Libre Graphics Meeting 2015 – Allowing Mistakes to Happen

The programme for Libre Graphics Meeting 2015 in Toronto has now been published and I’ll be featured twice at the meeting.

allowingmistakestohappen

Allowing Mistakes to Happen presentation

Wednesday 29th April

Glitch art is the aestheticisation of digital or analogue errors, such as artefacts and other “bugs”, by either corrupting digital code/data, misusing software, or by physically manipulating electronic devices. In cases where software is misused to create glitch art artists will work with software that allow mistakes and misuse to happen, for example, by importing image data into the Audacity audio editor.

GIMP, Inkscape Scribus and their proprietary counterparts are promoted as facilitating creativity. However, these programs and many others often return errors when dealing with the corrupted data made through the glitching process. Should the software be doing this? Does refusing to attempt to interpret this data limit the creative output of these artists?

In this presentation I will present my own work and experiences of creating art through errors. I will share commonly used techniques and discuss the relevance of glitch art in the wider design and art world. My intention is to present the case to developers to allow mistakes to happen and to artists to incorporate errors into their work.

Allowing Mistakes to Happen workshop

Saturday 2nd May

Following on from the Allowing Mistakes to Happen presentation, I will facilitate a workshop that focuses on the practical side of creating glitch art. The workshop will delve into the techniques utilised by glitch artists, such as hacking codecs, modifying hardware and repurposing software.

The workshop participants will need a laptop/computer (Mac/Windows/Linux) with the following software installed: GIMP, Audacity & a good text editor such as Notepad++, TextEdit or Gedit.

Depending on time and interest from participants, additional software can be covered. If possible, please have installed: Processing, Pure Data, ffmpeg/libav, Imagemagick, Inkscape & Blender.