Inspired by painter and writer Brion Gysin’s “cut-up technique” (inspired in turn by the Dadaists) William S. Burroughs and Antony Balch’s short film The Cut-Ups is an aggressively confusing and mesmerising audio-visual montage, originally entitled Guerilla Condition and filmed in Paris, Tangier and New York in the years 1961-1965. With a soundtrack...

In common language the notion of an operating system refers to the basic set of programmes that manages the hardware resources and facilitates the software applications of our personal computers. It is the basic infrastructure that makes the enclosed entity of the computer function efficiently. But ever since...

Glitches are the result of system malfunctions and occur for instance when you try to play a movie in a player that does not support the file format. However, most often glitches happen for no apparent reason and their look can never be completely predicted. That is part of their fascination, not least for an increasing number of artists. While trial-and-error experimentation allows...

Filming through a fish-eye camera lens and accompanying the image flow with distorted electronic sounds, video art pioneers Steina and Woody Vasulka drive through industrial cityscapes, suburban areas and rural districts. In the beginning...

A dark shadow from the past haunts the world of electronic music. By accompanying her compositional experiments with the moog synthesizer and other electronic instruments...

According to cybernetic theory a feedback mechanism that controls a given system in order to create stability. But the theory has, from the very beginning, been accompanied by artistic “misuses” or inversions of the mechanism that have connected it to otherwise unruly vibrations taking the system in directions where it was not supposed to go, for instance...

Is this the future dream world that consumer electronics has in store for us 17998 years from now? If so, what exactly does this surreal vision imply? An unidentified...

Who said that working with computer hardware was a purely technical activity? Anyone who has ever tried to put together a computer from scratch knows the excitement involved. From plugging the hard drive into the metal inner structure until...

The opening sequence of QTzrk by jon.satrom creates expectations of yet another sequel to Jaws. In dramatised slow motion and accompanied by a dark score a great white shark emerges from under water. Violently twisting...

With his work Realigning My Thoughts On Jasper Johns, JK Keller has devised a “glitch” version of The Simpsons episode “Mom and Pop Art” (Season 10, Episode 19), in which the seminal pop-artist Jasper Johns appears as himself. Recalling Johns’...

Already back in the early 1990s John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt of the RAND Corporation warned that “Cyberwar is Coming.” Now, almost two decades of the Internet later, it seems to be here. National governments are developing both defense and attack strategies for cyberspace and terrorist groupings are exploring new ways to do damage online. Although it takes place...

“E-waste” refers to the millions of electronic devices from mobile phones to personal computers discarded each year as a result of a lifestyle culture demanding constant hardware upgrades. According to Greenpeace, Asia alone...

If you were a teenage boy, what would you do if your mother cancelled your World of Warcraft account? Would you take off all your clothes, roll around on your bed and scream like a pig, go into a closet only to come out hitting yourself on the head with a shoe? If you have ever seriously played a computer game you know there is a chance you would. With material found on...

Questions of access are central to the notions of the Internet as a new space of freedom that became popular with the emergence of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s and have continued to flourish with Web 2.0 and beyond. The Chinese government...

Constant Dullaart’s response to Deep Water Horizon – a video shot by the US coastguard and published on YouTube by marinelog.com – employs abstract shapes and colours to transform imagery of a burning oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico. With the help of...

“At 6 pm I stood in the doorway of my studio facing the Venice boardwalk. A few spectators watched as I pushed two live electric wires into my chest. The wires crossed and exploded, burning me but saving me from electrocution.” This subtitle of Doorway to Heaven describes the event that made up the work in all its simplicity and intensity. The work...

Media interfaces are not simply a question of usability but, as Bjørn Erik Haugen’s simply entitled Interface shows, also an embodiment of politics and power. The work’s imagery offers a vision of war as seen through the augmented reality lens of a soldier operating a machine gun from an Apache helicopter as he communicates with military headquarters.