Please detail the reasons for taking part in this residency and how it will benefit your practice. (up to 250 words)
I’ve spent a lot of time working around ideas of overloaded systems as creative sites, and politics of welcoming the glitch (to not support the idea of a shiny and complete object, but to acknowledge the bootstrapping in the code is waiting to be cannibalised for another project rather than cleaned up into something finished). I have an anxiety disorder (that often precludes me from things like residencies as travel and breaks in my routine are often impossible) which I have been considering as part of a glitch prone system that includes my nervous system, the econo-legal requirements of work, the weather, the animals I live with, and so on. I think of the glitch of a panic-attack as a creative event, its new which is why it’s terrifying. This is something I’d like to explore in this residency.
The above work, due to my PhD requirements, has been mostly aimed at outputs on a printed page. I’ve made web based works like video games, images, and hypertexts as a way of researching ideas, but I’ve not had the opportunity or time to finalise these as things for an exhibition audience.
I’m really invested in the internet as a platform for art that is unstable, work can be open to adaptation, participation, and theft. More importantly, as Hito Steyrl pointed out, it's a place of “poor images”. Everything is a collaboration with artifacts and noise in the unclear overlaps between the amateur mistake, digital accident, and deliberate strategy. I want to take part in the residency to bring its themes and forms to those of my practice and research.
How do you plan to use your time in the residency space? *
Please provide a brief overview of your ideas for the residency and examples of activities you would like to undertake.
I’m interested in how art in the form of games can utilize the glitch in a manner which highlights the agency in the audience and external systems of order and control, whilst also considering how rules are often vague, ambiguous, and open to interpretation by power. Ideas for exploring this include:
The development of simple role playing games where the rules contain conflicts, holes, or other points where play might creatively degrade.
The development of simple web-hostable video games (using systems like Bitsy, Twine, Ink, and basic HTML) where rules/narrative/roles degrade.
Exploring how the collapse/glitching/overloading of information delivered through images (i.e. low resolution pixel art or “deep fried” image processing) and text (i.e. formal writing constraints or cut-ups) in such games can be used to highlight the site of rules/transgressions and the agency of the player-audience.
The playtesting of the above over streaming platforms like Twitch to make further artworks through the performance of playing/hacking/breaking the game.
Writing via the blog about how the glitch feeds into other areas such as horror cinema (see quoted footnote in the next section), lo-fi amateur video games and fanfic.
I’d like also to take advantage of other aspects of the residency, and keeping with the theme of the project see where they can be blurred, broken, or fed back. Can the blog glitch from a report of research done, into an artwork itself? Can the catalogue be made unstable at points? So like with a tarot card reading the broken space between some elements need to be creatively activated by the reader?
Relevant previous experience *
Please tell us about any relevant experience
For a number of years I have been making art through and about “being broken” with particular attention to politics of this. This is in no small part informed by my being a queer disabled artists, and an engagement with the queer poltics of “failure” and crip politics of being “less than”. But I mainly draw from Deleuze and Guattari’s articulation of Desire in their book “Anti-Oedipus” as a process of production which is always breaking-down in new creative ways, creating new unexpected results as its mechanisms degrade.
I’ve made a lot of artworks which are someone on a line between a diagram and a fragmenting text, and a few of these have been exhibited or published. I’m interested in forms of writing where there are gaps, like the found pieces in an epistolary novel like Dracula, or the processes that Kathy Acker described as taking a text “passed failure”, or any kind of unreliable narrator.
A couple of years ago I did a performance at the Whitechapel gallery in London that tied the glitches and gaps in (the english translation of) the Japanese horror film Ring into an approach to making/viewing art that focused on where it collapses/mutates.
In March 2020, via remote conferencing at the beginning of Corona lockdown, I passed the viva exam for my art practice PhD entitled "Becoming Ahuman: making it desirable to abandon certainty, including certainty of the self and play in this chaotic situation." My PhD research took the form of a toolkit (based in part on the system of manuals for Tabletop Role playing Games (TTRPG) such as Dungeons & Dragons) to look at art practice as an unstable process which continues beyond the artist studio in one direction and the audiences encounter in the other. The toolkit considers art practice from three overlapping points of view: as overwhelming sensation, as systems always creatively breaking down, and as an unseen space which can only be seen through how it transforms things that pass through it.
The “glitch” appears in all of points of view, and is considered through outside disciplines which already have language for dealing with overload, collapse, and the unknown. These discipines include feminist writing strategies, the collaboarative storytelling of TTRPGs, indie vieo games primairy concerned with trans* identity, fan fiction, horror film and television studies. Through this research I have been developing tools for thinking about creative practice as something always incomplete, and always in collaboration with some kind of disorder outside itself. The proposal for this residency has its basis in a footnote from my thesis which pointed to a pathway I was unable to pursue due to the requirements of that project.
“12. The ellipses in Aperitif along with its other instances of expressive
absences or damaged/lo definition information and therefore could be further
examined in terms of writer and curator Legacy Russell’s theory regarding
glitches and “sliding between identifications” (Russell, 2012, 2013). This
line of inquiry could be then further pursued via artist Hito Steyerl’s concept
of the “poor image” which can create “disruptive movements of thought and
affect” (Steyerl, 2009). Likewise theorist Steven Shaviro’s text on the titular
“found-footage” horror film “The Glitch Dimension: Paranormal Activity
and the Technologies of Vision”, presents another point of departure via
the deployment of absence and noise in horror cinema (Shaviro, 2017).
Shaviro’s analysis that “We are affected (and oppressed) as much by their
glitches, gaps and limitations as we are by their successful operations”
(Shaviro, 2017, p. 331), like those of Russell and Steyerl open up the breaks
in digital images as a site of both politics and affect.”
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