Reading Blog #1

While reading the Glitch Art Manifesto I found myself connecting to many of the beginning points. Specifically, I found myself resonating with the second paragraph. Besides being an artist, I’m also a writer with an interest in Marxist theory as it’s related to consumerism. This paragraph shows consumerism in America, like how the iPhones are always updating, but are never perfect. There’s an illusion of perfection that comes with software updates, but what the author finds fascinating is not the updates, but the imperfections as a result of the update.

The manifesto takes pride in inspiring readers to mess with technology, create art in ways that art wasn’t supposed to be created. Digital art as a whole represents this bending of rules, as fine artists never expected the medium of the future to be screens, but the author urges artists to push themselves past even this limit. This manifesto ties in close to what we’re doing in class. We’re using non-traditional ways of photo editing to create glitches. When something messes up, embrace the error, as many great things were created as a result of a mistake (like chocolate chip cookies!).

This manifesto, along with the project and labs, have helped me understand that art doesn’t have to follow a specific niche. You can use text editors and audio editors to change the visual appearance of a picture, something completely unexpected. However, it was those with the glitch manifesto mentality that figured out this was possible, by exploring outside the traditional confines of art.