The dominant, continuing search for a noiseless channel has been — and will always be — no more than a regrettable, ill-fated dogma.

Len Lye, A Colour Box, 1935.
Lye is known to have stated: “All of a sudden it hit me. If there was such a thing as composing music, there could be such a thing as composing motion.”37 Driven by a lack of money, Lye started off inventing new, controversial ways to create film without a camera. In 1935, he made the experimental movie A Colour Box. In this movie he color-painted and scratched the left-over trash-celluloid, connecting the visuals to the tunes of a Caribbean jazz piece. In 1937 A Colour Box was acquired by the General Post Office, who reissued it with the addition of a ‘cheaper parcel post’ message. The video continued its existence as a commercial.38 Today, Len Lye is known as one of the pioneers of the music video genre.

By jonCates and jon.satrom

Nam June Paik + Shuya Abe collaboratively developed the Paik-Abe Raster Manipulation Unit (aka the Wobbulator) in 1970. technically, the Wobbulator disrupts a data stream, in this case an incoming television signal as it is being rendered on screen by the electron beam of the modified television set. The Experimental Television Center has a functional Paik-Abe Raster Manipulation Unit (aka the Wobbulator) available for use by artists through the Artist in Residence Program. i (jonCates) travelled to The Experimental Television Center with jon.satrom + (as core developers of criticalartware) we did a short artist residency during which we interviewed Sherry Miller Hocking (for the criticalartware project) + were trained on The Experimental Television Center matrix system by Hamk Rudolph. during this time i used the Paik-Abe Wobbulator to Wobbulate JODI’s CO.KR version of the JODI %WRONG Browser. JODI (the highly recognized New Media Art collaborative/project of the artists Joan Heemskerk + Dirk Paesmans) released their “%WRONG Browser” a browser art or artware project in 2000 + 2001. JODI released %WRONG Browsers in different versions or formats, demarcated by nationally specific top level domain (TLD) names, i.e. “CO.KR” the TLD for Korea. these formats or versions differ from 01 another in primarily aesthetic + formal ways but operate functionally + conceptually in very similar if not identical ways. jon.satrom assisted with the patch programming + matrixing while i (jonCates) Wobbulated %WRONG Browsers.

Jodi + Rosa Menkman. Visuals for Cimatics, 2008.
I was asked to VJ together with Jodi @ Cimatics. A cooperation with Jodi :: Confusing, cool & interesting!
Jodi send me a collection of screencrack photos. I made some of them into glitched videos (by triggering a blocky glitch effect in VLC player) and also used them just as a photo-vj. In the end though, the stroboscopes in the venue made the videos invisible, Joan sick and Dirk dancing with his thumbs up. It was perfect!

Webcrash2800. %SCR2, May 16, 2009.

Rosa Menkman + Goto80. My broken phone, 2008.
Even though the constant search for complete transparency brings new and ‘better’ media, every one of these new and improved techniques will always have their own fingerprints of imperfection. LCDs Cracks are the new cousin of celluloid scratches, antenna noise, plasma burns and dead pixels!