I think the core concern of mine, if we distill it down, is "exposure"; that is, exposure of the medium and/or material; I think this happens primarily through methods or techniques which abuse/misuse the media/medium/technique, by exploiting idiosyncratic features of the media/medium/technique, and/or by "uncovering" invisible features/layers of the media/medium/technique.
Use/abuse of the med(ium/ia)
By exploiting the anti-skip mechanism of CD players in Wounded CD, Yasuano Tone exposes a function of the player, of the medium of compact discs; by freeing the anti-skip mechanism from its technological chains, from the confines of its operation, the CD is free to skip at will, creating new textures and new methods.
Exploitation of inherent/latent features
Uncovering invisible layers
This is most readily seen in digital art. Take a JPEG file. When the file is both written and read as intended, the seams in the reproduction of the compressed data are invisible; there is no residue of the compression method or compressed data itself. However, when one edits a single byte, changing it's value, depending on what that byte represents in the data (not necessarily important to know a priori, perhaps better to not know), one start to see the underlying nature of the JPEG file format.
The original file
A single hex value edited by an increment of one (up or down, I don't remember)
__Re-representation__
In the end, it seems that things are best exposed when they are taken out of their normal represetations: image as audio,
- Yasuano Tone - Wounded CD
- Basinski - Disintegration Tape Loops
- Francis Bacon's accidents
- Much of my own work
I am particularly interested and attracted to work that not only uses failure/glitch as methods of exposure but makes that process itself invisible in the final product. Take Bacon for instance: he himself notes that his process is essentially a choosing of which accidents to keep and which to move over (this is very much reduced). In looking at his work, one would never imagine that his paintings are a product of the sum of accidents; not random accidents, but rather curated accidents.
(What role does accident play in exposure? Is it a necessary part of it? Or does it only happen in certain circumstances?)
If we take Paul Virilio's assertion that within each innovation is its accident, its destruction-event, then it follows that glitch and technological failure is a natural material for art-making in the digital domain. This also follows Heidegger when he talks of technology, the latent products in raw material. In this case, however, the raw material is already transformed but in the same way it contains things which are not brought forth until certain circumstances are met (ice on the engines (airplane crash), speeding (locomotion), etc).
Moreover, if this accident is at all illuminating of the nature of the thing which has been "accidented", then