After nearly two decades it is natural that the glitchy landscapes of Rex Bruce would enter the realm of abstraction. He continues to optically process the wide vantage using in-camera artifact along with a melange of circuit bent analog processors, video synthesizers, post-digital image crush and AI assist.
Post-digital glitch is a revolutionary and transgressive art form that subverts the digital medium and challenges the notion of digital perfection. It is an artists' response to the inherent limitations of digital technology that exposes its fragility and contingency.
Plein Error cultivates an aesthetic of bricolage that pursues the use of found electronic materials and rejects technological meta-narratives. It is a refusal to accept the dominant discourse of digital technology and a resistance to aspirations toward slick and seamless computer representations. It can be seen as a form of détournement, a subversion of hegemonic cultural narratives through the use of disruptive tactics. Post-digital glitch is an inversion of established obsessions with hyper-efficient flawlessness and resolution, and undermines the anti-analog purity of the computer medium. It systematically redefines a lexicon of the discarded into what may be considered aesthetically palatable.
The post-digital work of Rex Bruce is a complex and multifaceted practice that defies easy categorization. It is at once organic and synthetic, actual and simulated, a fusion of the analog and digital, the human and machine. It is a sophisticated and refined mashup of technological detritus mated with its own artificial versions that is eager for the unexpected and the unpredictable. It constitutes a rejection of sclerotic paradigms and an embrace of fragmented and stochastic exigency.
Signal2Noise
And then, noise becomes the signal. Find the signal in the noise. Overexposed, overloaded, distorted, meters in the red. Hissing, scratched, discolored, alaised, unintelligble and unreadable. Lens flares. Warped, faded, clipping, bleeding, and humming. Dot screens, moiree patterns. Raster lines. Corrupted data. Feedback. Modem hash. Channel offsets. Degenerated dubs, replications and simulations.
Allow random access thoughts. Art is assembly language. Be a noise-to-signal processor. Processing and filtering all input. Be electronic. Sampling, capturing. Reconfiguring. Inputting, communicating, disseminating.
Be a feedback loop. Be an answering machine. Be a disconnected number, out of service. Be a busy signal, unreachable. Be a signal. Be a system error, crash applications. Be an error message. Be an error. Be an assembly language translator. Be machine level code. Be code. Be corrupted streaming data. Be an aliased side effect. Be aliased. Make feedback.
Be noise.
Rex Bruce
1993