MAX CAPACITY
Press

Jansson Mathias: Everything I Shoot Is Art

LINK Editions

Year
2011
Publication
LINK Editions
Author
Mathias Jansson

Interview with Max Capacity and Iman Moradi by Swedish art critic Mathias Jansson. Originally published in Digimag Issue 61, February 2011 as "The fine art of glitches cheats and errors"; reprinted in the LINK Editions book Everything I Shoot Is Art (Brescia, 2012) at pp. 109–115. Full book PDF freely available via Monoskop.

Jansson Mathias: Everything I Shoot Is Art

  • Publication: Digimag, Issue 61 (February 2011) — reprinted in Everything I Shoot Is Art, LINK Editions, Brescia, 2012 (archived on Monoskop)
  • Original title: “The fine art of glitches cheats and errors”
  • Author: Mathias Jansson (Swedish art critic and researcher)
  • Date: 2011-02-01 (original Digimag publication)
  • Book pages: pp. 109–115
  • Type: Book / Interview

Summary

Interview with MAX CAPACITY and Iman Moradi by Mathias Jansson. First published in Digimag, Issue 61 (February 2011) under the title “The fine art of glitches cheats and errors,” then reprinted in Jansson’s collected book Everything I Shoot Is Art (LINK Editions, Brescia, 2012) at pp. 109–115.

The interview is structured as a joint conversation: Jansson first interviews Iman Moradi on glitch art theory, then turns to Max Capacity for a practitioner’s perspective. Four images from the series Analog Video Glitch (2011) are reproduced on p. 114 with the caption “Images courtesy the artist.”

Max Capacity bio (as printed, 2011)

“Max Capacity, currently living in Santa Cruz, California, is an artist and illustrator often concerned with retro-style graphics, pixels and glitches. His work is well represented on Flickr and Tumblr.”

Co-interviewee: Iman Moradi

Senior Lecturer at the University of Huddersfield; leading theorist of Glitch Art; editor (with Ant Scott, Joe Gilmore & Christopher Murphy) of Glitch: Designing Imperfection (Mark Batty Publisher, New York, 2009). Author of the PhD thesis Glitch Aesthetics (2004), which introduced the influential “pure-glitch / glitch-alike” categorization.

Interview topics (Max Capacity responses)

  • On discovering glitch art: Found Flickr glitch groups after uploading his own captures — realized others cared about glitches too. Had been “doing this stuff at home in my garage or bedroom for a while.”
  • On what he looks for: Hardware glitches; NES cartridge failures; scrambled cable TV. “There’s a certain sort of nihilism and entropy present in glitch art that I think is relevant these days. Decay can be beautiful in its own way.”
  • On source material: NES is the constant go-to. Especially “NES games attached to movie franchises, or ports of arcade games.”
  • On pure vs. intentional glitch: Started with accidentals, then began manufacturing them. “The difference between a cable accidentally being plugged into the wrong place, or purposefully being plugged into the wrong place is mostly academic to me.” Satisfies “my appetite for destruction and my creative drive at the same time.”
  • On the glitch art scene: Mostly experienced through Flickr and Tumblr; rarely in physical art spaces. Draws inspiration from video art of the 70s and 80s. “I think it was the scrambled pornography and glitched Nintendo cartridges that really made me do it.”

Works Mentioned

  • Analog Video Glitch series — 4 images reproduced on p. 114 (2011)

Exhibitions Mentioned

(none)

  • PDF via Monoskop
  • Publications/Jansson_Mathias_Everything_I_Shoot_Is_Art_2012.pdf (local archive)

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