Dirty New Media is a branch of New Media Art, and its core idea is to contrast popular modern technologies by disrupting their functions instead of idealizing them. A Chicago based dirty-new-media artist, Jon Satrom, deliberately incorporates cyber flaws into his work as seen in one of his videos, QTzrk.
QTzrk was first introduced at the Filtering Failure exhibition at PLANETART in Amsterdam. The opening sequence starts with a Ouick time player showing a shark emerging from under water, but as the shark falls back into the sea, images become distorted. The mouse cursor starts to move on its own, windows pop up, and random folders appear in the background. The shark reappears in the end but in a broken shape. In other words, Ouicktime is rendered dead. Through OTzrk, Satrom shows how easily an everyday software can be inflicted by a sea of glitches, but instead of letting the audience feel defeated by it, he renders technical failure as a generative process. Satrom undermines interfaces, problematizes presets, and bends data. He spends his days fixing things and making things work. He spends his evenings breaking things and searching for the unique blips inherent to the systems he exploits. By over-clocking everyday digital tools, Satrom kludges abandon ware, funware, necroware, and artware into extended-glitchy-systems for performance, execution, and collaboration.
