In the realm where pixels dance in discord and the old boundaries of the screen are challenged, jonCates emerges as a digital desperado. His canvas? The vast, untamed landscapes of the American Western genre. But rather than riding through these digital plains on horseback, he ventures into this familiar yet foreign territory with a different mission. His quest? To subvert, distort, and ultimately redefine the visual and cultural narratives that have long defined the Western aesthetic.
With each piece, jonCates confronts us with a question as old as the genre itself yet as fresh as the latest software update: What stories do we choose to tell in the technicolor glow of our screens? His art, a symphony of errors, challenges the tales of triumph, conquest, and binary simplicity. Through the deliberate disruption of digital images—those iconic scenes of dusty trails and dueling cowboys—he invites a glitch into our collective memory.
In the hands of jonCates, glitch digital art becomes not just a technique, but a prism. Through it, we view the American Western anew, seeing past its surface to the complexity and contradiction lying beneath. His work, a meticulous orchestration of malfunction, forces the viewer into a confrontation with the unexpected, urging a questioning of the familiar.
How does one craft chaos? For jonCates, it’s an intimate process of dialogue with the digital medium, a give and take of pushing and pulling until the perfect glitch is achieved. Each piece takes on a life of its own, an organic blend of technology and artistic expression. The result is a visual language that speaks in refracted pixels, revealing hidden meanings and new perspectives.
jonCates spoke to 79Au about his curated drop, a series of 3 artworks that tell a story of greed, ambition, and unexpected beauty. Harnessing the motifs of gold and glitch, these works challenge our assumptions and reflect on the constant pursuit of progress in the Western landscape.
“金山 (goldMountain), origin of the immortal Mountain character”
jonCates
Virginia Valenzuela: I love to ask glitch artists how they found the glitch aesthetic. What initially interested you with glitch, and what is your approach to creating the glitch aesthetic in your work?
jonCates: I was about 10 years old when my Dad bought the Commodore 64. C64 was our family’s first computer. Its software could be stored on audio cassette tapes. Computer art, games, and whatever else you wanted to load onto those cassettes was recorded as actual audio signals. Just the same as all the music cassette tapes I used to listen to or that my Dad would record. To me, this was amazing and awesome, because it obviously meant that you could listen to software. You could hear data. It was physical and real. I would take the tapes and play them back as Noise Music on my boombox. I loved that Digital Noise Music and it really felt like the music of the future, which is true, because this is exactly the kind of music I make now.
I define Glitch Art as the Art of Surprise. That means we want to see what happens. We experiment and try things. Sometimes we find a strange place where we want to stay or a peculiar state of near-collapse when a system is about to crash. Or we just do things wrong, in the right way, like playing Commodore 64 software as Noise music when i was a kid. That specific kind of creative misuse of technology for unintended purposes is an intentional mistranslation of the data. Like poetry, we can find surprises in defamiliarizing to see the world we know differently, from a different digital perspective. The now old-school Glitch Art practices of Sonification and Databending are great examples of this approach.
VV: What’s it like working on a quintessentially American genre like the Western while living abroad? I can see lots of traces of the American Western in our media, movies, and politics, but I imagine that it hits differently when you are living outside of the country.
jC: Yes! The Western does hit different out here. Far away from home, living in 台北，台灣 (Taipei, Taiwan), one difference is that it’s more bittersweet…
When my Dad died in 2009, I went looking for him in The Western genre. I wear his cowboy hat that he passed down to me and I immersed myself in classic Western films and TV shows from the 1940s that he grew up with. They comforted me when he was gone.
At the same time I got increasingly troubled by these Westerns. Reflecting on their politics and representations, the white violence of their unrepentant settler-colonial imperialism and racism became stark and unmistakable to me. I realized that, as much as I loved them when I was little–as I would watch them at my Mammaw’s house (my Dad’s Mom)–now I hated what they had to say and how they were saying it. I still love the aesthetics: high contrast black and white film, the old weathered artifacts of early television, and the vast limitless landscapes they create inside those boundaries. But these are dangerous fantasies and fictions. Life isn’t made of high contrast black and white morality. We aren’t actually alone Out West. Stolen land isn’t “ours.” Happy trails don’t last forever…
I started to develop this idea to glitch The Western. I decided I should make this contested place my home sweet home. I don’t mean this ironically. Rather, I mean that I set out to work with The Western as an artist, a self-reflexive and self-critical digitalPunk artist who would rework conventions of the genre in new forms. Red Dead Redemption also came out and I saw The Western again in a very different way. The familiar conventions were the same but the form had changed dramatically. I used to literally drink whiskey and play Red Dead for hours, ambiently listening to both Country and Noise music. So, I decided to make all of this in my own weird ways. I set out on this path, to create the Glitch Western genre which I could use to queer and unsettle assumptions. Glitch Western deconstructs the world of The Western. I carry this home, home on the range in my heart, from the broken Heartland where I was born to a place folks call the ‘Heart of Asia.’
“Francisco López, The Secrets of Glitch”
jonCates
VV: The cowboy is a relatively lonely character in American legends. Yet, you are bringing cowboys to NFTs, which is an inherently social art community. Do you ever experience dissonance between your subject matter and the medium/distribution?
jC: I love this question. I never thought of it this way before!
Crypto, for me, is part of the larger story of technology. From the First Industrial Revolution to today’s Fourth Industrial Revolution, during this Age of AI, the creation of machines, railroads, railway time, cinema, compute powers, glitches, cowgirls, cowboys, cowfolks, and my Glitch Western are all very interwoven… they are not like steps leading to one another, but they are part of the fabric of our lives which redefine things. Nature, as we know it now, is as redefined as we are. We know ourselves and our world, as it is now, through the media of all of these technological changes or disruptions.
Westerners, like me, want to believe that they can do everything by ourselves. That’s impossible. But this fiction does make us strong. We force ourselves to endure. We know we’re not actually alone out there but we take responsibility for ourselves (in the best possible scenarios). We need each other but we do as much as we can on our own.
Our imaginations about ourselves, our rugged individuality, or hyperindividualism, contrast the facts that we all know that we are actually interdependent. Still, our beliefs in ourselves inspire us to continue and have fortitude. We literally dream impossible dreams and make them come true. We do incredible and terrible things because we believe that we can. We make things happen, like technologies, inventions, and innovations that change the world, for better and for worse.
As you say, the NFT space of Digital Art on blockchain is inherently social. We are connected via the ‘digital’ part of Digital Art. PFPs, DAOs, channels, chats, allowlists, and ownership of specific tokens or artworks themselves are all ways that people establish relationships. We belong to these groups together. These are also ways that people create communities and establish shared identities. I think it’s important to remember the context of Crypto during the Pandemic, when we had to be more physically separated, and when we were more together online. Fact is, people look back at those times as a kind of defining moment, even as a kind of golden age, or starting place.
When I introduce myself, I often say “I’m jonCates, from the Internet” because while my family is from Kentucky and I was born alongside the Mississippi in a rivertown called Keokuk, Iowa, I’ve always felt at home online. I encountered net.art when I was at university in the early-mid 1990s on nettime. The net.art movement was just starting. It was both (physically) far away and (digitally) so close. Digital Artists were right in front of me, on screen, in my email inbox all the time, and literally inside my computers. Internet Art of the 1990s was life-changing. I realized that computers and networks were the nexus. Not just a crossroads, networks of compute are an entire invented environment or set of environments, a dynamic ecosystem or set of ecosystems, worlds we build together to create, connect, and share our Art. Amazing.
VV: You’ve created several artworks that interrogate colonialism and the relationship between settlers and natives. Your piece “Francisco López, The Secrets of Glitch” is an interesting one because the subject is someone looking for gold in what is now California, kind of like a settler. But being that he’s Mexican, he is also a descendant of natives, and is a citizen of a country that has been negatively affected by colonialism. Can you tell me more about what drew you to this particular niche in the Western genre?
jC: Yes, absolutely! Since I am not Mexican or Indigenous I’m not trying to speak for anyone but I am pointing out facts. Francisco López is real and his story actually happened. These are historical events that occurred which I wasn’t taught. Many people are told about the so-called ‘discoveries’ of gold in California. How many are told the stories of the mineralogist Francisco López? Just imagine that it is the Spring of 1842, you fall asleep under an oak tree in the afternoon and you dream you are drifting afloat on a river of gold. López awoke under The Oak of the Golden Dream, dug up wild onions & made the ‘discovery’ of gold. When you wake, you dig there and you actually find that gold you just dreamt you were drifting on. Years later they named that tree “The Oak of the Golden Dream,” and we can go there today, to Placerita Canyon, where Francisco López found golden dreams come true. That’s a beautiful story.
I seek out and share these stories as inspirations in my Glitch Western Art because I am glitching The Western itself or what people might assume to be true about ‘The West.’ I hope that as folks have said about my Art, it can be both beautiful and unsettling at the same time.
“金關係，The Secrets of Glitch”
jonCates
VV: Let’s talk about “金關係，The Secrets of Glitch.” In this work, you mention that paintings of hands are some of the earliest known pieces of art. Our hands are one of the characteristics that have set humans apart from the rest of the animal kingdom, so I’m not surprised by this long-standing fascination with them. What specifically drew you to this subject matter, and what made you want to glitch it?
jC: Art Hystories. Like you say, human hands are a long-standing fascination of human art making. Human children draw hands unprompted. We talk about being able to see the “hand of the Artist” when we mean someone’s signature style. Hands were an early easy target to criticize AI Art. People sometimes call AI hands ‘glitches.’ The AI (Artificial Intelligence) or ML (Machine Learning) nonhuman forces are just refining their ability to render ‘realistically’. AI hands aren’t really ‘glitches’ in the sense of intentionally misusing or malfunctioning. Instead, what people see as the ‘glitch’ of AI hands is the fact that the AI/ML is making ‘mistakes.’ People expected different outcomes. People assumed the machines would be cameras and create photo realism auto-magically. What is actually happening is that AI/ML is learning (moving at incredible speeds).
In the Summer of 2022 I wrote that AI Art currently has a quality that we could call ‘ambiguity’. AI Glitch Art combines ambiguity and surprise, enchanting us with unpredictable results, ambiguities that we, as humans, had not yet already envisioned or that we cannot “/imagine” ourselves. AI Art’s ambiguity is a property of nonhuman attempts to create forms that are recognizable to us. We want to see what we ask for because we imagine we are in control. But, again, that is not the true story of technologies from the First Industrial Revolution to today. We might have set the process in motion but we don’t know where it is taking us. Glitch Artists embrace this. Glitch Artists value unexpected outcomes. We explore those strange new directions.
VV: I know you’ve been working with glitch for a long time. What has been one development in the glitch scene that you are really excited about? What is something you miss about OG glitch?
jC: When we have our first encounters it can feel like it’s never happened before because that is when we begin. We all start our journeys at different points, different nodes in this nonlinear network. Wherever we are coming from, the most exciting development for me, is that we can have this conversation. People know what Glitch Art is. People understand the words “Glitch Art” means something. People know Glitch Art is Art. People see that Glitch Art is an important category of Digital Art. Glitch Art is recognizable now and I feel like this is the most fantastic outcome of everyone’s hard work over all these years.
Crypto Art really contributed to that change during the last few years (2020s). Glitch Art didn’t start with Crypto Art but it did change and become massively more well-known. Social media and glitch apps brought people in before that, in the 20TEENs. The work that I did to establish this (starting in the 1990s), and the work that everyone did in the 2000s, built the foundations. For me, I was inspired by JODI, Netochka Nezvanova, and Mez Breeze who were already making this kind of Art. We can also look further back to find our origins. We can look to Jamie Faye Fenton creating Glitch Art in Chicago in 1978. She put on this path in a way that people now understand and she is here online talking to us, celebrating Glitch Art in 2024.
I write these Media Art Hystories and Genealogies to tell people about how we are family. We are a glitch family tree growing in a garden of forking paths. That’s the focus of my new text coming out soon that goes deep into this. We are all part of this ongoing conversation created over the generations. We are extended relations in a chosen family based on our love of glitches. Glitch Art is truly intergenerational.
One of the best moments I have had of this experience is from 2017. Jamie Faye Fenton is dancing in the club at the exhibition event GLITCH ART IS DEAD. She is dancing joyfully to glitch, when a younger Glitch Artist turns to me and asks “What was Glitch Art like when you got started?” I laugh and say “There was no such thing!”
During the late 1990s and early 2000s we were a small tightly-knit group. We were then, as we are still, always already internationally connected via the Internet. We were in specific places (Mexico City, Amsterdam, Chicago) while online. The Internet is real life and takes place in real places. In Chicago I built a Glitch Art community by teaching people that it was possible. A lot happens when a small community grows quickly. People go their different ways or change courses. I try to stay present and open to the unexpected. I’m super excited for this new chapter that we are all collectively writing together in our own nonlinear ways. What happens next is always unknown. What will Glitch Art become? I don’t know, and that’s what I love, because I am here for Glitch Art, the Art of Surprise!
As jonCates continues to glitch the frontier, we are left with a delicious sense of unease and wonder, a reminder that the digital world is constantly evolving, birthing new forms and ideas as it breaks down old boundaries. And in this ever-shifting landscape, jonCates remains at the forefront, pushing the limits and challenging our perceptions. So as we gaze upon his glitched Western landscapes, let us also ask ourselves: What stories do we choose to tell in this new frontier of art and technology? Let jonCates be our guide, leading us deeper into the digital wilderness and showing us that there is beauty to be found in even the most unexpected glitches.
