Laimonas Zakas is the man behind Glitchr, once described as "the weirdest thing on Twitter."
You may have heard of fan page or Twitter account, which are bold statements of opposition to the white walls of corporate unity (and the standard HTML protocol) and are filled with coded madness and signs of malfunctions, which resemble a cough or sneeze on a white canvas.
It all started in 2011 when Zakas came across an unusual set of Unicode characters on Facebook. He experimented with it and made his own, forming a fan page that is considered performance art. His Twitter account @glitchr_is equally interesting, filled with Unicode characters that drip, tangle, and explode outside the typical parameters of what is allowed on social media.
As a “social media breaker,” his work can be posted and deleted quickly, leading Zakas to exhibit his work in galleries. This May, you can see his work at Opificio in Rome, where his work will be composed into slides, projecting frenetic distortions of social media while simultaneously bringing his deleted work back to life.
Zakas, who is now studying media technology at Leiden University in the Netherlands, spoke to us about his relationship with Facebook employees, glitch graffiti, and what he thinks about China acquiring his expired domain.
TheCreatorsProject: Can you tell us about your upcoming show at Opificio?
Glitchr: In a nutshell, the show will be about everything cutting edge in social media. A compilation of Glitchr's social media interventions: prints, videos, and an installation/performance that I'm still working on. We'll be there with Lithuanian producer 96wrld, so I'll be collaborating with him on the kickoff and the afterparty.
In some of your exhibitions you take your online work and bring it offline . How much does your work change when it goes from URL to IRL in your eyes?
That's what we're going to do, also in Rome, since most of the stuff I did on Facebook is already gone forever. The only way to present it is offline. Now that it's history, I was planning to emphasize it by printing most of my files on slides and using a slide projector for the presentation (just like Jon Rafman did for his show at The Future Gallery last year).
How did this all start?
In the summer of 2011, I came across some crazy Unicode characters on Facebook, stretching up, down, and everywhere. At the time, I had no idea what they were (I think most people feel the same way today when they first discover Glitchr). But after a bit of research and experimentation, I was already able to do it myself and it was so much fun that I decided to create a page to share everything.
You paint with Unicode, what is the philosophy? Is it performanceart?
My initial idea was to explore how far I could go, beyond the strict limitations of Facebook's setup. It all started with Unicode combinations, but later I discovered that I could incorporate the graphical elements of the website (chat boxes/search bars/captchas etc.) into the posts and in this way distort the whole setup even more. That's what caught the attention of Facebook's developers. It's performance art, as well as net art and site-specific art and even digital graffiti. It takes so many labels.
Your fanpage was deactivated in December 2011? Who helped restore it?
Luckily no, the page only disappeared once from Facebook in December 2011. What I did then was open the cached version of Glitchr on Facebook from Google and to my surprise I saw that it contained all the recent posts with the lists of people who liked/commented on them. So I just filtered the likes of some posts and found at least 10 people, who obviously worked at Facebook (programmers, designers etc). Then I emailed them and most of them replied stating they were willing to help. One of them wrote that my page had been disabled because it had some non-alphanumeric characters or mixed character sets in the title (it was really quite confusing back then). Right after that, Glitchr reappeared on Facebook only with a changed title and category (it used to be in the 'professional sports team' category). The same guy said I would do well with Facebook's "white hat" program (where for every bug reported, they give you $500). However, I never reported any of the bugs I discovered.
How many Facebook employees are fans of your fanpage ? Do they 'fix' your bugs?
I've seen a few dozen for sure, but it's pretty hard to say the exact number. And yes, they do fix bugs. One of Facebook's developers came to my show at the Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center in Vilnius in 2012 and we had a nice chat. He said they were even thinking about inviting me to Menlo Park to "fault" the actual walls of Facebook's headquarters. And yes, they do fix all the bugs on a regular basis. Luckily, I have all the previous posts on file.
Has Twitter left you alone ?
Twitter seems to be okay with what I do there. But maybe because it's limited to text and images, so the most extreme thing I can do there is post Unicode combinations. I also have Tumblr, but the problem with that is that there's too much freedom. So some of my last posts were so long, that for over a year now I can't access my dashboard, it just freezes. I was able to access it once, but it was loading very slowly.
The same thing happens with the 'about' section on Facebook. I messed with it so badly a few years ago that after they changed the admin panel for Facebook pages, I can't edit any information anymore. It just keeps loading. I once let it load overnight, hoping it would load in the morning, but it was still loading the next day... Oh, and in the same unchanging 'about' section, the website is set to glitchr.net, which I registered a few years ago and basically redirected to the Glitchr Facebook page. But when I forgot to renew the domain registration last year, it was immediately bought by some Chinese guy. I have no idea what they're trying to sell there, but it looks ridiculous. And I think they must be getting clicks from Glitchr fans.
You designed a limited-editiont-shirt, will there be something different or similar that will be released?
Oh, yeah, I made 100 white t-shirts in 2012, and then by request I made another 50 black ones in 2013. Both times they sold out in a day or two, and I still get emails asking if I have any left over. So I'm thinking I might make another batch.
What is the latest bug you discovered?
I discovered some nice bugs in Facebook notes. But I'll wait until I get my Macbook Pro back and document them properly (I've been using a really crappy computer for a few months now...even Glitchr doesn't load properly).
How do you feel about the "distinctive mark"?
I love it! Maybe not the badge itself, but the fact that you can stack as many as you want on top of each other and make huge characters. That's really exciting. Even though it's been three years since I started working on it, I still haven't gotten tired of it.
Have you been in Lithuania all this time?
I started it in Lithuania, but then I moved to the Netherlands, where I am now studying Media Technology at Leiden University.
You're not Greek, right?
I have no connection to Greece. The confusion is probably due to my name (which is a common Lithuanian name), but to some it may sound Greek.
