Q: The word glitch refers to an unpredictable irregularity in a system—digital and analogue alike. Explore the creative possibilities of glitch.
In the last assessment I explored human error to represent glitch in a creative way. My final project is a follow up from assessment 1 of physical human glitch but, this time I explored mental glitch. Mental glitches or mind glitches refer to a “temporary spacing out, or lapse in judgement where one makes error in thought or analysis”, and I wanted to creatively explore this through combining the digital and analogue mind. This meant that before starting the final project, I already new that I wanted to utilise a video format to do with glitch, in order to represent the human mind going though a temporary malfunction and irregularity.
My final project was mainly influenced by a psychology study, Brewer and Treyens (1981) that I had previous knowledge about. This study was conducted to see if whether a stereotypical schema of an office would affect memory recall. To me, this was an interesting concept of mental glitch and it built my idea for my final project, to create a sequence of someone recalling an object that they have misplaced. I was really interested to explore this idea, as someone who loses things very often my self, such as last week when I left my wallet at a cafe. The aim of this project was to create a sequence of our mental thought process when we tend to forget things. For example, one of the first things people do whey they misplace an object, is they try to retrace the places they have been to and attempt to recall where they put it last. This is an interesting concept of mind glitch, where we picture a sequence of places we have been to in our head. Hence, I thought it would be interesting and creative to express this visually using a technological digital glitch method to represent a malfunction in the human mind. Although this type of mental glitch is common to picture in our head, this is definitely not something we see visually which makes my project unique and interesting to explore. Â
In order to create a project that was relatable to everyone, I asked my friends and family what things they constantly tend to forget or misplace in their daily life, and incorporated these in my work. The most common things people listed were, phones, car keys, opal card, what day it is and a wallet. In order to construct this project creatively I combined the office like setting from the study Brewer and Treyens (1981) with the list of objects misplaced in daily life that I created. My initial idea was to take photos of the misplaced objects in common places I tend lose and find, then glitch the object. However, because the settings were all different it made the project look a bit messy and did not portray the idea of memory recall clearly. Upon further research, I came across a photographer Sabato Visconti who had a series of photographs under a similar topic to mine, remembering machines. In his work, he used the method of cropping the same photo into different sizes and rearranging them to give a glitch effect. The method behind Visconti’s work was simple, but clear and so I thought instead of using different settings for my project I should have one main setting. This ended up being my desk, which acted as the background for the objects being glitch to be placed on top of. Having on simple background, made the concept behind my project much clearer.
I made the videos of objects going through glitches in Adobe After Effects, using the old television effects and presets provided. At first, I struggled to create this moving glitch effect, but as I kept experimenting my skills became quite advanced and eventually was even able to add colours red, green and blue that really represented digital glitch. Overall, my project is important in creatively demonstrating the process of mental glitch related to memory recall in a visual aspect. I believe that I have created a project that challenges the common concept of glitch art which is commonly related to error in technology.
"brain glitch". in , , 2007, <http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=brain%20glitch> [accessed 14 September 2017].
Role of Schemata in Memory for Places. in , Universiry of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, WILLIAM F. BREWER AND JAMES C. TREYENS, 1980, p. 1, <https://spmoodle23.aisgz.org/pluginfile.php/48599/mod_resource/content/0/Brewer%20and%20Treyens%20%281981%29%20-%20Schema%20Consitencey%20and%20Inconsistency.pdf> [accessed 15 September 2017].
"Glitch Art, Photography, and Illustrations by Sabato Visconti - Remembering Machines". in , , 2017, <http://www.sabatobox.com/remembering-machines> [accessed 12 September 2017].
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