The history of cinema is inseparable from the history of technology, and each new invention provides filmmakers with new narrative and aesthetic techniques. The creators of mainstream films learn and apply these technologies with enthusiasm, moving gradually towards perfection and forming a canon of big names. However, this is always countered by rebellious explorers who challenge the conventional use of the medium and offer an alternative view of cinema. Their subversions can be politically motivated and may reflect current world events (as in the case of Dadaist or activist films) or rebel against the traditional film apparatus (as in the case of structural cinema), but they almost always deny the unconditional good of linear progress that characterises the mainstream film industry. Refusing to accept it, many of the experimental auteurs turn to ideas of imperfection, error or obsolescence inherent in any technology. By undermining the positivist understanding of history and reality, this approach makes it possible to see that there is a contingency in the world that does not fit into any framework, and it is in this contingency that salvation in times of global crisis may lie.

One of the most prominent forms of such subversive practice is glitch art, which explores discourses around electronic technologies and challenges myths about their stability, ideological neutrality and perfection. By destabilising and disintegrating the image through various algorithmic tools or physical manipulation of devices, glitch artists expose the materiality of the media and its impact on society. In her film ‘The Collapse of PAL’, for example, Rosa Menkman uses various databending techniques and borrows the metaphor of the angel of history from Walter Benjamin in order to take a closer look at the transition from analogue to digital television that happened unnoticed and overnight. In consonance with Benjamin’s melancholia, Jon Rafman talks about the changing perception of history, time and reality in the hyper-accelerated digital age in ‘Shadowbanned’. A related media archaeological approach can be applied to much earlier moving image technologies and their failures, as seen in ‘Flame’ by Sami van Ingen who addresses nitrate celluloid cinema destroyed by fire and time. Many glitch-artist practices involve the misuse of technology in order to critically reflect on it, to reveal its limits and the ideologies hidden within it. This understanding of glitch art, for instance, is reflected in Grayson Earle’s desktop-documentary ‘Why Don’t the Cops Fight Each Other?’, which demonstrates the logic of police violence embedded at the code level in the GTA 5 video game. Riar Rizaldi has a similar critical attitude in his ‘Notes from Gog Magog’ where he uses AI-generated images and their eerie nature to talk about the exploitative nature of transnational tech corporations.

The works mentioned above, as well as others, are part of the GLITCH FILM: THE ART OF ERROR screening programme which is conceived to represent various forms of glitch art, understood broadly as a productive critical and formal strategy that celebrates error, obsolescence and misuse of media technologies. (Dmitry Frolov, Ejla Kovačević)

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PROGRAM

• The Collapse of PAL / Rosa Menkman, 2010, 8′, NL

The Angel of History reflects on the PAL signal and its termination. This death sentence, although executed in silence, was a brutally violent act that left PAL disregarded and obsolete. While the PAL signal is dead, it still exists as a trace left upon the new digital technologies.

Rosa Menkman is a Dutch artist and researcher, a pioneer of glitch art who began glitching in 1990. Her work focuses on noise artefacts that result from accidents in analogue and digital media, artefacts that can offer precious insights into the otherwise obscure alchemy of standardisation and resolution-setting. Menkman’s Glitch Moment/um (inc, 2011) is a book on the exploitation and popularisation of glitch artefacts that acts as a compendium to her research. A second book, Beyond Resolution (i.R.D., 2020), further develops and highlights the politics of resolution-setting; it shows how the standardisation of resolutions generally promotes efficiency, order, and functionality in our technologies but has the side effect of compromising and obfuscating alternative possibilities.

• Flame / Sami van Ingen, 2018, 15′, FI

A fractured melodrama, based on damaged frames from the last minutes of the only remaining nitrate reel of the lost feature film ‘Silja – Fallen Asleep When Young’ (1937) directed by Teuvo Tulio. All screening prints and the negative of the film were destroyed in a 1959 studio fire. A sequence from the middle of the film was found at La Cinémathèque Française in Paris in 2015.

Sami van Ingen is a veteran in alternative Finnish film, who has worked as an artist, lecturer and curator since the late 1980s. He lives and works in Helsinki, Finland. Van Ingen finished his doctoral studies in the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki in 2012. He often uses random or found materials in his works. His works have been seen in many national and international exhibitions and festivals over the years, including Tbilisi Triennial (2012), Kunsthalle Helsinki (2005) and Sara Hildén Art Museum in Tampere, Finland (2002).

• Shadowbanned / Jon Rafman, 2018, 8′, CA

The aesthetics of internet conspiracy theories is used to tell the story of an anonymous narrator on an enigmatic, transdimensional journey. The film unfolds across multiple universes wherein dreams are recycled waste products and meaning has been all but lost. The narrator arms himself with artificial memories of artificial pasts in order to protect himself from the future. Shadowbanned is a meditation on the perception of history, esoteric culture and the implosion of meaning in our hyper-accelerated times.

Jon Rafman (b. 1981) is acclaimed for a multifaceted oeuvre that encompasses video, animation, photography, sculpture and installation. His quasi-anthropological works — often incorporating internet-sourced images and narrative material — investigate digital technologies and the communities they create, focusing on the losses, longings and fantasies that shape our technology-infused lives today. The Montreal-based artist turns an empathic but critical eye on the internet age, investigating experiences of alienation, nostalgia, loneliness and grief.

• Zounk! / Billy Roisz, 2012, 6′, AT

In her video zounk! Billy Roisz breaks the song eisenwalzer by the Austrian-Slowenian band BROKEN.HEART.COLLECTOR down into its musical components, which she then uses to weave a brightly-coloured, close-meshed audio-visual texture that vibrates between white and black frames, thus making the screen swing.

Billy Roisz is one of the best-known figures on the Austrian experimental scene. Her ability to translate experimental music into visual memory images is particularly noteworthy, revealing borrowings from minimal art and conceptual art. She specializes in feedback video and video/sound interaction by using monitors, cameras, video mixing desks, a selfbuilt videosynth, computer, a bass guitar and sometimes turntables for video and sound generating. She is co-organizer/programmer of annual REHEAT Festival. She got the BMUKK Outstanding Artist Award for innovative film art (2009) and the Diagonale Award for innovative film (2011). Her films zounk! (2012), darkroom (2014) and THE (2015, co-director Dieter Kovačič) were shown in competition at Berlinale Shorts.

• Why Don’t the Cops Fight Each Other? / Grayson Earle, 2021, 9′, USA

This desktop documentary investigates the relationships between police officers in GTA V. Through an exhaustive forensic analysis of the game’s source code, it demonstrates the extent to which the cultural imaginary concerning the real world police is projected into the game space.

Grayson Earle (b. 1987) is a new media artist and activist from the United States. His work deals with the role that digital technologies and networks play in protest and political agency. He is known for his guerrilla video projections as a member of The Illuminator, a guerrilla video projection collective, and for his project Bail Bloc, a computer program that posts bail for low-income people.

• Notes from Gog Magog / Riar Rizaldi, 2022, 20′, ID

An exploration of the interconnection between ghost stories, tech company culture in South Korea, and the economy of logistics in Indonesia told through a notebook/premake film and dossier of an unmade techno-horror feature-length film set in between port in Jakarta and an unnamed employee assistance programme office in Seoul.

Riar Rizaldi works as an artist and filmmaker. He works predominantly with the medium of moving images and sound, both in the black-box of cinema settings as well spatial presentation as installation. His artistic practice focuses mostly on the relationship between capital and technology, labour and nature, worldviews, genre cinema, and the possibility of theoretical fiction. His works have been shown at various international film festivals (including Locarno, IFFR, FID Marseille, Viennale, BFI London, Cinema du Reel, Vancouver, etc.) as well as Centre Pompidou Paris (2021), Museum of Modern Art (2024), Whitney Biennial (2024), Taipei Biennial (2023), Istanbul Biennial (2023), Venice Architecture Biennale (2021), Biennale Jogja (2021), National Gallery of Indonesia (2019), and other venues and institutions. In addition, recent solo exhibitions and focus programs of his works had been held at Z33 Hasselt (2024), Centre de la photographie Genève (2023), and Batalha Centro de Cinema Porto (2023) amongst others.

• The Suburb Within / Pekka Sassi, 2009, 11′, FI

A film about communication, narration and presence. “Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That’s why it’s called present.”

Pekka Sassi (b. 1969) is a Helsinki-based artist whose output consists of experimental sound and video works, many of which are purely sound pieces and audio installations. Sassi’s works are characterised by creative integration of simple, and sometimes random, audial and visual worlds detected in the surrounding world. He is a wide-ranging, yet uncompromising artist. His works have been presented at several domestic and foreign festivals and he was awarded the annual AVEK Prize for audio-visual art in 2006 and the Best film in European Media Art Festival, Osnabrücke 2010.

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CURATORS

Dmitry Frolov (b. 1988, Kaliningrad) is an art and film curator and researcher based in Berlin, Germany. He holds a BA in Сultural Studies from the Russian State University for the Humanities and an MA in Film Programming and Curating from Birkbeck, University of London. Between 2017-2022, he worked as a curator at the Moscow International Experimental Film Festival. He has worked with a variety of international festivals and cultural institutions including the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, e-flux, Pushkin House (London), Kunstnernes Hus (Oslo) and many others.

Ejla Kovačević (1989) is a freelance film critic, curator and independent/experimental cinema researcher. She’s a member of the curatorial team at the International Experimental Film and Video Festival 25 FPS, a selection committee member at Belgrade-based International Analog Film Festival KINOSKOP and film programmer at /’fu:bar/ Glitch Art Festival. Member of Zagreb-based filmlab Klubvizija, she organized numerous workshops, screenings and held lectures on experimental and photochemical cinema. She earned her MA in French Language at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University and an MA in Comparative Literature at the University of Zagreb.

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Fubar program is organized in collaboration with the Mi2 – Multimedia Institute Zagreb and supported by the City of Zagreb and the Kultura Nova Foundation.