impact on signal fidelity is controlledmanaged according to algorithms (mathematical operations). Anything that is generated or processed by a digital system must be represented in numerical, even the program generating or processing the data. Tis does not mean that itpossible to capture noise or generate a sequence o numbers that appear random,r that noise becomes represented in sets o discrete values. Te random variations

characterize noise become limited by the complexity o the mathematics used toesent or reproduce them.

ing Voices in the Noise

ite the elimination and control o noise in the orm o random fluctuations, others o noise become inherent eatures o digital technologies. Encoding continuouslyble values in discrete numbers reduces the impact o noise in the orm ormission errors, but introduces its own signature in the orm o quantization errors

other artiacts. o reduce the these basic orms o error, we can increase bit depthampling rates but this leaves us with a massive amount data. Streaming media overnternet requires us to transmit digitized signals through a system with limited data. A standard audio CD has a data rate o 14 11KBps, which theoretically could bemed one-to-one on today’s high-speed Internet connections, but i you wanted toaudio two hours o recordings to a collaborator elsewhere, you’d have to wait twos or that transer to complete assuming your ISP isn’t lying to you about upload(which are as o 2011 still only a raction o download rates). Video is a whole

r beast with data rates o 24MBps or uncompressed SD video and five to size timesrate or HD ormats4. Streaming this data or transerring it across the Internety at a one-to-one rate is out o the question.

y compression schemes allow or large volumes o data to be represented by a muchler amount o data. Tis is achieved by analyzing a file and removing data that,rding to perceptual models, is not perceived by a human viewer. In the case o

audio, the spectrum o a signal is analyzed, and based on psycho-acoustic phenomenonsuch as spectral and temporal masking (appropriate or the average human listener ocourse), data that represents inormation that would not be perceived by the listeneris removed. Tis loss o inormation introduces noise in places where it is likely tobe masked by the content so that we are less likely to perceive it. A similar approachis taken with the encoding o image and video files. Te overall color palate or a filemay be reduced according to its content, patches o very similar tones consisting ohundreds o pixels may be represented as a ew overlapping squares o color, and inthe case o some video compression schemes, these squares will move according to vectorized paths.

What characterizes these orms o digital noise as opposed to the fine-grained variations o analog noise is that they are highly controlled; noise is only introducedwhere its impact is minimized, it is suppressed according to very specific algorithmsand mathematical ormulas. It doesn’t appear as noise because it is designed to takeon the appearance o the original signal. Ironically, this desire to mitigate the impacto noise can actually ampliy its effects. When a digital signal becomes degraded, thealgorithms responsible or decoding a data stream and reconstructing the originalinormation produce artiacts that bear little resemblance to the original content.Tese artiacts—ragmented and disjointed images, scrambled geometric patterns,melting color fields, atonal melodic whistles, bursts o static—bear the marks o the

compression/decompression algorithms which operate otherwise undetected, in thebackground. Tese signatures are the products o interpretive algorithms designedto discard inormation based on human limits o perception. Tough I would hardlycharacterize compression artiacts themselves the product o machine-based creativeimprovisation, by repeatedly compressing a file, compression algorithms beginto produce new orms o content (within their limited vocabulary) which can beinterpreted as metaphors or hallucinations, active imagination, creativity. In a strangesense, we have encoded ourselves into the machines, imbuing them with a crude ormo imagination or creativity.

A Premature Closing

Tis appearance o a possible machine creativity, o the machine collaborator hasits roots in the dynamic relationship between digital technologies and their humancreators. Te production o highly complex processors and the instruction sets whichgovern their operations involves a collaboration between the humans who speciy thedesign requirements and the computer algorithms they’ve designed to make decisionson how to execute those designs. Te problem o compressing billions o transistorsinto arrangements that utilize the surace area o the silicon waers out o which they’remade is nearly infinitely complex and an incredible challenge or human or computeralone to solve. Te necessary collaboration between human and machine enabling thedevelopment o more advanced digital technologies is at the core o digital art makingpractices. As algorithms become a metaphor or human thought encoded in machinelanguage, we are seeding these machines with crude, limited, and highly specific ideasin the orm o series o instructions and commands. In light o all this, McLuhan’snotion o technology being an extension o ourselves may not be ar rom the mark 5;though, ar rom being autonomous, our machines are dependent upon our survivalor theirs. Te algorithmic unconscious may not yet be something that we can clearlydefine or identiy, however, we may be able to look at the products o glitch art, circuitbending, and other related orms and identiy between their ideas a revised metaphoror ourselves and our relationship to our technology and the environment.

Tis meditation has ocused its attention on the material basis or the digital artmaking practices, touching upon the numerical systems o representation and thealgorithms employed by digital technologies. In much the same way that structuralistfilm abandoned the conventions o cinema in the pursuit o working with the materialessence o the medium o film, glitch art and circuit bending—and other related practicewhich orce digital systems ans algorithms into limit perormances—represent a seto practices seeking to work beyond the traditional scope o the sofware or hardwaretools, seeking within them essential characteristics and using effects inherent to themedium to explore new avenues artistic production. It is my hope that this meditationwill contribute to the enrichment o the discussion surrounding the work o artists whoare working outside o conventional practices, violating not on ly the physical enclosures

o the devices they work with, but the very data structures and architectures o theprocessors operating within. Trough a more refined understanding o the materialbasis or an ar tistic practice, it becomes possible to more concisely define the potentialconceptual metaphors entailed by the application o specific techniques and how theycan be used to compose a situation that produces a physical effect on the viewer whichreinorces the production meaning on the subjective level.

Notes:

[1] A yet undefined term, algorithmic unconscious appears independently in the writing o CarlDiehl (http://goo.gl/URaZQ) and Matthew Fuller & Andrew Goffey (http://goo.gl/EX9)

[2] JAIF, epco Nuclear Power Plants and Earthquakes. September 2011retrieved rom http://www.world-nuclear.org/ino/

[3]Menkman, Rosa. A Vernacular o File Formats. August 2010.retrieved rom http://rosa-menkman.blogspot.com/

[4] Final Cut Pro 7 User Manual: Data Rates and Storage Devices March 2010retrieved rom http://documentation.apple.com/en/finalcutpro/usermanual/index.html

[5] Marshall McLuhan Understanding Media: Te Extensions o Man 1964



/ LoVid

LoVid is an interdisciplinary artist duo composed of TaliHinkis and Kyle Lapidus. Our work includes live videoinstallations, sculptures, digital prints, patchworks,

media projects, performances, and video recordings.We combine many opposing elements in our work,contrasting hard electronics with soft patchworks,analog and digital, or handmade and machine produced

objects. This multidirectional approach is also reflectedin the content of our work: romantic and aggressive,wireless and wire-full. We are interested in the ways inwhich the human body and mind observe, process, and

respond to both natural and technological environments,and in the preservation of data, signals, and memory.

/ 486 Shorts486 Shorts stems rom a personal interaction with an ordinarily closed off common machine. By getting inside the black box (the casing o an archcomputer), LoVid reached the physical location where signals are passed. Conwere made on the circuit board o the video card, using wire to produce shortand videos were produced rom these short circuits. Recordings made rom thewere then edited into 486 short clips, each corresponding to one o the physic(486 Shorts was recorded during a residency at iEAR in 2006. Special thankWoodstrup, Douglas Repetto, Chris Jordan, Evan Rappaport, Ranjit BhatnaLower East Side Ecology Center. A DVD release o 486 Shorts was publAnalogous Projects.)

*%@)%$*%#@%*#)486#$%()(@#%@)(%&)@#%&()#@%486#(*%&@(#%486#@)%(*@#)$(*@#)%(*)#@%*%#)@(*%486@#)$(*@#%)(#*@%)*(@()

($#*%)@(%&)@#$486@)(#%*_!%&#)(&%#)@%(486#)%@(*)#%@()#%486)@%(*#)@%(*_@#%*486#@(*%&@)#%*)@#*%!)*@#%486 *%@)%$*%#@%*#)4(@#%@)(%&)@#%&()#@%486#(*%&@(#%)@(#%*)486#@)%(*@#)$(*@#@%*%#)@(*%486@#)$(*@#%)(#*@%)*(@()*486@#)($#*%)@(%&)@#$

(#%*_!%&#)(&%#)@%(486#)%@(*)#%@()#%486)@#486#@)%(*#)@%(*_@#(*%&@)#%*)@#*%!)*@#%486

Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus



/ Gijs Gieskes

Re-appropriating tools for new purposes, making inventive

hardware projects, such as his Feedback video log, Strobo

VJ machine or PCB hand painted circuit board, is what Gijs

Gieskes enjoys most.

Artists and makers are re-inventing the design and function

of ubiquitous consumer electronics devices by creating

hybrid systems and artifacts with extended uses.

Educated as an industrial designer, he now casts Gameboy

Bricks in concrete to build a garden path or a spinning

photoelectronic acid machine. Gieskes’ work and live

performances are a fantastic example of where hardware

hacking can take you.

/ HSS3 HypnotoadTe Hypnotoad is a character rom the television series Futurama, it hyeveryone that looks at it, by generating a drone s ound and wobbeling it’s eyes.

A Youtube user made a video loop o this Hypnotoad, that is about 10 minuTe HSS3 Hypnotoad is a hardware version o this Youtube video, that can run

/ GVS1bTe GVS1b is a video sampler, that can be used to sample small clips o composand play them back in a grayscale depth o 1.5 bit.

In the exhibition setup there is a viewfinder used as a display, and a small secucamera that films the person operating the GVS1b so the pers on can sample it



/ Recyclism

Benjamin Gaulon is a researcher, artist and has a broad

experience of acting as art consultant, public and conference

speaker and art college lecturer. His work focuses on planned

obsolescence, consumerism and disposable society. He haspreviously released work under the name “recyclism”.

He is currently leading Data 2.0 (Dublin Art and Technology

Associa tion) , he co-foun ded the IM OCA (Iri sh Museu m of

Contemporary) Art in 2007 and is lecturer at the National

College of Art and Design in Dublin.

Since 2005 he has been leading workshops and giving

lectures in Europe and US about e-waste and hardware

Hacking / Recycling. Workshop participants explore the

potential of obsolete technologies in a creative way and find

new strategies for e-waste recycling.

His research seeks to establish an inter-disciplinary practice

and collaborations by creating bridges between art, science

and activism, and by doing so, shifting the boundaries

between art, engineering and sustainable strategies.

/ AbstracTrisGameboy Screen, 9v Battery, Relay, Arduino, Servo.

Abstracris is a Loech generative pixel art device. Te pixel are directly contapplying voltage to the side pins o the GameBoy LCD screen.

/ CorruptTis single-channel video is the collection o uploaded images on corrupt.rcom since 2005. Te video o 1:11:45 minutes includes 107,175 corrupteduploaded by thousands o different people rom 2005 to 2011. Each image uand corrupted at corrupt.recyclism.com is unique - an individual story. Howethose 107,175 corrupted images are combined what emerges is a story, in a wentire internet. Tis video was made with the Corruptimator™ by Brian Solon.

Corruptimator™ is a bunch o Bash shell scripts loosely cobbled together in anto simpliy and automate the process o assembling a movie rom five years’ images generated by CORRUP™.

aka Benjamin Gaulon



/ MNK

In his research Karl Klomp focusses on live audiovisual

expressions and interfacing. His work shows a fascination for

glitch-art, hyperkinetic audio visuals and glitch grabbing. He

deals with video circuit bending, frame grabbing, hardwareinterfacing, and max programming.

He also makes video hardware tools for other artists, and

regularly gives audio/video circuit bending workshops, often

in collabaration with Gijs Gieskes. He is theater technician

for Toneelgroep Amsterdam.

Together with Tom Verbruggen (a.k.a. Toktek) he performs as

VJ MNK and plays live AV-performances (toktek vs mnk).

/ MNL CAMTe Minimal Camera is an object consisting out o an electronic circuit acoper wires. A consumer wireless camera is decomposed and modified wiwires to enhance the eeling o complexity and ra gility. By expanding the como the circuit with coper wires the electronic circuit becomes more tangunderstandable. Nothing on the original circuit board is added or omitted. Twas ound at flee market.

/ AV5-ERRORTe AV5-ERROR is a circuit bend video mixer which glitches live video inputsignal. Tere are two busses that are circuit bend separately and react to audio ina microphone or line audio signal. Te video RAM chips inside are extent wiand can be selected on the extension box. With the potentiometer on the extenthe amount o audio can be adjust making the effect heavier or less reactive to

Tis mixer is ofen used in live situations because o his stability in video syncbending video always deals with the sync inormation in the video signal. Tis glitching the image beore the sync signal so will always send out correct vidto a projector.

Karl Klomp sells AV5E to artist, musicians and other people how need lidistortions. He’s the only company in the world that sells broken devices.

aka Karl Klomp



/ TokTek

TokTek is a Dutch artist who designs and deconstructs

his own electronic instruments, giving his music a unique

character and allowing him to improvise live on stage with

the help of a joystick - the central piece in his live equipment.

Behind TokTek stands musician and visual artist Tom

Verbruggen, who aside from building his own instruments

is an improviser: synths, toys and computer become

instruments. His eclectic electronic style has been described

as illogical hardware bending, where the outcome creates

dramatic live compositions, which break down into delicate

and tender sound moments.

In one of his incarnations, he performs with VJ MNK (Karl

Klomp) - a video artist that hacks/bends video equipment

like videomixers.

/ Crackle-canvasA Crackle-canvas is a painting that produces sound. it contains a circuitboardknobs, switches, wood and canvas. Each one makes sounds by itsel but can be cothrue cables (patched) with other Crackle-canvasses. Tis way the paintingreact on eachother. Each patch creates a different sound and drawing o cablewall or in the space the paintings are presented.

aka Tom Vebrugen



/ Rosa Menkman

Every technology possess its own inherent accidents.

ROSSA MENKMAN is a Dutch visualist who focuses on

visual artifacts created by accidents in digital media. Thevisuals she makes are the result of glitches, compressions,

feedback and other forms of noise. Although many people

perceive these accidents as negative experiences, Rosa

emphasizes their positive consequences.

By combining both her practical as well as her academic

background, she merges her abstract pieces within a grand

theory artifacts (a glitch studies). Besides the creation of

a formal “Vernacular of File Formats”, within her static

work, she also creates (narrative) work in her Acousmatic

Videoscapes. In these Videoscapes she strives to connect

both sound and video artifacts conceptually, technically and

sometimes narratively.

/ A Vernacular of File Form RAW, JPG 2000, JPG, PNG, BMP, PSD, TIFF, GIF, TARG

/ Collapse of PAL

/ Together in my Freezer

/ Radio Dada

/ Compression

/ Performative Fail

/ Eastern Fire Swim



/ ReFunct Media 2.0

In the “Practice of Everyday Life” Michel de Certeau

investigates the ways in which users-commonly assumed

to be passive and guided by established rules-operate. He

asserts: “This goal will be achieved if everyday practices,“ways of operating” or doing things, no longer appear as

merely obscure background of social activity, and if a

body of theoretical questions, methods, categories, and

perspectives, by penetrating this obscurity, make it possible

to articulate them.”

“ReFunct Media” is a multimedia installation that (re)uses

numerous “obsolete” electronic devices (digital and analogue

media players and receivers). Those devices are hacked,

misused and combined into a large and complex chain

of elements. To use an ecological analogy they “interact”

in different symbiotic relationships such as mutualism,

parasitism and commensalism.

Voluntarily complex and unstable, “ReFunct Media

proposing answers to the questions raised by e-w

planned obsolescence and sustainable design strat

Rather, as an installation it experiments and exunchallenged possibilities of ‘obsolete’ electronic and

media technologies and our relationship with techno

and consumption.

Karl Klomp / Benjamin Gaulon / Gijs Gieskes



C t d ith th t f D A T A d th A t C il t f th D F t/R F t hibiti d i d i Glit h F ti l 2011 Edit B j i G l li

defunct refunct catalogue

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