the GIFs were too distracting

The “Conversation between Hito Steyerl and Daniel Rourke” was extremely difficult to read due to the incorporation of several obnoxious GIFs throughout the text, and I have to admit that I found the language overly pedantic. They talk about the glitch as an art form to aspire to, and present the engagement of technology with art as a revolution in art that allows for a more general and accepting form of making art. Image is everywhere, and thus, the subject of art is consistently apparent in everyday life. Art can be made out of anything, and the accessibility of art is far more rampant with the introduction of technology.

The authors seem to delight in the fact that people can create art out of the use of cellular phones, webcams, and easily downloaded software. I think that the accessibility of artistic expression is great, but I found the intolerance of working with outdated modes of technology unfair. This appreciation of older modes of making art may connote a false sense of superiority and WASPish attitude, but the attraction to this traditional and outdated mode of art-making also reflects something about society- progression is happening rapidly, but too rapidly for people to fully absorb. The nostalgia of the past is something that is consistently there, but with the exponential growth of technology and progression, the expanse of time that is romanticized and missed increases as well. Progress could be happening too fast for humans, just as those GIFs of glitches transformed too fast for me to process.

While I find glitch art quite interesting, and it certainly takes a lot of attention and knowledge about code in order to purposefully manipulate certain aspects of the image, I am wary about how the artists here are regarding glitch art. To start, the GIFs of the glitch art are not a successful way of presenting the art, especially in the midst of text- it is too distracting. Perhaps I am using this distraction as an escapist excuse as Osborne seems to think most in the contemporary age regard art, but given a reading task, it felt like I was being accosted by a series of nonsensically colored images that I was unable to process, resulting in a sickening feeling in my stomach. The degradation of these images and their reflection upon the intricacies of digital art and their continual transformation and travel in the computer world is reflected in the glitch pieces, but what else can they say?