Concept Statement
The word glitch refers to an unpredictable irregularity in a system
This is a recurring phrase that I have used constantly within my assessment. From analysing glitch, it became very noticeable that glitch cannot be avoid. But the outcomes of glitch does not only adhere to disappointment and flaw. Glitch can be utilised to create significant works that are unique and unpredictable.
For instance, the artist Emilio Vavarella presents to us images of technological errors that have appeared on google street view within his collection Report a Problem. These errors included missing censorship, wrong colours and random appearances. This created a surreal display within reality.
This made me research other errors within Google and happened to come across google translate. From many comedic Youtube videos, it’s very clear that the language translation provided by Google is sometimes very inaccurate. For my first experiment I retranslated the phrase “The word glitch refers to an unpredictable irregularity in a system” in 10 different languages before reverting it back to English. There was a significant difference made between the beginning and end result, being “the term refers to the winner forecasting system failures”. I found it ironic how it ended as I did forecast the system to end in a slight failure.
From here, I began to research the aesthetics of glitch. I particularly enjoyed Ryoji Ikeda’s work, The Transfinite. This work focused on the essential characteristics of sound itself and creates a connection between sound and visual through mathematical precision and mathematical aesthetics. It is a transformative piece, in which, visitors confront data on a scale that defies comprehension, experiencing the infinite. The projections created displays various pulsing glitch patterns of the real-time binary analysis of the artist’s soundtrack. I decided to incorporate this into an experiment by focusing on the sound of a glitch audio I produced of the word Irregularity. I then created a visual that is linked to the audio of the word glitching.
The final artist I focused on was Rachel Cronin and her artwork Babel. This artwork explores communication and miscommunication through languages across cultures. Cronin questions whether the ability of language enhances communication or paradoxically initiate miscommunication. This made me trace back to the first experiment on how translation can be easily misinterpreted, leading to my analysis of communication. People can be easily misheard or misjudged by what we say and how we say it. This ‘glitch’ in our society can be partly created by our over analysis of what others say and how it’s said. We begin to comprehend some of the information given to us but through over analysing the situation, we can begin to change the meaning.
This ultimately led to the construction of my final work, a 1.5 minute video depicting miscommunication represented in different languages, presented through the use of Google Translation, Adobe Premier Pro and Photoshop. I first assembled an audio piece that used the translated voices from Google translation. From there, I formed a clip that overlaps the translated sentence ‘The word glitch refers to an unpredictable irregularity in a system’. The overlapped audio and text starts to become overwhelming to the point where it creates a glitch effect of incomprehensible content until it comes to the point of no return and presents to us a result, non-identical to the initial sentence. From this work, I try to portray how the mind sometimes overthinks a given scenario which brings us to a glitched resolution of what it initially was. This concluded with me visualising one of our glitch as humans to be our thought process which is often unpredictable, which is what makes individuals unique.
Bibliography
"Inside ARTEXPRESS 2013." Art Gallery NSW. http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/insideartexpress/2013/rachel_cronin/.
Sawkins, Tommy. "Ryoji Ikeda." Tommy Sawkins. Accessed September 1, 2015. https://tommysawkinsbadmp.wordpress.com/2013/02/08/.
"REPORT A PROBLEM." E M I L I O V A V A R E L L A. April 18, 2013. Accessed September 1, 2015. http://emiliovavarella.com/archive/google-trilogy/report-a-problem/.
