tokyo_nomad_ FAQ

First published on Tumblr September 3 2023

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I sometimes get questions from people that want to know about me as an artist, so I decided to put together an FAQ that covers bio stuff like my background, inspirations etc.

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1. Can you share your artistic background and journey to becoming an artist?

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Sure. 

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I've always had a curiosity and creative hunger, but for a long time I didn't have a focussed creative outlet for it. I guess I was kind of looking for my calling. For many years I'd been lucky enough to have a creative aspect to my IRL work so that kept me feeling satisfied. Unfortunately, that all changed around 2019 for various reasons that are too boring to write out here. 

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That kind of left me with this vacuum in my life and I felt like I had a lack of purpose. I started getting depressed and realised that I needed to take back agency in my life rather than allowing other people such control over my fulfilment.

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So around 2019 I started getting into photography and photo editing. I started off just taking photos as I walked around Tokyo, and that became my initial kind of niche.

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Not only that, but I had all these photos of my 10+ year in Japan but I'd always assumed they were just kind of flat and lifeless. And most of them were. But then I realised through changing simple settings like brightness and contrast, it actually made a big difference to the photos. 

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Eventually I started gravitating more towards black and white photography. I was a listening to a lot of Joy Division around that time. If you've ever seen that Kevin Cummins shot of the band on a bridge that he shot for NME, that was kind of what I was hoping to replicate.

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So yeah, I guess I can sum it up as a need to create something in my life.

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2. How did you become involved in glitch art?

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It was kind of a perfect storm of different factors that lead me to discovering glitch art and finding that I had a passion for it. 

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I already kind of mentioned how I started off taking photos, and then discovering the power of photo editing, which I guess were the first two initial steps that lead me towards glitch art.

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At that time I was still playing around with black and white photography but it was kind of difficult to feel like I was making much improvement with it despite spending hours on a single photo. I also felt like there wasn't much room to experiment with b&w photography, at least not with the resources I had at my disposal.

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After a few months doing the b&w photography, the pandemic hit and it was getting more and more difficult to get outside to take new photos, and after a while I started running out of photos from my 10+ year Japan library that would look good as traditional photography.

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That doesn't mean I didn't have a ton of photos left. It got me thinking if there was anything I could do with the 100s of imperfect photos that I had; the blurry ones, the ones with poor lighting, the ones with the subject just out of shot. It felt like a waste just to have these imperfect images sat around not being used in any way and not being enjoyed.

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I've always had a fascination with transforming one thing into something else entirely. At first I started just messing around with a few apps or in GIMP and would see how much I could change the meaning or feel of an image. I'd change a photo of a tree into a futuristic spiral, or a cute little rabbit candy my daughter made me into this eldritch abomination. I found that dichotomy interesting.

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I really enjoyed doing that and I started an Instagram account dedicated to these images and would follow different artists. Eventually the algorithm would suggest glitch artists and I became really interested in their styles. jrdsctt and sgt_slaughtermelon were a couple of the first accounts I followed. Then I also found Glitch Artists Collective which introduced me to a load more glitch artists and that was when I decided I wanted to make art that looked like that.

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After I started playing around with different glitch tools, I realised I really loved the endless possibilities that glitch art provides. There's always new tech being made, which brings with it new ways to break it and turn it into art.

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3. What inspires your glitch art creations and influences your unique style?

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When I first started out with digital image manipulation, I was heavily inspired by music. I guess I was trying to achieve similar aesthetics to artists that created art for bands that I liked, such as Peter Saville (Joy Division), Rob Sheridan (Nine Inch Nails) and Muted Fawn (Drab Majesty).

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As I've gravitated more towards glitch art, my visual style is probably influenced a lot more broadly from a wide range of different influences; from 70s/80s sci-fi to 80s/90s video games,  to 80s retro futurism.  But I’m also affected by purely artistic or aesthetic influences too, whether that’s the Bauhaus movement, vaporwave aesthetics, or more esoteric influences such as industrial decor on 1980s Greater Manchester public transportation (a movement I’ve just dubbed GMPTEwave).

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I also try to choose a visual style that I think can best express the narrative that I want to tell. So my style is also influenced by the themes in which I explore.

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4. Speaking of which, could you describe some of the themes or concepts that often appear in your glitch art pieces?

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In a broad sense, a lot of my work explores humanity, society, technology, and the way in which they interact or affect each other. 

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Society has become needlessly complicated post modernization and is only become exponentially more so as we head toward the event horizon. My art is how I make sense of all the nonsense.

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More specific themes I've explored in the past include social masks, false realities created through nostalgia, alienation caused by technology, communicating across the cultural and generational divide, just to name a few. 

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Also, my experiences as an immigrant living in a foreign country is something that sometimes informs my work, as I document the weird and wonderful contrasts I find as an outsider.

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5. What techniques or tools do you use to create your captivating glitch artworks?

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I find that I get the best results when combining techniques or tools. 

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Whether that's databending with hex editors or wordpad++, using sonification in audacity, glitching with CODECs. Or more standard kinds of image manipulation like slitscan or pixelsorting.

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I generally start off doing something destructive with an image and making a lot of iterations of it. I often do a lot of stuff in Processing. I'll then decide which iterations I like and then play around with them in GIMP and try to make a composite image by blending layers together or using layer masks.

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Once I've done that, I'm hopefully at a stage where I've found something that has potential but doesn't quite seem like the finished article. To give it a bit more personality, I'll generally finish it with some colour correction, adding some blur or playing around with G'MIC or with some of the mobile apps like Glitch Lab or Chroma Lab.

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6. What emotions or reactions do you hope to evoke in viewers through your glitch art?

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I guess it's evolved over time. At first I wasn't really making art for anyone but myself. Like I said, it was just about feeding that creative hunger. The actual final artwork was a byproduct of feeding that hunger. It was just an ends to a means. Back then I wasn't really thinking about evoking any emotions.

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I think nowadays, it's always going to vary depending on what I wanted to express when I made each individual work. Ultimately, I feel as though the work has been successful if it prompts the audience to think more deeply about the subject. That is what makes a work meaningful, both to the observer and in a wider context.

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It might sound strange but I wanted to avoid people considering my art from a technical standpoint. I didn't want them coming away focussing on what kind of techniques or programs I’d used. I find that to be a distraction and I wanted the work itself to be at the forefront. I think it's kind of like the joy someone feels when watching a magic show and not knowing how the illusion is done. Peeking behind the curtain too much ruins the fun and the magic.

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7. Have you participated in any exhibitions related to glitch art?

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Yeah.

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I exhibited at fu:bar/expo in 2021 and 2022, Glitch.Art.Br 2021 and 2022, and Glitch Art is Dead in 2022.

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8. Do you offer any workshops or tutorials for aspiring glitch artists who want to learn from your expertise?

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I recently did a workshop for fu:bar/expo (2023) on using GLIC that was a lot of fun.

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It's an area I want to think more about in the future. I started this journey with absolutely no knowledge of the technical side of things. I'm completely self taught. Glitch art is a very accessible medium, and I think the biggest barrier is just knowing where to start. Everything after that is just experimentation.

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So in future, I want to think about how to help people make that jump into creating glitch art.

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Aside from that, my DMs are always open to people who want to ask questions about my process. 

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9. How can people connect with you and acquire your glitch art pieces for their collections?

 

People are always welcome to drop me a message on Instagram (unless you're intending to spam me with messages to be an ambassador for your jewelry brand). I'm always happy to answer questions about my process and I try my best to get back to people as soon as I have some free time. This is just a hobby for me and I have a pretty busy 'real' life, so it's not always possible to respond right away.

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Right now, I don't sell my work. But it's something I'm looking to change in the future. At some point, I plan to start selling prints, t-shirts etc. I'd also like to license my artwork to musicians, content creators etc.

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As for NFTs, that's not something I'm really interested in (so if you see anyone selling my work as NFTs, it's not me so please let me know). I only have limited time, so for me right now, I'd prefer to put my efforts toward something meaningful to me and make it accessible so everyone can enjoy my work; whether that's a print that people can buy and hang on their wall, or providing artwork for musicians as part of a broader creative vision for an album. I think back to all those albums I loved as a teenager and how much the album artwork really helped sell the vision of the music. That's more meaningful to me than some cryptobro owning my work as a piece of data on a Blockchain.

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tokyo_nomad_