The Grandfather of
Glitch by Patrick Burns
The teenage dominated social
blogging website Tumblr has a new obsession that may not be as new as many
bloggers think. Like seapunk and grunge, glitch art has become popular in the
blogosphere, where digital images and videos of pop culture icons are
dismantled, short circuited, decoded, and bugged. From the pixilated ashes new
images are born, images of digital errors and malfunctions that create unseen
textures and stretch the limits of convention, attaching new symbolism to
iconic imagery.
Flashback thirty years to Rafael Montaňez
Ortiz, a pioneer of deconstructionism, and his video manipulation The Kiss, a 6 minute black and white
single channel video of a scene from the 1947 film noir classic Body & Soul, currently on display at
the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Ortiz first began to manipulate and
deconstruct images and clips from films in 1956, primarily punching holes in film
strips and playing them backwards. In The
Kiss (1985), Ortiz experiments with altering a laser-disc copy of Body & Soul, using a computer
joystick to control the advancement of the scene.
Using this technique, Ortiz is able
to transform four seconds of film into six minutes of pulsating stop and go
imagery. The actors repeatedly chug forward and jolt back through time
accompanied by thudding audio, creating a trance-inducing visual. The hypnotic
film barrages the senses. When the man and woman on screen are shown kissing,
the boundaries of their features blur, morphing a moment of noir romanticism
into a bizarre, mutant-like exchange. A
flurry of repetitive hand to shoulder contact evokes a violent feeling between
the two, darkening the original spontaneity and passion of the film’s kiss.
The Kiss is striking and requires
full attention. There is potential danger in Ortiz’s work; a twisted
attractiveness. The Kiss toys with the viewer, challenging the notion of
romance by exposing the odd nature of mouth to mouth contact between
individuals.
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