On Friday May 30th come to Arebyte Gallery, Hackney Wick, for an evening of GLTI.CH Karaoke! Sing with people present and telepresent, near and far in a raucous party at the edge of London.

Invitation to Telepresent People

Can’t make it to the gallery in person? Want to join or even host your own GLTI.CH Karaoke Portal on May 30th? Hook into the real-time live crooning fun via our Tinychat page: http://tinychat.com/gltich (For step-by-step instructions to join us: http://glti.ch/host-a-glti-ch-portal) All you’ll need is an internet connection, a webcam and a set of speakers/headphones loud enough to keep your feet moving and your vocal chords vibrating.

Bio

GLTI.CH is a collaborative mess between Kyougn Kmi and Daniel Rourke that breaches hopeless distances with cultural and technical make-dos. Our work brings people together in glitchy karaoke fests, broken DJ mix-haps, and other kludged-together happenings. Since April 2011 we’ve exposed the course of accidents, temporal lyrical disjoints and technical out-of syncs between, among others, London/Seoul/Kumamoto with Meanwhile Space, Liverpool/London with MercyUK, Amsterdam/Chicago/London with glidottcslashh, Amsterdam/Berlin/Seoul/Manchester as part of ANDfestival, and with The White Building, Hackney Wick. We’ve made the mishmashed world of GLTI.CH through play and we hope you’ll join us.

As they continue to synchronize singers in different time zones, they also do these GLTI.CH Breaks event where DJs located in different parts of the world mix together in a basement, a bedroom, or a pub full of drunks (from New York to Seoul, they’ve done it all).

Last month, glti.ch karaoke opened a show called Tactical Gltiches at the SUDLAB gallery in Italy. They spoke to us about tinkering with Ustream, avoiding crappy bandwith, and how acapella saves the day.

NOISEY: How did Glti.ch Karaoke come about?

Kyoung Kim: We were swapping stories over a few pints—Daniel of his experiences living in Japan, and I of my time in Korea, and got to talking about missing karaoke in these respective countries. Unlike your average karaoke bar in the US or the UK with a conspicuous stage and spotlighting for the singer, karaoke in Korea and Japan generally consists of piling into a room with a bunch of friends, food, and drink and singing in a raucous mix of solos, duets, and group numbers eventually belted while standing on the sofa. It’s more about sharing fun with people than claiming your theatrical moment, and all in all, you get a lot more bang for your buck. For me, karaoke with my sister trumps all, but at the time she was living in Seoul. I confessed to Daniel I’d been getting my karaoke fix by singing YouTube karaoke videos with her over Skype.

Daniel Rourke: We were astounded to find that nobody had given a name to ‘singing karaoke over Skype.” (We did a lot of Google searches). It seemed so obvious to us to hook up two locations, buffer a YouTube rendition of “Livin’ on a Prayer” on both sides of the Atlantic and click “play.” That got us thinking about the possibilities. A good friend works at Meanwhile Space, a non-profit organization in London that transforms empty properties into community projects, and mentioned to us that they were about to start working in an old shoe shop in Whitechapel. The challenge to make karaoke happen in a dusty basement with no internet access at four o’clock in the afternoon spurred us on. We had our eye on the amazing stuff the GLI.TC/H community was doing at the time, and setup our website Glti.ch as a kind of homage to them. The rest is less easy to explain.

How does it work?

Rourke: We have done it a few different ways over the years, but we try and make sure the basic setup is accessible to anyone who wants to repeat it. Using free software like TinyChat or Google Hangouts we link up at least two disparate locations and orchestrate karaoke duets over the internet. YouTube is stuffed full of fan made karaoke versions of pop tunes. If you want to sing it, chances are, somebody has already uploaded it. Then it’s just a case of scrambling to get things to work on both sides.

Kim: To prepare for that scrambling, we test and design a bunch of back-up plans that only work about 30% of the time in attending the actual glitches that manifest. In emphasizing the GLTI.CH of the karaoke, the scramble is something we both warn and invite others to join in on. So how things work is not just contingent on computer software, hardware, cables, and broadband connections, but also on the mix of curiosity, patience, and enthusiasm for making-your-own-fun-through-convoluted-ways that people bring with them to our events.

Rourke: That’s where the “art” of the project begins: a sincere desire to dance with failure. The most exciting elements of the project come out of realizing how many variables there are in organizing something so simple, especially if you have a group of drunk karaoke enthusiasts at one end, say in Liverpool, and an old pizza restaurant in a London shopping mall at the other. The thing that remains stable—getting people to sing duets—is surrounded by all this other stuff that we, as the hosts, have to juggle. Let’s just say we are both very adept at keeping a crowd entertained.

How do you combine DJs in different time zones together?

Kim: A lot of planning. Hosting a party in London on a Friday night means you get a DJ during the work day in San Francisco. So we work with our DJs’ schedules accordingly. There is constant managing and coordinating during the event. We dedicate one computer and the best internet connection in the house to connecting with the DJs with (so far) Skype, but also usually have one or two other computers open with Google Hangouts, again Skype, Tinychat, Facebook, Twitter, Kakao Talk, our phones, smoke signals, pigeon… both for backup and because different people have different preferences for interfaces. We avoid as much as we can set-ups that require others to register or sign up to any new social media outfit, download more software, or buy equipment they don’t have. With the last Breaks, we tinkered with Ustream, and the chat in there ended up being the key for making things go.

What is GLTI.CH Breaks?

Rourke: Originally, it was a project we instigated with Christina Millare. We wanted to take some of the stuff we had learned while glti.ch karaoking and translate it into another format. The result was the first GLTI.CH Breaks event, where we had three DJs—Tramshed, Sahn, and WaxOn—all located in different parts of the world, mix together in the basement of Power Lunches, Dalston. It was a blinding success, apart from the computer crashes, and crappy bandwidth, but that means success to us.

Karaoke is a ridiculous phenomenon. Anyone who has watched the X-Factor will know how kitsch and mediocre karaoke can be. But those of us who love it embrace that, and the social outcome of that kitschy quality is what makes it so wonderful. Our projects inhabit that crappiness, and take it somewhere else, so the technical components of the work also echo the social, and hopefully the two really fuse and amplify each other. With GLTI.CH Breaks I think we stumbled on something like that. DJ mix culture is based around a beloved, but antiquated medium – the vinyl record – that is prone to skip, and jump and crackle and hiss. Ironically though, it is those very qualities that make vinyl perfect as a medium of expression. Building a series of technical, network, temporal and spatial layers on top of that in GLTI.CH Breaks we felt as if the creative element of DJing was heightened even further. Plus, drunk people get really excited when they realize that a DJ based in a bedroom in San Francisco is mixing tunes just for them.

Kim: They get excited by it when sober too!

Enlighten us. What is “social glitch?”

Kim: A phrase we’ve batted around since the beginning. To describe what we’d both been thinking about and working through in our separate research and practices.

Rourke: Social glitches are at the heart of all the projects we have done. They are what you might call, “desirable unintended effects.” We go hunting for them, we try to set up the conditions to make them happen, but we never know when they might arise, or what exactly they might look like. For instance, in summer 2012, we took part in AND Festival, Manchester. We were asked by curator Christina Millare to host a GLTI.CH karaoke event in one of the bedrooms upstairs in a pub. We hooked the room up to our online chat room, and invited anybody with a webcam to join us from wherever they were in the world. The event in Manchester was raucous, full of people singing at the top of their voices from 8 PM until 2 AM. The HD television was lit up all night with new people logging in from London, Seoul, New York, and who knows where. At one point the computer in Manchester completely crashed—mid-chorus—and everyone in the room let out a huge groan of despair. The social glitch came when I logged back into the chatroom, because even though our side of the party had crashed, the participants online were still there singing their hearts out. It was an amazing moment, and the crowd in Manchester whooped with joy and began to sing along, even before I’d had chance to hook the music back in. It was improvized acapella karaoke and a beautiful unintended social effect.

Nadja Sayej would like to sing “More Than A Feeling” with you. Follow her on Twitter – @nadjasayej 

From Friday 24th January we will be running a GLTI.CH Doom WAN Party as part of the Tactical Glitches exhibition. You can join in, play, explode and explore from wherever you are in the world! It’s 20 years since the original DOOM was released. Let’s remember in glti.chy style.

We are running the game through a chain of servers and remote software to create a glti.chy soup for viewers playing at Tactical Glitches. Your involvement will help make that soup even glti.chier – how will the players evolve their Tactics to cope with your onslaught?

Play Instructions

It is SUPER easy to join, but you will need a few bits and pieces. Here is everything you need to get started. Don’t give up:

1. Download the PC or MAC version of Zandronum (a freeware program for playing Doom).
2. Install Zandronum on your system (make a note of exactly where it installs on your computer e.g. C:\Program Files\Zandronum).
3. Download our GLTICH WAN PARTY MAP pack.
4. Copy/move/save the map into the Zandronum directory (e.g. C:\Program Files\Zandronum).
5. You will also need to have the Doom2.wad, or Freedoom equivalent. Unzip this into the same directory at Zandronum.
6. Now, if you open up the Zandronum directory you will see another directory called ‘Doom Seeker’. Go into there and load the Doom Seeker application.
7. First up, it is worth checking your settings are correct. Go into the ‘options’ menu then click ‘configure’.
8. Go to ‘Engines’, make sure the ‘executable’ points to Zandronum (e.g. C:\Program Files\Zandronum\zandronum.exe).
9. Go to the ‘File Paths’ setting. Make sure your Zandronum directory is listed here (e.g. C:\Program Files\Zandronum) – add it if it isn’t.
10. Save and go back to the main Doom Seeker screen.
11. You will now see a long list of servers. Our server is called TACTICALGLITCH, it has a British flag. Scroll down until you find it, or alternatively click the ‘Servers’ column header to arrange the list anti-alphabetically. It should be near the top.
12. Double click the server to join!
13. Press SPACEBAR to jump into action!

At this point Doom will load. You may need to press the ‘ESCAPE’ key, go to the game ‘Options’, ‘Set Video Mode’ and fiddle around with how the game looks until you are happy. Fullscreen at high resolution is obviously the best way to experience a 20 year old gaming legend

Troubleshooting: If you have any problems setting up or connecting let us know in the comments section below.

Controls

(you can change these too in the Options menu)

Mouse = move your head around,
(or you can use the <-left and right-> arrow keys to look around)

W = forward
A = strafe left
S = backward
D = strafe right

CTRL = fire
SPACE BAR = Open doors

T = Type a message and press ENTER to broadcast it!

BONUS: Press the ¬ key on your keyboard (usually under the escape key) and type “name CHOOSEAFUNNAME” to change your player name!

As well as killing innocent players in SUDLAB Gallery, Naples, there are lots of secrets to discover on the map. The monsters WILL KEEP ON COMING! The body count WILL KEEP ON RISING!

Have fun! Invite your friends, and get Tactical.

Massive thanks to curators and collaborators Nick Briz and Rosa Menkman, as well as SUDLAB Gallery, Naples, and Domenico Dom Barra!

• A/NIX (D.O.B. CREW) at the helm in Sudlab (Portici, IT)
• SAHN+JAMES spinning from San Francisco (US)
• DJ WAX ON from Derby (UK)
• TRAMSHED from London (UK)

We’re stoked that our original crew is back and to be joined by A/Nix for this second GLTI.CH Breaks! Working with our kludgy ways they’ll be sending real-time beats and breaks from their various locales to the party-makers and -shakers inhabiting the Sudlab gallery space in Portici, Italy.

Can’t corporeally make it to Sudlab? No problemo! Join us online via the GLTI.CH Ustream page (http://www.ustream.tv/channel/glti-ch-breaks) wherever you are in the universe!

“Technologies come with expectations, but these expectations aren’t always met. An MP3 might skip and crackle. A computer monitor might—for a moment—show shards instead of windows. A website might hiccup on load and scramble its contents. When this happens, we call this unexpected occurrence a glitch. While these moments are rarely anticipated and usually unwelcome, they are at times intentionally provoked. The result of this intentional and creative instigation is what we often call GLITCH ART.” – Rosa Menkman, Nick Briz

Visit the gallery on opening night (January 24th) for a round of GLTI.CH Breaks, followed by a month-long Doom WAN Party in the gallery space!

What is a GLTI.CH WAN Party?

We’ve kludged together free software, dusty hardware, and technical loopholes to rock a global deathmatch Doom WAN party that celebrates, in GLTI.CH style, 20 years of Doom LAN parties. Computer stations installed at SUDLAB in Naples are connected to a remote laptop server in London and a turn-of-the-millenium PC in Seoul, inviting network errors through the front door and rendering gameplay inefficiently possible. Your keyboard movements and rocket launching in the SUDLAB gallery space may not just warm up, but explode computers and servers located across the world! Frienemies can also join in the rusty chainsaw action via the TACTICALGLITCH Doomseeker server.

See you at SUDLAB or ONLINE very soon.

Watch. This. Space!

Below are photos from the event. You can also listen to a brief interview we did with BBC Radio’s Dan Damon for World Update (listen from about 17m 5os in):

We really want to thank everyone who took part and all those who brought this exhibition together, especially Stephanie Seungmin Kim, Heejin Cho and Hyemi Na of ISKAI Art for inviting, curating and welcoming us into the Korean/UK collaborative fold. A big shout out to Sam Meech too, an old friend of GLTI.CH and fellow new media / social mutator.

This might very well be the last time GLTI.CH host a Karaoke event. We have news of this soon, but for now, please enjoy the wondrous smiles on all the GLTI.CH Portal participants’ faces.

Wherever and whenever you are, you can join us for 67 hours of GLTI.CH Karaoke here (= http://tinychat.com/gltich) and have your voice echo through the chambers of Crystallize: New Media Art Lab Korea & UK exhibition!

Here’s the step-by-step guide to plugging into the party–it’s easy and there is NO need to register or share contact/personal information.

BONUS: To choose songs throughout the night, you’ll need a password. Go to http://tinychat.com and click Sign in, like this:

Then enter these details:

Username: gltichportalz
Password: karaoke

Now follow these instructions to sing!!

 1) Go to URL: http://tinychat.com/gltich.

2) When you see this, select GUEST.

3) Enter a USERNAME (it can be ANYTHING and does not have to be your real name). Then click GO.

4) Another window may open regarding Facebook or Twitter announcements. You can just close these windows.

5) You’re in the GLTI.CH Karaoke Room! Now to get your video and mic online…

6) Click the START BROADCASTING button (towards the upper left of your screen).

7) Select your computer’s CAMERA. Then click CONTINUE.

8) Select your MICROPHONE (to test this, make some noise and see which level responds). Click CONTINUE.

9) Select OPEN MICROPHONE. Click CONTINUE.

10) And that’s it! You’re now ready to GLTI.CH KARAOKE! Woohoo!

If you have ANY QUESTIONS in this process, either chat us up via text no the page or email us at mess@gltich!

We continue to GLTI.CH Karaoke at The White Building with nothin’ but BALLADS!

So come and unleash your inner Frankie, Ella, Billie, Julio, Whitney, Patti… onto bleeding hearts around the world at The White Building and/or live online at http://glti.ch/ballads.

It’s our first ever GLTI.CH Karaoke themed session, so more than ever, we are curious: What ballad will YOU sing?

p.s. Don’t forget to translate our start time of 7:30BST to your timezone!

This event will be preceded by The Digital Subconscious I – a forum looking at Art, Technology and Global Society.

Kicking off with KARAOKE at 7pm BST on Sunday the 18th of August

Come and sing your hearts out from The White Building, in our event space – with the Olympic Park and Annish Kapoor looking on in the background.

For this trans-global sing-off, we’ll be celebrating our Indian summer with a slew of hits – from post-revolutionary angst to Rihanna.

Let the GLTI.CH Karaoke Summer Revolution begin!

GLTI.CH Karaoke is preceded by a day of open studios from 12-6 with new work from Sam Ashby, Jesse Darling, Fabienne Hess and Jon Rafman. See here for more detail.

Sing with us in the flesh – 7pm-11.30pm BST August 18th – or live online at our TinyChat hub to join in the fun. Invite yourself and the world via our Facebook Event. See you there/somewhere?