[Gijs Gieskes / Eye, still / 2004 ]

I've been fixating on "failed" and subverted media of late. No doubt this fascination has been largely inspired by my reading of Caleb Kelly's Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction, but this interest also extends out of some writing that we recently published on Vague Terrain.

PLAYLIST is an exhibition organized by curator Domenico Quaranta that is currently on display at LABoral in Gijón, Spain. The show brings together a few dozen projects that explore musical production through lo-fi and obsolete technologies. The exhibition features work by a range of artists including Paul B. Davis, Tristan Perich, Paul Slocum, Raquel Meyers – a cast of characters who repurpose "dead" media, either with a soldering iron or through ROM hacking. A superficial reading of PLAYLIST might result in the show being dismissed for capitalizing on (unwavering) chiptune-chic, but the selected projects are far too smart and nuanced to have to solely rely on nostalgia or kitsch to resonate with an audience. I'm not so interested in focusing on the show itself (see Régine Debatty's coverage here and here) but pointing out the excellent catalogue essays by Quaranta and Ed Halter that we republished on the Vague Terrain blog. These two texts do more than simply frame a body of work, they each provide a toolkit for thinking about technology.

Quaranta's "PLAYLIST. A Reader" opens by invoking the dead media of Bruce Sterling and the notion of planned obsolescence invented/advocated by Brooks Stevens. Quaranta on the life and death of consumer electronics:

Media rarely die in the same way – more often, they are just sent to the garrett, the home version of the Elysian Fields. There, they wait to be brought back to the living room by that very emotional investment we made in them. There, they wait to be brought back to the living room by that very emotional investment we made in them. If my Powerbook had a strong influence on the way I see the world; if, during its lifespan, it changed the way a wide community of people see, listens to music, interact with other people, etc., obsolescence won't be a form of death – it will be, instead, the main gateway to eternity.

The notion of emotional investment is leveraged to describe artists working with obsolete technology as "collectors" and Quaranta points to the persistence of the demoscene as a related model of liberated (retro)engagement with technology that blurs the distinction between visual art and musical production.

Halter's "The Matter of Electronics" is a rich examination of lo-fi aesthetics that builds bridges between materialist filmmaking and artists working with obsolete media. Halter on the recognition of the true nature of a medium:

The very moments that indicate the specificity of the medium occur when that medium starts to break down, to suffer and reveal imperfections. The technology becomes visible through its failures. Glitches and errors constitute evidence of its origins; we see the material through disruption.

Halter surveys a number of video pieces from the exhibition and in doing so he develops a playbook for considering their material qualities - how the works relate to the devices they were generated on and the grain of digital formats.

I've only really provided cursory summaries of these essays so cruise over to Vague Terrain if I've piqued your interest. I'll have more news on the VT front soon as Vague Terrain 16: Architecture/Action (curated by Joshua Noble) will be launching in the next few weeks.