Camera and Mic highlights the relationship between digital media and our physical senses. The piece prompts the viewer to recognize a pattern among 3 images.

The glitch highlights the eyes and ears to build an association with the title of the piece, suggesting that cameras and microphones imitate the eyes and ears. However, glitches are an explicit piece of evidence showing that these devices are not perfect. The presence of the glitches suggest a disconnect in how information is captured, though we frequently consume digital media as an illusionary extension of our own senses.

The artefacts appear as noise, “an undesirable, unwanted and unordered disturbance” as characterised by Menkman. In this case, the noise is a visualization of the sound recorded where the photographs were taken. These two channels are usually experienced together by humans. However, the forced digital combination is unintelligible, suggesting again a fundamental mismatch in how sensory information is communicated.

A relationship between the viewer and the subjects could be built. There is an awareness of the fact that the subjects themselves are experiencing the environment from a non-digitized and more complete perspective.

This piece originates from the practice of using Audacity to produce glitch art. Despite working in a technical field, I had never considered mixing audio and image data. They were seen as completely separate things on a technical level — even in film, video and audio tracks are stored separately, simply being played at the same time.

The experimentation process consisted of mixing audio tracks into an image imported into Audacity. To remain faithful to the idea of a “raw digital perspective,” the images were edited minimally. Audio was kept in WAV format. Though Menkman mentions that some artists feel that compression is a “necessary part of the character of the digital canvas,” I wanted to focus on the idea of perception and channels, rather than full digital systems. The import did not work successfully with the camera raw format, so photoshop raw was used instead.

Menkman, Rosa. The use of artifacts as critical media aesthetics. N.p.: University of Amsterdam, n.d. PDF.