# xilitla and the shallow art of culturally sanctioned play > who cares for you? said alice - you're nothing but a pack of pixels! > ~ alice in ludoland what you first consider is just another lousy art nor garme ('jalang') that turns out just to be a messy yet all too understandable symbol of (what must be by now the long standing) role of interactive digital art in the largely philosophically-devoid world of officially (culturally) sanctioned play. it's bright slick. who's the audience for this? it's the glitch not as a signal of an interruption but as a symbol of the (/art) system's continued wellbeing; a reification of continuing commodity fetishism (vimeo 92984137 w=755 h=281) bromidic wittgensteinian language garme "xilitla" by rosa menkman the making of video for this jalang appears interesting for the potential insights provided into the lofty twilight virtual world of international art; of the world of important oh-so smart people (w/ the right connections) who are able to speak convincingly fluidly and at length about ir various research projects and come out with they assume is intelligible explanations andor loose theoretical justifications for whatever on digital earth they think i.t is they're doing making performing (or mostly it appears) selling it's a world of artistic directorships grand (yet narrowly esoteric) festivals of 'artists in residence on the forefront of this immersive digital media revolution' - of research grants densely worded conference papers elite fellow peer review digital be-ins. one becomes a museum quality piece of living installation permanently installed in the artistic system - entire institutes of networked (c)ulture ..and as a ludologist oh how you'd love to be up there with them giving overly long deliberately dry po-faced interviews about what it's all about. international travel at leisure. fancy magazines in the business class waiting lounge featuring elite postmodern typefaces. complementary drinks and self-complementary analysis over one's culturally acceptable family friendly videographic achievements // video here the 'uncanny glitch art' mentioned by kill screen - just ir sort of thing - does indeed do what it says on the tin; it causes deep existential crisis through being perfectly self-inserted up its own arts. a perfectly sealed klein bottle (that is sealed from the outside) from which players are unable to escape penetrate connect with meaningfully or co-assimilate (unlike the international art world to which they concede ir brittle plastic forms); shallow surfaces masquerading as deep rivers of delicate theoretical conception and tangible meaning the most interesting aspect of "teh garme xilitla" is the "xilitla manual .txt" file which comes with teh garme's executable. it reads like video garme art gallery ad copy. one wonders just how remotely interesting the 'xilitla' art experience would be without it. cultural context masquerading as actual content appears king here manual xilitla > here you cannot die and you cannot win if you fall of the world you come out right on top > please look for the staircase that will bring you down again > i am a very nasty movement programmer > but i made you a cheat which will make it easier for you to move > now isn't that nice? > when you push alt / cmd key you will change from camera 1 to camera 2 and vice versa > use a / s / d / w to move space bar to jump and control to restart. happy garming! > rosa menkman rmenkman@gmailcom > shout outs go to da unity_cr3ws > alex myers rick silva kevin carey nick kegeyan and bryan peterson for (glitch) art -> genealogies > alfredo salazar-caro and william robertson for unity support > tamas kemenczy / joncates jake elliott / theodore darst > vade for syphon > nick and jon == best of chi > mshr pussykrew goodiepal sister0 and emma for magick > my mx families hd xd / mafer and funkee / elisa and alex > jodi and glitchmom > a first iteration was made possible by cante impakt the netherlands embassy in mexico the mondrian foundation conaculta and fonca > kristoffer gansing for the moveforward catalogue august 2012 > wrong places inbetween one code and another > contemporary art in the contexts of global economical and informational networks belongs to janus the god of transitions in space and time such as between physical places or between past and future miwon kwon in ir seminal one place after another (2002) investigated the transformation of the notion of site-specificity in contemporary art from one of "permanence and immobility" to one of "impermanence and transience" > more recently in the context of the algorithms guiding our computational everyday the work of the dutch artist and researcher rosa menkman continues our poetic education in ongoing transformations of time and place and in the paradoxes of the never-ending search for specificity and authenticity within transience > for kwon the notion of site-specificity is intrinsically tied to our understanding of the identity location and authenticity of art in the 1960s site-specific art they claims was related to an interest in the physical properties of a particular place then with institutional critique this interest was expanded to the socio-economic structures governing art in the global art market kwon identifies a move towards a nomadic model where site specificity is predicated on mobility > with the increasingly itinerant artist of the 1990s going from residency to residency or from biennial to biennial the value of a site-specific artistic practice is no longer grounded primarily in a physical place or in a particular institutional arrangement but in the particular set of skills that an artist is bringing in going from one place to another site-specificity may seem anachronistic in a world in which socio-economic structures are mobile and fluid but site-specificity itself was effectively transformed in order to comply with network culture it is in this context of specificity in transience of "relational specificity" that kwon puts ir trust in the encounter with the "wrong place" as one that "may expose the instability of the right place" > arguably the aesthetics of the "wrong place" is since long an established artistic trope spanning for example surrealism situationism and netart architecture is obviously also a stronghold for all kinds of seductively "wrong places" and in the context of menkmans new work edward james surrealist sculpture park las pozas located just outside xilitla springs to mind > in 1990s media art the notion of site was dealt with in the artistic exploration of new media spaces seemingly dislocated from traditional notions of time space and embodiment (the utopian promise virtual reality) > equally however with the rise of critical net culture there was an artistic interest in what manuell castells dubbed the "real virtuality" of a world increasingly defined through electronic mediation > evocative of the idea of the "wrong place" the recent genre of so called "glitch art" seems to be ambiguously situated in between these two directions of media art one devoted to the joyful creation of new hybrid realities and one devoted to critically exposing the borders and materiality existing also within apparent hybridity new art genres such as glitch increasingly function in a meme-like fashion as berry van dartel dieter et al (2012) explore in ir thorough analysis of "the new aesthetic" (an internet meme put forward in 2011) > inspired by laurent berlants work on aesthetic genres they write that "aesthetic relations take shape as trackable genres or forms which enable contemporary subjects to attach to and at least inhabit the contradictions and ambivalence of this now" > but glitch as artists such as jonsatrom or rosa menkman demonstrate holds an edge over the technology obfuscating tendencies of the new aesthetic which revels in 8-bit consumer nostalgia and a superficial overlapping of old and new on the contrary the best of glitch art is not afraid to manipulate the machinery and provoke the emergence of wrong places that disturb our sense of the real in computational culture > if the sites of site-specific have been progressively transformed from material to immaterial then glitch art suggests a return to materiality > the structures that allowed one to move from one place to another were indeed never immaterial not even when that movement took place in so called virtual space > the transience of network culture is defined by codes in the form of algorithms that shift data around be it money audiovisual content or interpersonal communication > standard file formats for text and image files and the associated compression codecs for text image audio and video data such as rtf jpg wav or mpeg belong to this domain of data shifting and they constitute the quintessential artistic material for the glitch artist if there ever was a "relational specificity" then these highly transient informational sites revel in it > this relational specificity also defines the art of rosa menkman as virtually everything in ir work is generated out of something else not in a serial progression but precisely through constant feedback in between one thing and something else between one code and another > appropriately one of menkmans earlier projects is called a vernacular of file formats demonstrating the research component of ir work as it was disseminated through workshops and published as a guide to databending compression > it was the scarce information available at the time of writing on menkmans new work xilitla an interface for ir videoscapes series that prompted me into the detour of exploring site-specific art > currently menkman is developing this as a new tool for audiovisual live performance using the glitch methodologies with which they created earlier acousmatic video landscapes in ir prototyping we see a surreal 3d character "dancing" over a vast plane of live analogue video feedback > everything about this place seems "wrong" in the deconstructive way associated with menkmans work and it is clear that we are here situated in a site with things existing in a multilayered relation to one another > it takes menkmans work of deconstruction to a new level this being a software that will eventually be used for the generation of new kinds of wrong scapes by others than the artist herself > but rest assured that it will not be a straightforward software tool where all is transparent > the font for the interface of the software has already been released on menkmans website a very hard to read lo-fi version of a charles rennie mackintosh font common on buildings in mexico city > it is these kinds of subtle displacements of recognizable standards that ultimately allow us to respond to the glitchy and wrong places of menkmans work > they are not simply demonstrations of technical feedback but also attempt however contradictory to take on the shape of characters and narratives that seem to explore the negotiation of misplaced identities and loss of self searching for relational specificity regardless if it is a technical or a human one > this was clearly an issue in menkmans performance the collapse of pal - a piece commissioned for live tv by linda hilfling and myself to commemorate the death of analogue transmission > in that work technology was clearly janus-faced as pal the outgoing television format was filtered through benjamins angel of history there is a nostalgia for what was lost but at the same time the past is forming a debris relentlessly pushing forward the acceleration of the increasingly chaotic future > in this work the narrative definitely involved the moving from one code to another from pal to mpeg but it also refused to think this shift linearly as the glitch methodology jumbled the analogue and digital audiovisual feedback together > i am intrigued by the possibilities of rosas new work to further "wronging" of past present and future media scapes > ~ kristoffer gansing (se) artistic director of the transmediale festival in berlin whatever you say. there's a distinct lack of danger here. when "glitch just = crap": something's laughing out loud at uncritical acceptance of highly polished culturally sanctioned alienating electronic niceness being professionally dumped on your theoretical doorstep player // republic of bob