We have posted about the Vienna scene and the Austrian Abstracts here on previous occasions, but the video work that was central to that movement has generally not been available for viewing online. Therefore, it’s with great pleasure we see that Tina Frank has posted some early videos to Vimeo. Let’s hope other artists follow her initiative, it would be nice to have an online archive of these early experiments somewhere.

Shown above is the video AKA by Skot, produced for Gasbook 4. Skot was the name used by Tina Frank and Mathias Gmachl for a number of collaborations from 1996 to 2000. Gmachl is also one of the founders of farmersmanual, a collective that was central to the Vienna scene. “Aka” means “red” in Japanese, and the video was made with Image/ine software from Steim, one of the very first softwares to support realtime processing of video on a regular computer.

Frank created the video "iii" below by taking digital audio files of the music by Peter Rehberg (Pita) and opening them as raw pixel data in Photoshop. An oval image mask was superimposed, giving a more specific form to the resulting video. The result is classic glitch, taking a signal of a given form and deliberately misinterpreting it as something else.

More videos on Tina Frank's Vimeo stream.

Generator.x: The concert tour (Phonophani, Lia vs. Emi Maeda)

Generator.x: The concert tour – 19-29 April, 2006

Phonophani (NO) / Marius Watz (NO)
Emi Maeda (JP) / Lia (AT)
Frank Bretschneider (DE)

This week sees the beginning of the Generator.x concert tour, with 7 dates all over Norway – we’ll even go north of the Arctic Circle. The tour is produced by Rikskonsertene, and presents a selection of artists working with generative strategies in the intersection between sound and visual performance. Co-curators are Marius Watz and Alexander Rishaug, the latter also known for his music and his RandomSystem festival projects.

Norwegian Phonophani (aka Espen Sommer Eide) will play glitchy improvisations using Max/MSP, accompanied by generative visuals by Marius Watz. Helsinki-based harpist Emi Maeda will play harp combined with electronic sound manipulations, with Lia doing visuals. Finally we are pleased to be joined by Frank Bretschneider from Berlin, one of the founders of the renowned Raster-Noton label and a veteran of minimalist beats and sine wave abstractions. In what could be seen as a continuation of the Gesamtkunstwerk tradition, Bretschneider also produces visuals from his sound works.

Photos from the tour will be put online on Flickr.

Generator.x: Tour dates

• 19 April, Oslo: Presentation at NoTAM Forum
• 20 April, Trondheim: Blæst (w/ Monolithic)
• 21 April, Oslo: Blå
• 22 April, Fredrikstad: St.Croix huset
• 26 April, Bergen: Landmark
• 27 April, Tromsø: KAOS
• 28 April, Drammen: Union Scene
• 29 April, Stavanger: Tou Scene (w/ FE-MAIL)

Our thanks go to Rikskonsertene, Alexander Rishaug and local organizers like TEKS, BEK and Tou Scene for making this tour possible.

For information about the concert that took place during the Generator.x conference in Oslo, please visit the Generator.x Club page.

Karl Klomp (VJ MNK) & Tom Verbruggen (Toktek)

I know glitchy sounds and visuals are appreciated round these parts, so I couldn’t miss out on posting about Karl Klomp and partner-in-crime Tom Verbruggen. These hyperactive boys indulge in video bending, max/msp hacking, hardware repurposing and general sweet mayhem.

A student at the Frank Mohr Institute in Groningen, Karl Klomp (aka MNK) documents his hardware hacks and visual glitch on www.karlklomp.nl. Make sure to see the videos of his live performances, he combines drawn animation with video bending noise. Tom Verbruggen (aka Toktek) is part of the Sonido Gris band / art collective, and also does performance art, installation etc. I certainly hope they drop by Berlin sometime.

Tony Scott: Glitch Art

Tony Scott has created some eerie glitch art photographs by capturing long-exposure photograms of the computer screen. Simple animated shapes create complex abstract images, dissolving blurred and faded trails, evocative of skyscrapers or obscure technical film formats. Scott has created other variations on the same theme, but the vertical stripes seem more successful. He has also posted a description of the flat-panel photogram technique he uses.

The best thing about this piece is how lo-fi and analog it is. The film process lends a totally new quality to what would otherwise have been a familiar experiment in abstract shapes. It points to the inherent quality of the process, and might explain why 16mm buffs get all frantic trying to explain that film just feels sexier than video.

Scott’s Beflix site is worth poking around in, see for instance the explanation of the data visualization process used to produce the art works. And if you’re doing similar things yourself, maybe you’d like to submit work for the Glitch Art & Design Aesthetics Book.

Freeware glitch: gleetchLAB

Via dataisnature: Giorgio Sancristoforo (aka Tobor Experiment) creates nothing less than “avant garde music authoring software”. His latest offering gleetchLAB is a full-featured tool for creating and manipulating “drones, glitches and amazing digital noises”.

The software currently runs on MacOS X only, and was created in Max/MSP. From the brochure describing the software:

The software is completely free, and can download from the Gleetchplug web site.