glitch nature - freedom to the galaxy
Glitch sound / video artist and cultural hacker Ben Kelley (Mikrosopht) has done it again. You may recall my post earlier this year about his short film glitch endless, where he datamoshed raw video codec to create gushing LCD blood for 10 straight minutes. His newest work Freedom to the Galaxy examines the popular film Star Wars through a glitch lens. FttG is an investigation into the meaning of electronic error as aesthetic ideal.
My mind was blown by FttG and so I asked Ben if I could chat with him for this article. Ben explains that using XVid and corrupting the encoding algorithm by short circuiting torrent downloads to randomize frame fragments allows him to manipulate the video. By intentionally embracing the glitch to formulate a specific spontaneous datastream, the result is a nonrepresentational fluid state which is actually sophisticated codec architecture containing massive quantities of extreme compression.Ben comments that he doesn't like pre-packaged datamosh software's and prefers to hand corrupt the video. He explains that his motivation doesn't necessarily come from a place of making maximalist texture mash's either. His focus is more of a discovery of the unusual and unrealized. For him the high is searching within unconventional methods of stimulating conceptual artistic experimentation that strike a strong surrealist chord.
Ben says he worries about the temporary nature of bytes, and is afraid to zone in too hard and get lost. I must discourage this apprehension, since his video experimentation thusfar results in the most epic data orgy of our time. FttG is pure gaussian lossy fructose, erratic semi-forming juxtaposed waves of distorted multicolored bits. An LSD nightmare / synesthetic ylem you can grasp with your eyes.
