<<Mark, your Museum of Glitch Aesthetics was presented as a gallery
installation at Abandon Normal Devices festival this year, I wonder if you
would like to tell us more about how it was to work with this two different
'platforms' of display in terms of deciding how to present the works in
relation to the structure and organisation of material, e.g. architecture,
the interface, the modes of arrangement.>>



Thanks for your question, Marialaura. To start, I should say that both MOGA
(glitchmuseum.com - commissioned by Abandon Normal Devices and Harris
Museum) and remixthebook (Univ. of Minnesota, 2011 and remixthebook.com)
are expandable hybrids that are open to remix / reconfiguration in a
variety of exhibition, publication, and performance contexts. This open
collaboration is ongoing if anyone's interest is piqued by my (too long)
comments below.



With MOGA, a close "reading" of the work will reveal a central,
pseudonymous figure, The Artist 2.0, and a small bevy of other fictional
characters: Nigel Foster, the Director of the Museum of Glitch Aesthetics;
Gaby Whitebread, the head curator of the museum but also a research
professor running a new program in Social Media Performance Art at a
university in the NW of the UK; Brian Hale, a media art critic for the
Guardian; and an international pop star (who cut her teeth experimenting
making art on the net in the mid-90s) who is now the most prolific
"collector" of the work of The Artist 2.0. The various artworks thought to
be made by The Artist 2.0 and that are included in the online museum are
discussed by these figures and others in the free, downloadable, full-color
catalog available via glitchmuseum.com. A color, collector's edition of the
catalog is available via Lulu and linked to from the site as well. The
web-based version of this (admittedly satirical / transmediated) work was
released on the net on June 22, 2012, in conjunction with the launch of a
few other projects at Abandon Normal Devices right around the time the
torch was being passed in Manchester.



After the web release and over the summer, AND helped facilitate a dialog
between the curator Omar Kholeif, Cornerhouse, and I, and we began formally
developing a strategy for what would be the first remix of the website in a
gallery context. The eventual Manchester-based gallery venue that MOGA was
exhibited in was the Lionel Dobie Project, a very new space focused on
"emerging curatorial strategies as they relate to artistic practice" --
something that resonated with the MOGA project which is, after all, a net
art work but also an experimental form of curation. It's also been
identified as a work of electronic literature (or transmedia narrative)
which would probably make sense to anyone who is familiar with my work.



Having said that, we like to think that what the work actually "is" is
quite open to interpretation. In this regard, Lional Dobie was the perfect
space to initialize the coming out of MOGA into more traditional exhibition
contexts. In many ways, Omar -- and the curatorial team at Harris who I
will discuss in a bit -- assumed the role of The Artist 2.0-as-curator. Of
course, since the work is a playful investigation of digital persona as it
relates to contemporary forms of artistic and curatorial practice, the
Lionel Dobie venue ended up being the perfect location to launch the first
physical remix of the site (Lionel Dobie is a fictional character /
abstract painter played by Nick Nolte in a movie based on a short story by
Dostoyevsky, so the playful relationship between abstract artist, fictional
persona, pseudonymity, and narrative myth-making was further accentuated in
this hands-on cultural production with the gallery space -- and here it
should be noted that creating these resonant convergences of
cross-generational, like-minded cultural producers and experimental
practitioners is something that AND excels at).



Omar and I agreed that since the Lionel Dobie Project was just getting
started and MOGA would be the first exhibition of its kind in the space,
that we would experiment with the way we redistributed the web artifacts
into the physical space and that MOGA would, in a sense, inform the nascent
gallery's initial narrative (which I'm sure has since changed). The gallery
was just getting started and had no real exhibition history to speak of, so
the space was (mockingly? seriously and with good intent?) transferred into
a slick, Soho-like gallery, and the exhibition was also very clean and
included many of the works and texts available on the WWW, including some
of the following:



* the construction of a maze-like or labyrinthine space to navigate

* lots of vinyl wall text sampled from the catalog

* the MOGA logo

* framed digital images from the blog (sized at blog-thumbnail scale)

* looping animated GIFS consisting of images shot on early mobile phone
video circa 2006 playing on small LCDs

* projections of experimental Google Street View glitch video distributed
by The Artist 2.0 on sites like Vimeo (also sized at large desktop monitor
full screen scale)

* a display of assorted books and early mobile phones referenced in the
catalog as being instrumental in the early and ongoing nomadic practice of
The Artist 2.0 (the catalog discusses the various hardware, software,
books, etc. that the artist has used over time including mobile phones and
experimental / open source software and postmodern metafiction … although
keep in mind that the narrative tone is definitely satirical -- perhaps the
natural outcome of some of the frustrations often voiced in communities
like CRUMB and nettime and Rhizome, etc. -- and that as an artist who has
worked in the field for what feels like forever, is best addressed through
black humor)

* a small listening room for the Soundcloud stand-up comedy performance
(more glitchcrack humor focused on many issues but most significantly "art
schools")

* a computer displaying the glitchmuseum.com website



etc.



Here is a link to some images from the AND / Lionel Dobie exhibition:



http://markamerika.com/news/images-from-museum-of-glitch-aesthetics-andfestival



A month after closing in Manchester, MOGA then reappeared (and is still on
exhibit until January 3) in an exhibit at the Harris Museum and Gallery in
Preston. When the curator at the Harris, Lindsay Taylor, came to the
opening of MOGA at Lionel Dobie, we began a discussion on how best to
re-remix the Manchester exhibition and glitchmuseum.com exhibition of MOGA
into the Harris. Lindsay's curatorial team included Steph Fletcher, Aneta
Krzemien, and Kit Robinson, and in consultation with Omar, we came up with
a different approach. Contrary to Lionel Dobie, which opened this summer,
the Harris has been around since 1893 and has a rich and deep historical
narrative already implied in its building foundation, extensive and
centuries-old collection, permanent exhibitions, etc. Given these very
different contexts, we decided it would be more provocative to try and, if
you will, "glitch the museum" ("glitch the muse" is how I saw it).  The
different works distributed throughout the Harris also include the looping
animated GIFs, framed jpegs, books, video projections, old mobile phones,
screen based net art, QR codes (that link to quotes from The Artist 2.0
peppered throughout the catalog), and the album-length stand-up comedy
routine.



Here is a link to some images from the Harris remix of the MOGA exhibition:



http://markamerika.com/exhibitions/images-from-the-moga-installation-at-harris-museum



As you can see by following the link above, the various digital works and
objects exhibited in the Harris are distributed through the permanent
collections of fine and decorative art as well as within the more
contemporary galleries where the "Digital Aesthetic" exhibition is located.
In this way, Museum of Glitch Aesthetics goes mano y mano with the by now
predictable narrative trajectories of museological discourse. Yes, the work
was first intentionally constructed as a playful, online intervention into
the challenges of not only curating web-based art but of resisting (or
strategically embracing) the potential canonization, historicization, and
mythologization of a pseudonymous (fictionalized) net art presence (The
Artist 2.0). Some of you may find that this figure resonates with the
mid-late 90s net art practitioners who still inform the discourse today as
we tangle ourselves up with the academic, commercial, and mainstream art
purveyors now glomming on to the potential of digital transformation in the
arts. Obviously, much of the artist's bio-data resonates with many of my
own creations over the years, and of course this is intentional, and
resonates with my next work which looks at the relationship between
Duchamp's portable and miniaturized museums (Boîte-en-valise) and his Large
Glass delay-in-painting which comes with its own "album" and "book" (terms
he used to  describe "The Green Box" that many think is at the heart of his
practice).



Perhaps I should also mention that MOGA has been sampled from and remixed
into two live performances as well: the first with Lydia Lunch, Chad
Mossholder and myself in a packed hotel room in the Salutation Hotel in
Manchester as part of AND's "Machine By Other Means" event (
http://www.andfestival.org.uk/events/machines-by-other-means/) and as the
closing act on the opening night of performances at ELMCIP's "Remediating
the Social" event held at the Edinburgh College of Art earlier this month.



I must say that as exhausting as it was to make and continue performing
this elaborate artwork -- I'm trying to imagine what Gaby and Ruth at AND
thought when they first opened up the website -- it was really quite fun to
address these issues that concern us all (the institutionalized life as
experienced in museum/gallery culture, the "art world," art school,
creative industries, etc.), It goes without saying that I had an excellent
team of collaborators and amazing production support from the team at AND.



Sorry for the lengthy email … I think I will end there for now. I am happy
to discuss two other recent works, remixthebook and Immobilité, in relation
to the themes of the month if there's time.  remixthebook tries to rethink
the relationship between practice, theory and performance by hybridizing
the publication as print book and digital  exhibition / performance; and
Immobilité has a semi-interesting history in relation to museum culture,
cinema culture, urban screens, and fine art collection.



But I know there are many others who have a lot to contribute as well.



Best,



Mark