Interesting artists! (David Szauder and Nicola Hunter)

I decided to make a compilation of some of the more memorable artists that I have stumbled upon over the course of this module in order to remind myself as well that such works of art exist.

David Szauder Failed Memories 
Personally when researching about glitch art, i chanced upon the works of David Szauder and his Failed Memories series and it was one that i appreciated aesthetically but upon further reading also enjoyed in his approach to the concept behind it.



David Szauder is a Hungarian media artist that utilises computer codes to create digital images and interactive installations. This series "Failed Memory" was inspired by the parallels he saw between human and digital memory. Szauder uses different glitch codes he’s created and applies them to old photographs, usually focusing on their heads and faces. Using image editing software, he then isolates the foreground and background in the images, controlling the composition more than if he were to employ classic databending techniques such as adjusting the file data with a hex editor.

“Our brains store away images to retrieve them later, like files stored away on a hard drive. But when we go back and try to re-access those memories, we may find them to be corrupted in some way,”
- David Szauder. 

He states that when our memory fails us, we fill in the gaps with self-generated memory fragments that are often biased/corrupted.

This art work struck me as being visually striking but also extremely relatable in context. As someone who has a horrible memory and frequently forgets, my physical memory fails me and in turn the ideas that i come up with to fill in the gaps are often wrong or extremely biased. In terms of digital data, this also brings to light the question of how permanent/impermanent these data are. Because data does not take up physical space but rather is rather intangibly stored, we often actually forget that they exist. As such, i sometimes question the value of the data i store digitally and if it would actually be more valuable if i were to physically store it in some ways in paper or on notebooks, but then i remember the pile of papers and old notes i had stored away in the corners of my rooms collecting dust and then I'm not so sure anymore. 

Nicola Hunter "Raising the Skirt"

Although not strictly a digital artist, I came across her works when researching for our first exhibition and was greatly intrigued. 

Her works include the performance piece "Motherfucker" and the feminist project "Raising the Skirt". "Raising the Skirt" can also be read as a participatory artwork given how it started as a workshop but now encourages women internationally to contribute as well.