A month ago I posted a glowing review of Glitch: Designing Imperfection, an impressive collection of glitch art compiled by Iman Moradi and Ant Scott. As a follow up to the review, Iman, Ant and I had the following exchange in which we discussed the backstory behind the book, addressed their art and design practices and considered the fine balance between complexity and restraint.

Greg J. Smith: As noted in Ant's documentation of the book project, Glitch: Designing Imperfection was almost five years in the making. Could you describe how you came to start working together and what prompted you to document glitch art?

Iman Moradi: I first met Ant at an event in Nottingham titled, "Computational Audio/Visual Aesthetics and the Glitch". I subsequently interviewed Ant as part of my dissertation during the final year of my undergraduate studies where I dedicated my time to studying the glitch and coming up with an artistic response to it. During this time we had several conversations in which we discussed the possibility of collaborating together to create some kind of multimedia glitch interactive DVD extravaganza. After a couple of months of wrangling with it we decided that the limited resolution of TV screens back then (this is pre-Blu-ray) was too limiting to how we wished to show the glitch, and as Ant pointed out, we didn't really have the capability to do it either. On a trip to London a friend of mine showed me this book. the premise is an exchange between John Berger and John Christie (entitled I Send You This Cadmium Red) after more conversations we ditched the interactive DVD concept and Ant and I moved to prototyping what a book on the glitch would be, we experimented with mostly Ant's glitch content and then decided we needed to broaden the scope considerably to bring in other people's contributions, and thus the book was born. Documenting something that previously hasn't been compiled or surveyed provided a reasonable amount of motivation for me.

Ant Scott: Iman sent me his copy of Koyaanisqatsi to watch, which I found very beautiful and inspiring, and it would have been nice to give that sort of care and attention to a glitch film. Unfortunately, inspiration and ability don't always come as matched pairs, so we decided to produce a book instead. Besides, it's nice to have the artworks as physical prints in a book; attention spans when looking at screen-based media probably hover around a few tens of milliseconds, so having something tangible hopefully persuades us to look a little longer.

GJS: I wasn't familiar with that Berger/Christie text so I'll have to track it down. I think Ant is on the money with his comments about attention span and screen based media. Read in this light, Glitch really is an inventory of frozen moments—definitely an interesting outcome for what might have been a video project. Once you'd settled on your format, how did you find your publisher and assemble your design team?

AXS: Iman will now present his definitive guide on how to find a publisher! To be frank, I gave up on the process past a certain point, but Iman persevered and contacted Mark Batty Publisher, but I can't remember how he found them…

IM: We didn't know anyone who had done a book other than in academia, so there was a bit of initial research to find out how you get a book published, however most guides on how to get a book published talk about getting literary agents, they refer mainly to mainstream channels of publication and book ideas that are pretty concrete and genre specific, not mid way through art books. I can remember the moment when I called an agent who actually laughed at the idea and said theres definitely no appeal in the idea and in her expert opinion no one would like it either which I thought was a bit harsh

So anyway, before the final selection of works were decided on, before we'd even reached the deadline for submissions on the website and despite our initial hesitations, we thought we could just approach publishers on the strength of the books theme, present it to them and see if they like the concept enough to help us get the book published. So we made a little information pack and sent it out to Taschen, Die Gestalten Verlag and funnily enough Thames and Hudson who are now the distributors for the book. This pack featured a brief introduction to the book, a few sample images and a web link. They all respectfully turned us down, with messages like we're busy and we don't have space within our current editorial to fit this in. We even approached boutique publishers who did more arty things and they just didn't have a budget for this sort of thing. Looking back, they must get loads of submissions like that so we clearly didn't have the edge over someone who was in a more advanced stage of developing a book.

We weren't just ready to give up, but a bit disheartened that none of the big publishers were interested, so I pitched the idea to my university and we had some initial support from them in developing the book, we thought we could use them to self publish the book, but then our agendas didn't cross, funding was pulled from different directions out of anyones control and we set out to contact publishers again. During this time, I was also talking to Joe Gilmore who was doing bits of work for the University and told him about the book project. Joe being an audio artist and graphic designer with mastery of typographically heavy work, loved the concept and agreed to become the design partner, Joe brought onboard Chris Murphy and from their expertise in designing things and their additional editorial input a beautiful designed book emerged. So now we had a designed book, no funding and no publisher and a bit of angst about the funding scenario.

With a positive attitude and in a final push, we made a mini-site which had previews of the book and this was basically a well designed single page describing the origin of the book, the contributors we had, and gave them an interface to browse all the spreads. It was very targeted for a shortlist of publishers we wanted to contact. We found and shortlisted them mainly by looking at our favourite books and seeing who they were published by. Luckily, the very first publisher I contacted (Mark Batty Publisher), and who were coincidentally our favoured choice, replied within a couple of hours to say they see our glitch book fitting in with their other titles.

GJS: Iman's introduction describes the glitch as kind of a nostalgic device that "harks back to a time when imperfections were tolerated" – this sounds as if you are describing material culture rather than ephemeral screen art. Can you elaborate on this comment?

IM: I think the glitch is categorized, studied and appreciated on a multitude of different levels. In fact its definition (as an artifact, digital art aesthetic, or concept) is pretty plastic. On my personal quest to study the glitch, I quickly realized that many of the reasons behind its its appreciation are tied up with significant psychological and cultural factors and related concepts (such as Wabi Sabi), that are neither logical nor functional but more emotional. A case point are the psychological attachments which are inevitably invoked by our experiences of the places and times in which glitches have manifested themselves and are usually tied up with malfunctioning physical devices that carry our cultural and entertainment content. I think the way in which the book is a snapshot of glitches now (or rather two years ago), could prove interesting for an intrepid future media archaeologist studying dead media.

However having said all that, in compiling the book we ultimately shied away from a third level of numeric indexing which was to hint at its type of physical representation in a host medium.

AXS: Do you think there was more textural dirt around us before computers took over? I'm involved in designing audio production software, and what everyone wants is that elusive slightly dirty analogue sound - in a nice controllable digital plugin! And similarly, last night I was watching some YouTube videos of the late painter Bob Ross, and as he was showing us how to paint snow-capped mountains, he said 'don't use pure white - that would be disconcerting'. Using digital tools can be like having pure white in your palette.

[photo: Michael Surtees]

GJS: Would that "third level" of indexing that you opted not to use in Glitch be what Bob Ross was warning about—pure white (taxonomy)? On that note, could you discuss how the work is arranged the numerical system that did employ?

AXS: I'd have to refer to my notes, and then do some example exercises, followed by a short test, before I was confident in explaining how the numerical systeme diabolique works. I believe there's an example on the last page, but I daren't look.

IM: I think we figured that employing a third level and using a number to signify that was largely redundant and too onerous (i.e.. one based on classifying either a type of glitch, or what it was ultimately manifested in, so we literally said next to each image whether it was a Screenshot, Photograph or Video Still). Do you know, I'm not entirely sure what we did employ in the end to organize the entire book itself other than what the book designers Joe and Chris did to lay out the pages and make the imagery flow nicely. What are the three sections punctuated by the pink section pages? This looks bad now, but we did have some kind of a system in place (and this was the subject of many ridiculous arguments). As you pointed out in the review of the book the numeric indexing system is in line with the slightly austere naming conventions typical of this type of work.

AXS: I don't think there was any reason for the crimson section dividers other than to provide some pauses.

[photo: Michael Surtees]

GJS: I know you received close to a thousand artwork submissions to be considered for inclusion in Glitch. Granted, you both have expert eyes when it comes to this aesthetic, but how did you determine what made the cut and what didn't? What makes one glitch less successful than another?

IM: A lot of the submissions we received were actually quite similar or of the same type of glitch. Some of the images we received were sadly quite low in quality, due to compression, but fortunately they were the less interesting ones. In most cases, I think we were after 'interestingness', whether that was visually manifested (composition, colour, structure) or in the way in which the glitch was provoked captured or finally presented. I was more keen on picking out the story of how those glitches came to be. How we determined interestingness was quite subjective. On a practical level to arrive at our shortlists of what we liked, We made lots of lists and used a fair bit of tagging to indicate whether we found an image interesting or not.

We went through the images as a group on two occasions, where we went through all of the submissions and the shortlists we'd made. We pretty much discussed the merits of including each individual item of work. The ones that we found mutually interesting got discussed, if they were part of a series, we'd pick the images out of that series which we liked and if we felt alone in liking someone's work, we would have to argue out the merits and give a convincing case of why it should be included.

GJS: Ok, so we have an idea as to how your organize and consider the work of other artists (at least as far as glitch art goes) but what about your own work? You have both been actively experimenting with this aesthetic/approach for several years—how do you determine the 'interestingness' of your own glitches?

AXS: I like stuff with nice edges, because it's the edges or boundaries between neighbouring colours where the energy is. It's a nice idea isn't it? I got that from a Bridget Riley interview. Furthermore, a defining character for some types of visual glitch is that they incorporate 'virtual edges' that add even more energy. In the first image, we have some stripes. The energy, or interest, is on the edges.

In the image below, I've done a simple lateral dislocation. What does your eye see? It's drawn to the edges again, which now have a slightly more complex form. But we also now see a pair of horizontal edges that aren't explicitly there, along the boundaries of the dislocation itself.

This is all obvious stuff, but the point I want to make is that you can get 'interestingness' without the 'throw everything in the pot' mash-up style glitch visuals which superficially attract attention but then become instantly fatiguing. If I can still see an overall structure—some sort of compositional restraint—despite all the delicious noise and complexity of the glitchy bits, then I will usually prefer that.

Anyway, why should interestingness (I'm going to stick with this word) be a criterion for selecting material? If I was going to have one of the glitches printed and hung on the wall, I'd choose something that I could easily ignore, and not having it shouting 'Look at me! I'm an interesting glitch! Look how complex I am!'.

Talking of complexity, can I tell you about a theory I've just thought of? A few weeks ago someone in my twitter clique twitted a link to an article about how the skills of the artisan—fine motor control, cognitive ability to plan artworks—were indicators for being a suitable partner with good-quality genes to pass on. Unfortunately, I didn't bookmark the article. So anyway, I reckon that, at least in the digital arts community, what people are doing is showing-off how good their brains are, by deploying increasingly complex projects involving mashing-up N open-source frameworks, multiple OS's, mastery over data and statistical analysis, and sophisticated project statements. Thus indicating their suitability as a mate. It's all subconscious though.

[Iman Moradi / scrambled Scarlett Johansson]

IM: I don't think I've generated that much work over the past few years, I have plenty of sketches and ideas for things that I'd like to do though and I partly wanted to pursue those for my practice based PhD which I've put on hold for a bit, one of them was a Persian Carpet that has Glitches encoded in the design, I read about this concept of a Persian Flaw where pious and god fearing carpet weavers would deliberately weave a flaw into their designs, so as not to presume divinity through perfection. I loved this concept of using an imperfection to enforce a belief system. What I had in mind was visually dissimilar from Richard Hutten's Playing with Tradition, but I really like his notion of playing with tradition too and I guess its these ideas which in my mind possibly construe interestingness. When you're experimenting its usually a small thing that piques your interest and serendipitously leads you down a certain path, that could be a technical process, a vague concept, or the possibility of getting closer to an outcome. The outcome, just from a visual standpoint though for me are glitches that work well as pieces of graphic design. They have at their core a nice interaction of colour and form and aren't overly gratuitous, but gratuitousness, and the 'overpowering' and 'turbulent' work just as well sometimes, in measured doses.

[Ant Scott / Air Burst #01 / 2008]

GJS: Great, thanks for this window into glitch and your respective practices. What are you currently working on?

AXS: Nothing. And everything. What would you do next? Because glitch artworks use technology in a relatively unrefined way (which is a big part of the appeal, I'm not knocking it), it's difficult to impress your own personality on it. That's definitely why for the past four years or so I've experimented with analogue process, such as photographic exposures and some bits of painting. I was also thinking about Grayson Perry and his coil clay vases. Perry sort of conceals dark and disturbing imagery on disarmingly innocent-looking, decorous, wobbly vases. I'd love to do something like that for the visual glitch - bury it in something really childlike and a bit shit-looking, and I've got a few ideas. I'm pretty good at doing shit-looking art.

IM: Currently doing non-glitch-related things for a bit until I can find a suitable framework to do glitch work within. A few large funding bids in the pipeline, so we'll have to wait and see.