Glitches, bugs, and hisses: the degeneration of musical recordings and the contemporary musical work
by Eliot Bates
in Bad Music: Music you Love to Hate, edited by Chris Washburne and Maiken Derno, 2004
Datamoshing and the emergence of digital complexity from digital chaos
Co-authored with Meetali Kutty, published in Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 18:2 (May 2012), pp. 165-176.
In this essay, we explore the aesthetic possibilities that are opened up by datamoshing, a practice whereby... more In this essay, we explore the aesthetic possibilities that are opened up by datamoshing, a practice whereby audiovisual artists actively downgrade the quality of digital images in order to render a more ‘raw’ aesthetic on screen. We follow this up by exploring the ways in which datamoshing as a practice (together with ‘glitch art’ more generally) highlights the decay that digital images undergo over time. Because it takes place through the deliberate compression of images, we here argue that the aforementioned loss of quality is an ‘artistic’ form of entropy, which leads us to the possibility for a theory of ‘digital chaos’. However, since the loss of data is reworked by artists in order to create new forms, we argue that this is a form of digital ‘emergence’ of ‘order out of chaos’, or ‘digital complexity’.
Uncanny Space: Theory, Experience and Affect in Contemporary Electronic Music
RANS-Transcultural Music Review 14
This article draws upon the author’s experiences of promoting an music event featuring three prominent European... more This article draws upon the author’s experiences of promoting an music event featuring three prominent European electronic musicians (Alva Noto, Vladislav Delay and Donnacha Costello) to examine the tensions between the theorisation of electronic music and the way it is experienced. Combining empirical analysis of the event itself and frequency analysis of the music used within it, the article works towards a theoretical framework that seeks to account for the social and physical contexts of listening. It suggests that affect engendered by the physical intersection of sound with the body provides a key way of understanding experience, creativity and culture within contemporary electronic music.