Glitch Art – 1984

‘GLITCH’ DATA & CODE MASH-UP – CARRY ON COMPUTING

Sound on – warning – clicks, bleeps, shrieks. Micro Arts Geoff Davis: Various Unusual Events: Carry On Computing glitch computer art (1984)

Early or even the first Glitch Art. Code and computer maths, with loud nasty beeps. Micro computer internal effects such as List, Run, Load and other more direct commands, overlaid, this is all code not images or video effects. This creates a collage effect of the ‘insides’ of the computer. Generated on the fly by the program, each run is different.

History: As with ‘Minimal’, the aim of computer art and graphics in those far-off days was to improve the image rendering, dimensions, realism (so-called), in a mad race to Toy Story. That was not my aim with Micro Arts.

Once the program starts, there is no escape. Anything typed in and entered, starts a random glitch program. Except by pulling the plug (there was no switch on the ZX Spectrum).

This collage technique is now quite common, but had not been used in computer art at the time (Digital TV Dinner, see below, was video art using a games console as source). 1970s computer art was mathematically regular, lines drawn by plotters, or graphics, designer, patterns. These styles were highlighted in MA “Abstract Originals”. This is also the preferred “pioneering” style now, see Hans Dehlinger’s cubes, Herbert Franke’s symmetric animations etc.

“Carry On” films are an English comedy franchise, pretty ghastly.

For a history of glitch video and net art see Alex Pieschel review.

An earlier video art ‘glitch’ piece is Digital TV Dinner by Raul Zaritsky, Jamie Fenton, and Dick Ainsworth which used the Bally Astrocade console game to generate patterns. Some of the geometric patterns created from the video memory store resemble the art in MA1 “Abstract Originals” which wrote directly to the memory store. This was a fixed video recording. Carry On was randomised on an actual computer.