Medium Specificity - Glitch Art

Artist's Statement

I have seen all of these paintings on the internet. As Magritte so wonderfully depicted, these paintings, all full of disturbing or scintillating life, are no more than paint upon canvases. My whole interaction with them and my entire knowledge of them stem from the internet, the paint depicted on LCD screens - another frame away from reality. They are no longer paint upon canvases, but pixels on a screen - and even deeper, binary code. The physical painting loses its texture, its brush strokes becoming gauche flatness made of red, green and blue. The pixels are zeroes and ones, the raw data a mess of indecipherable static.

Van Gogh's Starry Night in .raw format

When you reduce a masterwork of art into binary, is it still valuable? The physical strokes traced by the artist's own hand are gone, no longer a testament to the careful recording of the transcendental inspiration or moment of sublimity. With that gone, it is only an image on a screen - even less, a castrated set of pixels, void of the deeply spiritual and humanistic ties with the creator, that relationship rendered mute. I decided that I might as well take it a step further, and visually portray the images as their stunted counterparts to the physical, hand-crafted canvas. Their faults are made bare, static and inverted colours overpowering the original paints. The medium is the digital image, the specificity is code.

Hit the jump for the originals and a brief statement.

I chose Starry Night specifically because it has so much texture and detail, thus reinforcing my statement. Initially that was to be the only one, but I decided to continue making them and picked the others as I liked. I used a technique called databending, opening the .raw files in audacity and applying filters and effects to the resulting file. I chose to focus on this rather than using fashion as my medium because the latter would have been a much larger project, and would have required a significantly lengthier amount of time to create something I could be satisfied with.