'Glitch Art' Festival Plugs Into Wicker Park, Bucktown

Artists from across the globe—many of whom only know each other virtually—are gathering together today and through the weekend in Wicker Park and Bucktown.

The reason? A four-day festival of "glitch art." The event, GLI.TC/H 2112, will feature collaborative workshops, exhibitions and performances.

Glitch style, in a broad sense, focuses on exploiting glitches in systems in order to create art. It can take on various forms—audio, video, interactive, performance, software, hardware and everything in between. It usually involves technology, electronics, or new media work in some way.

"We call a glitch any break in any system that catches you off-guard, and it kind of reveals that system," said Nick Briz, one of the festival's organizers. "So maybe there's a system you're not thinking about or not aware of, but when it glitches, all of a sudden you've got to think about it. So it brings to light certain issues that you might not think about."

The GLI.TC/H festival started in Chicago in 2010 as a way to bring the thriving online glitch community together for a physical exhibition.

"The event was kind of a way to bring a bunch of glitch-minded folks together in, sort of IRL real-space," Briz said. "Because this is a sort of really online community, so this is a lot of folks that know each other on the Internet but rarely have a chance to meet and, like, collaborate and share ideas in real life."

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Collaboration is a big part of GLI.TC/H. Unlike most events of its kind, GLI.TC/H's exhibitions consist of work artists create during the festival. Several "Threads," or collaborative workshops, will be held in its three venues throughout the day on Dec. 7 and 8, and the work created during them will be featured in exhibits, performances and showcases in the evenings.

"Rather than a festival that sort of exhibits artwork or whatever, it's more like a chance for the folks that are interested in making stuff to come together to share that stuff with each other," Briz said. "So it's a big emphasis on collaboration and a big emphasis on sharing ideas."

The festival's schedule was put together by a group of about 50 organizer with the expectation that the community will work together to create the actual content and performances.

"It’s weird to think about structured openness, but that's sort of what's happening here," said Jon Satrom, an organizer. "We've put together frameworks and containers for things, and then we all are filling them in together. So, like, the exhibitions in the evening, all of that will be generated from the work that's done during the days and the conversations that are done during the days, but it's really about gathering, in real life, from an online community. So it's emergent, in some capacities."

Although Satrom admits that he finds the unstructured format of the festival slightly unsettling from an organizational standpoint, he says it also makes him excited to see what the community will come up with together.

"This is just an amazingly talented group of weird thinkers," Satrom said. "You never know what to expect."

For more information about workshops, exhibitions, or an overall festival schedule, see GLI.TC/H's website.