objkt talks to: Chepertom
“I like this idea to use the weaknesses of your medium to show that it’s not undestructable, that it’s really fragile, that it can be attacked, corrupted.”
‘Leaving New York’“Actually the art school I went to is called La Cambre in Brussels and it's really traditional. I was in a drawing section, so I was more into drawings and prints at some point. But it's still really close to drawings, I think.
I don't draw that much today and at the time I was really interested in it, but I couldn't find the right process to talk about the thing that I was living. And I've always been on the internet, I've always looked at videos, at memes and GIFs and being part of the Internet culture. But I didn't perceive that as art at the time because it was really more into traditional things at the school.
But at some point I started to do montage, like some basic video montage. And it speaks to me, the montage thing, it's just something that you feel that it's the right medium. It was natural for me to try new things with it. I've always been into films and video, YouTube, and the way people can create new ways of interacting and communicating.
So I just started to learn a bit more about the compression of video because as a painter or a drawer, you know what you're using, you have your tools and you see what's happening in your hands. It's really straightforward. But when you work with a computer, it's really difficult to understand what's really happening on like binary, to try to understand what's happening behind the screen. I think my first curiosity was about that. What is happening when I encode several videos together and what is happening when I choose all the parameters of the compression.
Since my dad is working as a physicist in signal treatment, he really helped me to understand that because it can be really complex, the way that video creation tools work. For example, if you take your phone and you just take a video of, like, pretty much anything, it's going to apply a lot of different process to the video so that it's not too big on your phone and so that you can send it easily. I don't know, like on social media. So the idea is that there are so many tools inside of the video compression that you can try to play with them. And at some point I just realized that I could use them just to make the perfect compression and to have my video viewable for YouTube or anything.
But I also discovered that people were using the same tools to kind of shift the results and to play with the corruption and to play with breaking things inside of the compression. And that was amazing for me because it was pretty much fitting with the idea that I have about art in general, that it's always about deconstructing things, and it's always about not thinking that your art is going to be eternal, but thinking that it will live and change and be something. At the end, it will be nothing.
And I like this idea to use the weaknesses of your medium to show that it's not undestructable, that it's really fragile, that it can be attacked, corrupted. And I think it's more sincere to show that, to show this version of the work, to try to show the fragilities. I was just discovering things and curious about how things work.
Then I started to find that there were so many scripts and so many people working on that and actually breaking things and sharing them online. So it was a real thrill to discover all that because it felt a bit like I was discovering things on my own first. Because I was part of the drawing section, I was showing a lot of things to my professors, but they couldn't really grasp what I was trying to make because they were more into physical things and they didn't know much about the technicalities of videos. So it took me a while to find the right communities and to find the right space to share that.
It was kind of a weird journey where I started to lose interest in drawings and even painting. I was also painting a bit at the time. But I think there is something that just stood with me is of course the references, the aesthetics that I like and so all the art history classes. All of this is still really important for me, like the references that I have and that I can use to find connection between Glitch art and maybe abstract expressionism, for example.
I think there are a lot of people that are digging inside of these techniques that are really finding singular artifacts and singular ways of creating abstraction. It's really like a contemporary way of using the technology with its weaknesses to find a more singular version of the image that you see on the everyday life.
Sometimes I teach some other artists or even collectors how to do glitch. And one of my first advices is to make backups because if you corrupt the file and you play with it, it's cool. But if you don't make backups as soon as you corrupt it, it's really hard sometimes to go back in time and to get the original version again. It's going to be like a real pain in the ass if you want to do this.
If, for example, you've done data bending or destroying the data will always lead you to some corrupted version. So sometimes I don't make backups just to feel the loss. What I'm really doing is erasing things and it doesn't have any consequences. If I don't like, if I make backups, I can just go back and it's not worth the same thing. I would say if you don't make backups, you really feel like maybe you have a great version and you corrupt it again and it's not that good anymore and you feel like something happened, you just lost something.
It's one of the feelings that is inspiring to me when I create, because it's one of the things I'm gravitating around, this idea of Entropy and destruction, loss and corruption in itself. I think it's a great reminder that, as I said before, nothing is eternal. When you get this sensation of loss, it's, I don't know, kind of a grieve in a way. It's always important for me to go back to that feeling, to understand what I'm really doing, when I erase things, when I curb them. And again, it's about being sincere because if you erase something and you still have a copy of it, it feels like you're a bit lying to yourself, to me, but it's just me, like it's the way I consider glitching.
I think I didn't picture myself as a collector before starting to put my own work and sell them. And at the time it was just like super easy. You just get the credit to buy another work and you're just like close to other artists and at the time it was more of a bull market.
It was easier for artists to be able to spend a bit of money to just buy a few things and it's still something that I do. I love to collect from a lot of different blockchains actually. I think it's always been part of the game. As you said, it's a way to give back and also it's a way to not only curate but also put the money where your mouth is at. I think it's always a pleasure when I see someone buying the stuff that I do and I enjoy the work of that artist. It's really striking when you see someone that you consider being a great artist just collecting your work.
So it's something that I love to do as well, like to be able to showcase the work of someone and also to be able to own part of it. And it's really difficult for me to just sell the work afterwards. So most of the time I just keep them and I don't believe that it's going to be like a long investment or something that I can get a lot of money out.
I'm not thinking about these consequences. I'm mostly thinking that it's kind of my duty and it's something that I felt from the beginning on Tezos, people create huge editions and people get into them and feel part of a huge project.
I've seen a lot of really interesting ways of putting people inside of the work and to be able to share it to a lot of people. And I think it's always a good exercise as well to be able to consider the work of others. I think it's part of the deal, I would say, to buy the work of other artist and to be able to collect everything.
I tend to look less at my collection these days. But I think I need to find a way to display them because one of the main issue that I see in the NFT world is we don't have yet much ways of reactivating a work. Sometimes it's more about like you put it on social media and it has some kind of lifetime where people are interested in it and then it kind of falls into the void of the new content, the new work, the new thing. And so I think as a creator I try to think about ways to make the art relevant again and to make it pop again, not only just putting new work together and just consuming the work.
I would love to find a way to do this properly, to make some exhibitions, even if it's like virtual exhibition, I think it's a great way to start to understand all the creation ideas and questions.”
