Ο Laimonas Zakas is the man behind the Glitchr, who once was characterized as "the most curious thing on Twitter".
You may have heard of it fanpage on Facebook or his Twitter account, which are bold statements of opposition to the white walls of the corporate unit (and the standard HTML protocol) and are full of coded madness and signs of dysfunction that resemble coughing or sneezing on white canvas.
It all started 2011 when Zakas fell on an unusual set of Unicode characters on Facebook. He experimented with this and made his own, forming a fanpage that is considered artistic action (performance art). Twitter's @glitchr_is just as interesting, filled with Unicode characters that drip, confuse and explode outside the standard parameters of what is allowed in social media.
As “social media breaker,” his work can be posted and deleted quickly, resulting in Zakas exhibiting his work in galleries. This May, you can see his work at Opificio in Rome, where his work will be composed on slides, showing frantic distortions of social media and at the same time bringing his deleted work back to life.
Zakas, who now studies media technology at Leiden University in the Netherlands, told us about his relationship with Facebook employees, "glitch graffity" and what he thinks China got its expired domain .
TheCreatorsProject: Can you tell us about your upcoming show on Opificio;
Glitchr: In short, the show will have to do with what's pioneering in socialmedia. Recording of Glitchr's interventions on social media: prints, videos and an installation / interpretation on which I still work. We will be there with the Lithuanian producer 96wrld, so I'll have one cooperation and with him both at the opening and the after party.
In some of your reports you get it online your work and you bring it offline. How much your work changes from URL is done IRLin your eyes;
This is what we will do, also in Rome, since most of the things I did on Facebook are already lost forever. The only way to present them is offline. Since they have now passed into history, I planned to emphasize them by printing most of my files on dia slides and using a slide projector for the presentation (just like Jon Rafman did for his presentation of his show at The Future Gallery last year).
How did all this work?
In the summer of 2011, I fell on some mad Unicode characters on Facebook, which stretched up, down and everywhere. Then, I had no idea what this was (I think most people feel the same today when they discover Glitchr for the first time). But after a little research and experimentation, I was already able to do it myself and it was so fun I decided to create a page to share everything.
You paint me Unicode, what is philosophy? It's about performanceArticle;
My original idea was to explore how far I could go beyond the strict limitations of the Facebook setup. It all started with Unicode combinations, but later I discovered that I could embed the graphical elements of the web page (boxes conversations/ search bars/ captchas etc) in the posts and in this way to distort the whole setup even more. This is what also caught the attention of Facebook developers. It is performance art, as well as net art and site-specific art and even digital graffiti. It gets so many labels.
Η fanpage deactivated in December of 2011? Who helped to restore it?
Fortunately no, the page only disappeared from Facebook once in December 2011. What I did then was to open the cached version of Glitchr on Facebook from Google and to my surprise I saw that it contained all the recent posts with lists of people doing like/ commented on them. So I just filtered the likes of some posts and found at least 10 people who apparently worked at Facebook (developers, designers etc). I then emailed them and most of them responded saying they were willing to help. One of them wrote that my page had been disabled because it had some non-alphanumeric or mixed character set characters in the title (it was quite confusing then). Soon after that, Glitchr reappeared on Facebook only with a changed title and category (it used to be in the 'professional sports team' category). The same guy said I would do well with Facebook's "white hat" program (where for every bug reported, they give you $500). However, I never reported any of the bugs I discovered.
How many of his employees Facebook is her fancy fanpageyou? Do they 'fix' your bugs?
I've seen a few dozen things, but it's hard enough to say the exact number. And yes, of course, they fix the bugs. One of the Facebook programmers came to my show at the Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center in Vilnius, 2012 and we had a nice chat. He said they even thought to call me at Menlo Park to "cause malfunctions" to the actual walls of Facebook's headquarters. And yes, they fix all the bugs on a regular basis. Fortunately, I have all the previous posts recorded.
The Twitter has left you quiet?
Twitter seems to be okay with what I do there. But perhaps because it is limited to text and images, so the most exorbitant thing I can do there is to post Unicode combinations. I also have Tumblr, but the problem with this is that there is a lot of freedom. So some of my last posts were so big that for over a year now I can not access my dashboard, it just freezes. Some time I managed to approach it, but it was too late.
The same goes for the 'about' section on Facebook. I teased her so badly a few years ago that after they changed the Facebook pages admin panel, I can't edit any information anymore. It just keeps loading. I once let it load overnight, hoping it would load in the morning, but it was still loading the next day... Oh, and in the same unchanged 'about' section, the website is set to glitchr.net, which I had listed a few years ago and basically redirected to Glitchr's Facebook page. But when I forgot to renew the domain registration last year, it was immediately bought by some Chinese. I don't even know what they are trying to sell there, but it looks ridiculous. And I think they should take clickGlitchr fan art.
You designed one limited-editiont-Shirts, will there be something different or something similar to be released?
Oh, yeah, I made 100 white T-shirts 2012, and then on request 50 2013 XNUMX. Both of them were sold out in one or two days, and I still get an email asking if I'm having a surplus. So I think maybe I can make one more batch.
What is the error you discovered lately?
I discovered some nice bugs in Facebook's notes. But I will wait until I get my Macbook Pro back and document it correctly (I've been using a really useless computer for a few months ... and Glitchr is not loading properly).
How do you feel about "distinctive sign";
I love it! Perhaps not the mark itself, but the fact but the fact that one can stow what one wants on top of each other and make enormous characters. This is really exciting. Although three years after I started working on it, I still have not been bored.
Have you been in Lithuania for all this time?
I started in Lithuania, but then I moved to the Netherlands where I am now studying Media Technology at Leiden University.
You are not Greek, right?
I have nothing to do with Greece. Confusion is probably due to my name (which is a common Lithuanian name), but to some it may sound Greek.
