The arrival of digital distortion and glitch art to the visual medium highlights a fundamental polarity of the digital age itself: these works in appearance erroneous and inhuman and yet essential to the present human experience. In critique, some contemporary artists have set about presenting us the articulated prospect of malfunction, in our decisive world of automation. Antonio Roberts is one such artist that confronts us with the horror of error in a society of ever-growing reliance on digital comforts and applications.
One form of this error explored by Roberts is the issues of copyright and legality around recreation and manipulation of digital property. The above work from Roberts’ Visually Similar, commissioned for the Copy Paste event at the Victoria Albert Museum, illustrates effectively a digital property’s vulnerability for corruption and reproduction. Roberts takes museum digital scans of Victorian busts and transforms them into 3d models, before running them through a Google search and merging the result compilations with the model. With this process, Roberts not only creates a distorted reproduction, highlighting the complexity with legal usage digitally, but also a new identity for the unidentified Bust of a Boy, blank and white to begin with, giving him significance through colour. In doing so, Roberts has also brought to light the issue of race and colonial gaze within museum’s and cultural institutions within the west. The works ability to illustrate the significance of colour in identity here in a way obviously and unapologetically, gives the recreations existence a positive agency and purpose that elevates it above what would otherwise be deemed as arbitrary rebellious alteration.
This being said, what the work shows us about ownership and authorship in the digital realm going forward serves as an important warning for us all. Copyright Atrophy (2012) succeeds in illustrating a similar issue, not just identifying how the stark lines we expect from copyright legality have been blurred, but just how blurry the lines have become.
For this work Roberts takes brand logos of influential and recognizable corporations and uses distortion software to slowly degrade them to the point of simple shape and colour, beyond recognition. The question is posed – at what point does the logo cease to exist and loose its copyright integrity? This works importance lies not just in the question it poses to the viewer, but rather in the absurdity of the answer. Why does this moment of degradation mark the point of loss, why not the moment directly before or after? We are left with an answer unquantifiable or transferrable across multiple instances of Roberts’ atrophy works, and therefore in copyright infringement cases involving branding to come perhaps. This complexity is reflected in many similar copyright cases today, which require exhaustive review on a case-by-case basis.
Roberts’ also creates work on music in this realm, one of the largest and most expensive causes for copyright disputes on digital platforms today. As part of the Common Property exhibition at Jerwood Arts (2016) Roberts explored a similar notion to the exhibits visual counterpart, the aforementioned “Atrophy”, taking songs involved in copyright disputes such as Metallica’s “I Disappear” and remixing them beyond the point of legal infringement and auditory recognition.
Roberts takes his music transformations further however using coding. On his own developed software he is able to convert the same legally disputed songs into a JPEG image through reformatting the raw data and birthing glitches. This experimental work although interesting naturally doesn’t stack up with Roberts’ more complete and fleshed out works, but is an interesting exploration conceptually and could be utilized by artists as part of a more complete commentary in the future perhaps with similar use or rather misuse of data files representative of other things we deem inherently human.
One of the main things to strike me about a lot of Roberts’ work including his aforementioned works is his proclivity to recreate and rebrand in regards to the topic of copyright and ownership. However one such exhibit Roberts included in his exhibition No Copyright Infringement Intended (2017) is made brilliant through its identical reproduction. Artists Jan Nikolai-Nelles and Nora Al-Badri effectively communicate the importance digital scans can have in tackling problems of ownership.
This discreet 3d scan made by Nikolai-Nelles and Al-Badri at the Neues Berlin Museum in secrecy was done in response to the museums authoritarian attitude towards ownership of the bust and its digital scan, which was unavailable to the public for free use despite its status as public domain. Whether the bust is an exact scan or not, the scan itself enabled the creation of a remarkably convincing model that would be displayed proudly in the centre of the exhibition in defiance. This work brings to light an interesting example of how digital applications can in fact help enforce copyright ownership abuses within cultural institutions especially. I think Roberts was likely drawn to what the bust suggests about power structures of these institutions and their dominance over the public in regards to ownership. Nikolai-Nelles’ and Al-Badri’s Nefertiti builds a vision for a more conscientious and respectful attitude from institutions with restricting their public.
Antonio Roberts is no doubt successful in exploring the opportunity for glitch and malfunction, legally as well as ethically. In a world of automation, Roberts and others seem to be creating to understand how this malfunction can manifest perhaps. Roberts’ work is not only an example of the capabilities of art in the digital age, but a prognosis on things to come.
