i found you not on purposei found you not on purpose
throughout this web installation, you are encountering a series of works orbiting around a transient glitch phenomenon within geovisualization software.
it is the documentation of an artistic practice in isolation, a meditative obsession from 2021 to 2023.
a glitch is proud to be wrong. failing means refusing to take a system for granted. to counter habits, and to acknowledge difference.
salty glitches, stay a little longer, bug and orbital mirage are collections of code-born unintentions. they allow one to slip below the surface
of seemingly seamless digital maps. to question their smoothness, to sense their fragility. to uncover new forms of being with technologies.
my practice is grounded in erring. zooming in and out. losing orientation. eventually, one finds oneself. finding oneself with a glitch once more.
screenshotting as archiving, screen recording and continuous observation become a gesture of care – in preserving moments in awe.
– till rückwart –
salty glitchessalty glitches
six archival prints of approx. 400 screenshots, qr-codes
salty glitches is a counter-mapping project that troubles the notion of truth in digital media. its colorful anomalies challenge mapping technologies’
claim to represent an objective worldview, and they draw attention to zones of ecological disaster and social injustice.
the qr-code links to google maps, where, by 2023, most of these glitches quietly disappeared through bug fixing.
each color fragment was sitting nearby the atacama desert and the jujuy region, both reservoirs
of the precious mineral lithium.
viewing these images on a smartphone or laptop potentially means viewing them through a device that is materially connected to these very places.
stay a little longer, bugstay a little longer, bug
16-channel video installation, screen recordings (11:18–17:52 min), sound (20:28 min), text layer in the background
you are listening to an atmospheric soundscape by NOOW, a berlin-based producer duo that immerses in the healing energies of music. The Frequency of Health and Beauty unfolds at 285 hz. subliminally, its vibrations resonate with the mirage-like aesthetics satellite view glitches, continously zooming in and out…
in and out… in and out… while meditation emerges as a popular coping ritual for inner healing and self-care in our digitized everyday lives, technologies heal, too. bugs are being fixed. hopeful diversities vanish.
the 16-channel video installation stay a little longer, bug follows the vivid existence of random digital phenomena. where they are, and where they have been. it searches for the fragile beauty and visual ecstasies of unintended code. by slowly getting closer, it lets the bugs speak, reveil their inner being, and breathe.
orbital mirageorbital mirage
public glitch archive: map, markers, screenshots
while satellite imagery contributes to an ever-growing archive of pictures searchable on google earth, the glitches’ transience and evanescence
slip away from the digital corporate logic of search and database systems. orbital mirage questions the technologies and politics of
mapping, proposing a counter-archive that deepens our exploration of these digital encounters.
the archive is collaborative: do not bug-report, but preserve glitches. set a marker at their coordinates and upload a screenshot of
the glitch. it will help to build an archive of glitches.
some glitches still exist. so, feel free to get lost, too.
acknowledgementsacknowledgements
the works are inspired and influenced by among others wendy chun, hito steyerl, trevor paglen, rosa menkman, donna haraway, jan distelmeyer,
legacy russel, emilio vavarella, winfried gerling, elisa linseisen, ulrike bergermann, harun farocki (no intentional order)
thanks a lot to vivian koch & carolin fischer (NOOW) for allowing me to use their wonderful sound frequencies (mastered by sven weisemann)
thanks to the curatorial team of Six Minutes Past Nine for their kind invitation to take part in the exhibition Plastic Prognosticate on occasion of TheWrong Biennele
