Night of the Living Glitch Art Interview: Alex Kmett

Alex Kmett:

"I have been making noise and experimental music for 13 years (mostly under the name Zombie Bite, but a few more projects as well), and other brutist extreme music and art for a bit longer. As Indigenous Futurist, I have mixed feelings of wonder and disdain for both modern dominant culture & advanced technologies, which manifests in the form of desolate and bleak electronic aesthetics. Natural glitch to me represents the failures or technology and "modernity," the power that the dominant culture is giving up in exchange for dependence on it. I think of my expressions, through harsh noise & glitch, to be acts of social resistance against "modernity," the glorification of technology, and "professional" abstract art."

Q1.
You describe yourself as an Indigenous Futurist. How would you describe your relation to technology as someone who self-identifies as such?

A1.
Indigenous Futurism is about adaptability, while also asserting the validity of traditional Indigenous epistemologies. All too often, Indigenous identities are looked at through the frame of the past, as if we no longer exist if our image at any given doesn't match some deeply ingrained stereotype. Indigenous futurism asserts our collective present and our dreams for the future... and there is a lot to be said of dreaming in our cultures. Adoption of technological innovations in nothing new in Indian Country, and sometimes our languages can also accommodate it. I often tell my Ojibwe language students that our language is very advanced. We have physics concepts than can be expressed in a single syllable within a word. Because of the structure of our language, we have words for modern technology, like laptop. We are using technology to record and create online "talking" dictionaries and other repositories of information. In a way you can say we're utilizing modern technology to hold on to the language and memories of our elders and ancestors to carry them forward into the future. But there's no way like the old way.

Q2.
How do you strike this sense of balance between the present, perceptions of the future, and what modern society might call an "ancient past?"

A2.
Time itself is all about perception, and our perception as human beings is limited. I argue that time is cyclical, and that by looking to our "past," we very well may be looking to our future. Languages native to this hemisphere are several thousands of years older than English, which has maybe 1,400 years of development and is a hodge-podge of other world language families. Native languages by contrast, contains several thousand years worth of observations of the world around us. In this way, as I mentioned before, our languages are very advanced. There is an incredible breadth of knowledge there, it is not primitive in any sense. We used this knowledge since time immemorial to survive, in balance. By contrast, the modern technology and machinery we see in use today buys us comfort, convenience, and information at our fingertips, but at what cost? Rapid deforestation, depletion of what is viewed simply as "resources," irradiated oceans, mass extinctions, an forfeiture of real-world knowledge. Even for production of digital arts, what minerals have been stripped from the Earth and who has had to suffer as a result to create the machines we're using to produce this nice, leisurely event you're attending? Call me a pessimist if you must, but I see this tradeoff of reliance on technology for comfort to be something that can easily destroy us, so I fall back on the traditions, culture, and spirituality of my people, what has enabled us to survive as a distinct people for thousands of years of interaction with our natural environment, and a few hundred years of interaction with systems aimed at destroying us.

Q3.
So how do you reconcile this perceived threat of technology with your current use of it?

A3.
Like most people reading this, I was born into a world immersed in technology. I grew up appreciating all kinds of digital media, and too some of my inspiration for digital aesthetics comes from cyberpunk media and sitting around reading old copies of 2600 as a teenager at a friend's house. Arguments that one can't be critical of techno-reliance and still use it are analogous to arguments that one can't drive a car if they protest oil. It is always possible to reimagine our future, and to critique our present. The message is not void by it's method of delivery. Absolute rejection of technology will not advance my work in the revitalization of Anishinaabe language and culture, and would only stifle the message I am delivering here and now, so I utilize it for the time being while trying to live my life in a balanced way that carries these teachings.

Q4.
Why glitch? How does it fit in to this whole perspective? I notice your work is particularly abstract.

A4.
All too often, I feel futurism and cyberpunk envisions some kind of inclusive "techno-utopia," which to me just looks scary. It's not the utopia that I envision. As I'm sure you've gleaned from this interview, "techno-utopia" is hardly something in my vocabulary. Although technology brings so many people together, it seems to me to also be a great divider and destroyer. In a nutshell, it is very imperfect. Glitches are the unintended byproducts of these imperfections and may manifest in various forms, depending what kind of equipment is being employed. One might view the aforementioned negative consequences of "technological advancement" and industry to be glitches, as I hope that mass extinction of biodiversity was never an intention. Natural glitch to me represents the failures of technology and "modernity." The deconstructed digital images that I present here, are essentially stylized representations of these failures on a larger scale. The visual focus is on the relative "beauty" of the glitched data itself, rather than trying to portray something definite with the use of glitch aesthetic that glorifies technology.

Q5.
Thank you for you time Sir.

A5.
Miigwech gegiin!