Video

Glitch (single channel version)

Nick Torok

2004, 15:00 minutes, colour, english

TAPECODE 749.06

An ambient work about the technological follies in video art. Like looking at a tape recording of a friend in slow motion to study their gestures and eye movements and discovering that they weren’t telling the truth or that they really did love you when you thought that they didn’t, Glitch also explores these spaces in-between time itself as represented on magnetic tape. Glitch analyzes the place that links the performance for the camera to the camera shutting off.

In this space there are few images that remain of the performance that took place just before the end of the tape, such as a representation of a ‘house’, a search light that looks for a girlfriend but instead finds a dimly lit a ball of coat hangers, a sign saying "cat no", and a man who is being hung and is trying to cut himself free with a large knife. All these images have the obvious reference of home, love, and depression, but they are transformed as this piece progresses. The fleeting images become smeared and vanish amongst the pixilated glitches at the end of the original tape. The ‘glitch’ takes over, and what was once a semi clear image of thought and narrative, has become obscured. Just as memories of pain loose their basis of reason and become deep-rooted depression and hate, all semblance of what was real in this piece vanishes.

This building of abstracted images becomes a body onto itself, a mind of its own. Substance is derived from inconceivable small spaces. Desperation forces us to rebuild our lives from the fragments it has become. Like the old saying goes of bricks and buildings, we are complex because of all the avoidable happenings that make up our perception and personality. If you don’t go, you miss the point of living, but if you analyze it too much you loose all of the substance of living.

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