GLITCH CINEMA: Poetic & critical embrace of noise & error

In the beginning there was noise – thus writes Rosa Menkman in her influential Glitch Studies Manifesto (2011), a work that laid the foundations for the critical exploration of art works that incorporate noise & error as a means to examine and interrupt the normative function of the image and the media itself.
These works do not only present pleasurable aesthetic objects (because, yes, dirty glitch can be indeed very pretty) – they also act as a magnifying glass drawing attention to the material basis of the technology used to reproduce moving images, whether it be celluloid, analogue video or digital apparatus.
Using various means to distort the recognisable imagery (celluloid scratching, data bending, images generated by artificial intelligence etc.), they bring us exciting, vibrant, noisy and utmost dirty alternative visions that radically challenge the dominating clean, sterile imagery of contemporary digital cinema. As such, they pose fundamental questions regarding the political nature of technology, image and the reality itself.
This program will showcase eight eye and mind-bending contemporary audiovisual works that offer a journey through myriad of creative & critical uses of glitch in different media (celluloid, analogue video, digital format) followed by the Q&A discussion with the artists.
(Ejla Kovačević)

ARTISTS & WORK:
Sophie.B : IMMERSIO (FR, 2018, 5’)
Tim Caldwell : two mushrooms KNOCKING (NZ, 2017, 5’)
Joanie Wind : This one weird trick (US, 2020, 6’)
Billy Roisz & Dieter Kovačić : Surge (AT, 2019, 5’)
Telcosystems : TESTFILM #1 (HR/NL, 2020, 14’)
Ian Keaveny aka Crash-Stop : Mantissa (IE, 2021, 6’)
Chris Peters : Vertigo A.I. (US, 2019, 5’)
Autojektor : thisismenotthinkingofyou//untitled2 (UK, 2020, 2’)

CURATOR:
Ejla Kovačević – a freelance film critic, curator and independent/experimental cinema researcher. She’s a long-time collaborator of International Experimental Film and Video Festival 25 FPS and a selection committee member at Belgrade-based International Analog Film Festival Kinoskop.
Since 2011 she’s been active in the film labs community dedicated to the promotion and preservation of analog film practices. In Zagreb-based filmlab Klubvizija she organized numerous workshops, screenings and held lectures on experimental and photochemical cinema.
As an Erasmus scholar she spent a semester working in filmmakers’ cooperative LIGHT CONE in Paris. She earned her MA in French Language at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University and is currently pursuing MA in Comparative Literature in Zagreb.

IMMERSIO “Caelum mergens sidera” – a sound and visual experience around duality. “Immersio” evokes the light / dark, the conscious and the unconscious, the confusion of the senses in a chaotic world and the finitude of being.

Sophie BOULOUX alias Sophie.B, practices photography and experimental cinema, but also writing more precisely concrete poetry that she self-publishes and also produces sound creations for her films. His photographic and cinematographic work is autonomous and without rules and builds a link between experimentation and poetry creating a real dialectic of intimate and unusual worlds.

TWO MUSHROOMS KNOCKING – a disused shed in county Wexford remix featuring percussion and ambient mushroom sounds.

This audio visual piece was put together with my friends Victoria Spicer and Catherine Ireland as a submission for Peter McCoy’s Radical Mycology Mixtape Vol. 1 – sounds were inspired by the Derek Mahon poem A Disused Shed in County Wexford and made use of percussive and ambient mushroom samples that we recorded. The visuals represent what I imagine mushrooms would dream of – made using and misusing VHS and other obsolete video devices.

cyberboy666 is a video-artist & toolmaker interested in electronics, creative code, open source, hack culture, community space, weird+trash cinema and more.

THIS ONE WEIRD TRICK – A woman slogs through an identity mired with gendered stereotypes and consumer capitalism to attempt to discover her true self. What is “natural” or “original” becomes inaccessible, forgotten, and nonexistent.Joanie Wind (b. 1987, she/they) is a visual artist and filmmaker from Tucson, Arizona. She received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from Eastern Michigan University in 2015. They now live and teach art in the Detroit area and exhibit their work internationally.

SURGE – A green shape hops on a red background mildly offbeat to a waltzing rhythm rendered by the alternating sounds of an increasingly slurred high-key ping and deeply resonant bass tone as the green color gradually turns turquoise and spreads out in space. Something awakes and stretches itself, the gravitational center of the image shifts from horizontal to vertical. In the next section a mysterious object – not a UFO – enters from the left and pushes across the image at a Star Wars angle. It is a finely chiseled ghost ship that shape shifts into a gorge and back again to the powerful beat of the music. The voyage of the gorge ship is superimposed with vertical stripes. These glitches serve as an allusion to disturbed analog signals and interfere with a circumspect deciphering of what is seen, thereby triggering the imagination. The next sequence returns us to abstraction, circumscribing an inner world conjured by bass notes – the insistent beating of a heart cradled within the ghost ship. It resolves into the slow-motion dance of a phosphorescent fade-out.

Billy Roisz is one of the best-known figures on the Austrian experimental scene. Her ability to translate experimental music into visual memory images is particularly noteworthy, revealing borrowings from minimal art and conceptual art. She specializes in feedback video and video/sound interaction by using monitors, cameras, video mixingdesks, a selfbuilt videosynth, computer, a bass guitar and sometimes turntables for video and sound generating.

Her videoworks are distributed by sixpackfilm.

Dieter Kovačić lives and works in Vienna. Since the late 80ies he has worked continuously at rendering cassette players, vinyls, cds and harddisks as instruments. solo appearances under various pseudonyms, eg dieb13, dieb14, takeshi fumimoto. Member of different musical formations and conscientious copyright-objector.

TESTFILM is a series of projects in which Telcosystems address the impact of new technological developments in digital filmmaking and their implications for the future of artists’ cinema. In TESTFILM #1 they explore the creative possibilities of the Digital Cinema Package (DCP) – the new global infrastructure for film projection in cinemas. By 2015, this digital standard had completely replaced analogue film projection around the world. Could one upset the default behavior of the DCP system and unearth its artistic potential? (A practice that has been an integral part of the history of cinema.) Or is the system designed to exclude any possibility of human intervention? If so, what happens to the history and the future of experimental cinema and the renegades who refuse to play by the rules? (Text by Telcosystems & Mirna Belina)

Telcosystems are Gideon Kiers, David Kiers and Lucas van der Velden. Lucas van der Velden (1976, Eindhoven) and Gideon Kiers (1975, Amsterdam) studied at the Interfaculty Image and Sound, a department at the Royal Conservatory and the Royal Academy in The Hague. David Kiers (1977, Amsterdam) studied Sonology at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. Over the past two decades, they have been investigating the digital universe from an artistic perspective. In their audiovisual practice they have been pursuing the liberation of machines from the rules and limitations imposed through standardized software and hardware. Telcosystems create immersive spatial experiences that explore the interaction between technology, human expression and machine behavior.

Mirna Belina (HR) researches and curates in the fields of environmental humanities, film and new media art. She has edited several books and curated film programmes for international festivals and exhibitions. She holds Master’s Degrees in both literature and philosophy from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Zagreb University, and is a graduate of Women Studies from the Centre for Women’s Studies in Zagreb. Since 2015 she is one of the curators of Sonic Acts festival and editor at Sonic Acts Press.

MANTISSA is partly a reference to the book by John Fowles and partly to the meaning of the word as the least significant fraction of something. The video is a record of the script I call Mantissa running on a computer which takes its input from two cameras observing the screen as a seed then uses a displacement script to alter that seed combined with the current feedback on screen , its a self feeding and self recording feedback loop which is slightly out of step with itself and which continues infinitely constantly changing until halted by the user. I see it as both the computer observing itself and as conjuring something out of nothing , which is also the theme of the book.

Ian Keaveny aka Crash-Stop – Born and raised on a council estate in the Midlands of the U.K I’ve lived and worked quietly in the Midlands of Ireland for the last 30 odd years. At first primarily a traditionally trained artist working with paint I switched to using digital media and specifically exploring glitch art and circuit-bending from 2012 and on.

VERTIGO A.I. – An artificial intelligence (A.I.) computer watched the Hitchcock classic “Vertigo” 20 times in a row and then it made its own disturbing movie.

With machine-generated imagery and narration, the film gives us a glimpse into a world at once familiar and fantastic – our world, as seen by a new intelligence of our own design.

Chris Peters is a Los Angeles based painter and filmmaker. His films have screened at numerous Academy Award qualifying festivals, including Slamdance 2021 and winning the Peter Wilde Award at the 2020 Ann Arbor Film Festival.

His art work has been exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as part of the private collection of Academy Award winning director Guillermo del Toro and he recently completed a solo show at Sullivan Goss Gallery in Santa Barbara. He’s had eight previous solo shows at galleries in Santa Monica, Santa Fe, and New York City. His collectors include many members of the music and film industries.

THISISMENOTTHINKINGOFYOU//UNTITLED2 – 8mm footage of a 1960s skyline is attacked by decades of distortions.

Autojektor is a trans-femme filmmaker from the UK.