On Nov. 9, 2025, Karin Denson and I will give an artist talk, titled “Non/phenomenalities: A Hodological Laboratory for Unstable Times,” at the Western Film & Art Festival. In line with the festival theme of “Emerging Visions of AI, Art, and Environment,” we will be discussing our recent artistic and curatorial collaborations around AI and environments, both natural and computational. Selected pieces from our ongoing series GlitchesAreLikeWildAnimalsInLatentSpace! will also be screening throughout the festival.
I’m excited to announce that GlitchesAreLikeWildAnimals! — BOVINE, part of a larger series of collaborations between me and Karin Denson, will be installed at GearBox Gallery in Oakland. The opening is Saturday, November 1 (1-4pm), and it will be on view through December 6 (with a closing event and artist talk starting at 2pm).
The installation comprises a set of paintings and custom software that runs a real-time generative audiovisual experience. You can read more about the piece here and here.
And here are a couple of installation shots from a recent show at 120710 Gallery in Berkeley:
Canine! is a part of the GlitchesAreLikeWildAnimalsInLatentSpace! series of AI, generative video, and painting works. Inspired in equal parts by glitch-art vernaculars, the chronophotography of Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey, the cut-up methods of Brion Gysin and William Burroughs, and generative practices from Oulipo to Brian Eno and beyond, our ongoing series GlitchesAreLikeWildAnimalsInLatentSpace! stages an encounter between human imagination and automated image-making — including the mental “schematisms” theorized by Kant and now embodied in algorithmic stereotypes.
This is a screen recording of a real-time, generative/combinatory video.
Canine! is a sort of “forest of forking paths,” consisting of 64 branching and looping pathways, with alternate pathways displayed in tandem, along with generative text, all composited in real time. It is mathematically possible but virtually impossible that the same combination of image, sound, and text will ever be repeated.
The underlying video was generated in part with RunwayML (https://runwayml.com). Karin’s glitch paintings (https://karindenson.com) were used to train a model for image generation. Prompting the model with terms like “Glitches are like wild animals” (a phrase she has been working with for years, originally found in an online glitch tutorial, now offline), and trying to avoid the usual suspects (lions, tigers, zebras), produced a set of species-indeterminate canines, which Karin painted with acrylic on canvas. The painting was fed back into RunwayML as the seed for a video clip (using Gen-2 in spring/summer 2024), which was extended a number of times in branching paths before looping back. The resulting video was glitched with databending methods (in Audacity). The soundtrack was produced by feeding a jpg of the original canine painting into Audacity as raw data, interpreted with the GSM codec.
Made with Max 8 (https://cycling74.com/products/max) on a 2023 Mac Studio (Mac 14,14, 24-core Apple M2 Ultra, 64 GB RAM) running macOS Sonoma (14.6.1). Generative text is produced with Pavel Janicki’s MaxAndP5js Bridge (https://www.paweljanicki.jp/projects_maxandp5js_en.html) to interface Max with the p5js (https://p5js.org) version of the RiTa tools for natural language and generative writing (https://rednoise.org/rita/). Jeremy Bernstein’s external Max object, shell 1.0b3 (https://github.com/jeremybernstein/shell/releases/tag/1.0b3), passes the text to the OS for text-to-speech.
Bovine! is a part of the GlitchesAreLikeWildAnimalsInLatentSpace! series of AI, generative video, and painting works. Inspired in equal parts by glitch-art vernaculars, the chronophotography of Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey, the cut-up methods of Brion Gysin and William Burroughs, and generative practices from Oulipo to Brian Eno and beyond, our ongoing series GlitchesAreLikeWildAnimalsInLatentSpace! stages an encounter between human imagination and automated image-making.
The above video is a screen recording of a real-time, generative/combinatory video. There are currently two versions:
Bovine.app displays generative text over combinatory video, all composited in real time. It is mathematically possible but virtually impossible that the same combination of image, sound, and text will ever be repeated.
Bovine-Video-Only.app removes text and text-to-speech elements, and only features generative audiovideo, which is assembled randomly from five cut-up versions of a single video, composited together in real-time.
The underlying video was generated in part with RunwayML (https://runwayml.com). Karin’s glitch paintings (https://karindenson.com) were used to train a model for image generation.
Karin Denson, Training Data (C-print, 36 x 24 in., 2024)
Prompting the model with terms like “Glitches are like wild animals” (a phrase she has been working with for years, originally found in an online glitch tutorial, now offline), and trying to avoid the usual suspects (lions, tigers, zebras), produced a glitchy cow, which Karin painted with acrylic on canvas:
Karin Denson, Bovine Form (acrylic on canvas, 36 x 24 in., 2024)
The painting was fed back into RunwayML as the seed for a video clip (using Gen-2 in spring/summer 2024), which was extended a number of times. The resulting video was glitched with databending methods (in Audacity). The soundtrack was produced by feeding a jpg of the original cow painting into Audacity as raw data, interpreted with the GSM codec. After audio and video were assembled, the glitchy video was played back and captured with VLC and Quicktime, each of which interpreted the video differently. The two versions were composited together, revealing delays, hesitations, and lack of synchronization.
The full video was then cropped to produce five different strips. The audio on each was positioned accordingly in stereo space (i.e. the left-most strip has its audio turned all the way to the left, the next one over is half-way from the left to the center, the middle one is in the center, etc.). The Max app chooses randomly from a set of predetermined start points where to play each strip of video, keeping the overall image more or less in sync.
Onscreen and spoken text is generated by a Markov model trained on Shane’s book Discorrelated Images (https://www.dukeupress.edu/discorrelated-images), the cover of which featured Karin’s original GlitchesAreLikeWildAnimals! painting.
I’ve been traveling a lot outside of California this summer, but whenever I get the chance I like to spend time up north in Mendocino or Fort Bragg, where my wife Karin is part of the artist collective at Edgewater Gallery.
Earlier in the summer, we observed tons of California brown pelicans and common murres (which look like penguins) camped out on some small offshore islands. The assembly has attracted a lot of attention — from locals, tourists, artists, and scientists. The local newspaper, The Mendocino Voice, just put out a long piece on the birds and the possible reasons for their convergence there, and they quoted Karin and featured a glitch collage that she did a while back.
Karin has been photographing, filming, glitching, and painting pelicans and other California wildlife for several years now. Check out more of her work at karindenson.com.
On December 17, 2018, I will be giving a talk titled “Participatory Horror: Glitches, Ghosts, and Networked Images” at the University of Siegen. Thanks to Marcel Hartwig and Daniel Stein for making this happen!
The Digital Aesthetics Workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center is entering its second year, and we are pleased to announce the first event: Carolyn L. Kane will share some of her current research with us, under the title Chroma Glitch: Data as Style. The discussion will encompass Takeshi Murata, Ryan Trecartin, and datamoshing, all within Kane’s broader project, tentatively titled Precarious Beauty: Glitch, Noise, and Aesthetic Failure. There will be a paper pre-circulated ahead of the talk; we will pass it along a week ahead of the event. We are thrilled Dr. Kane can join us – when we first came up with this idea for a workshop, her name became a token for the sort of scholarship we would want to bring in. She will launch a year already filling up with exciting speakers and a new graduate colloquium (more on that to come).
Carolyn L. Kane is the author of the award-winning Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code (U Chicago, 2014). [You can learn more about this fascinating project through this interview in Theory, Culture & Society.] She earned her Ph.D. from New York University’s Dept. of Media, Culture, and Communication in 2011, and was awarded the Nancy L. Buc Postdoctoral Fellowship in “Aesthetics and the Question of Beauty” at Brown University in 2014. From 2011 to 2014 she taught at Hunter College; she is now Associate Professor of Communication and Design at Ryerson University in Toronto.
This event will be held from 5-7p on Tuesday, Oct 9, 2018 at the Roble Arts Gym Lounge (TAPS department). Drinks and snacks will be served. Please RSVP to Doug Eacho (email in image above) if you can, and share widely.
On Tuesday, April 3, 2018 (4:00-6:00pm), I will be giving a talk titled “Discorrelated Images” in the context of the Digital Aesthetics Workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center. The talk draws on my current book project of the same title and will address primarily temporal and affective relations and transformations occasioned by digital images.
Next week, on April 7, 2017, I’ll be giving a talk titled “Post-Cinematic Artifacts: Digital Glitch and the Ruins of Perception” at the 2017 Media Fields conference, “RUINS,” at UC Santa Barbara.
Building on recent work I’ve been doing, I’ll be arguing “that new forms of sensibility and collectivity may become thinkable in the spaces opened up by post-cinematic media – that new ways of being and relating to the world may arise from the ruins of perception.”
At the upcoming SCMS conference in Chicago, I will be participating in a workshop on “Deformative Criticism and Digital Experimentations in Film & Media Studies” (panel K3 on Friday, March 24, 2017 at 9:00am):
Deformative criticism has emerged as an innovative site of critical practice within media studies and digital humanities, revealing new insights into media texts by “breaking” them in controlled or chaotic ways. Deformative criticism includes a wide range of digital experiments that generate heretical and non-normative readings of media texts; because the results of these experiments are impossible to know in advance, they shift the boundaries of critical scholarship. Media scholars are particularly well situated to such experimentation, as many of our objects of study exist in digital forms that lend themselves to wide-ranging manipulation. Thus, deformative criticism offers a crucial venue for defining not only contemporary scholarly practice, but also media studies’ growing relationship to digital humanities.
Also participating in the workshop will be Jason Mittell (Middlebury College), Stephanie Boluk (UC Davis), Kevin L. Ferguson (Queens College, City University of New York), Mark Sample (Davidson College), and Virginia Kuhn (USC).
My own presentation/workshop contribution will focus on glitches and augmented reality as a deformative means of engaging with changing media-perceptual configurations, including the following case study:
Glitch, Augment, Scan
Scannable Images is a collaborative art/theory project by Karin + Shane Denson that interrogates post-cinema – its perceptual patterns, hyperinformatic simultaneities, and dispersals of attention – through an assemblage of static and animated images, databending and datamoshing techniques, and augmented reality (AR) video overlays. Viewed through the small screen of a smartphone or tablet – itself directed at a computer screen – only a small portion of the entire spectacle can be seen at once, thus reflecting and emulating the selective, scanning regard of post-cinematic images and confronting the viewer with the materiality of the post-cinematic media regime through the interplay of screens, pixels, people, and the physical and virtual spaces they occupy.
