Honey, what happened to my Michael Bolton CD?

Back in 2001 the Whitney Museum mounted a show called Bitstreams that, as you may well imagine, exhibited artwork that was created using some form of digital means. One of the works in the show that has stuck in my mind all these years later, (Well, among several others such as Brian Conley's War! Serbia vs. United States) was a sound piece by the San Francisco collective DISC (I don't know if they are active anymore). The premise for their work was that there are too many compact disks in the world already so they would create their work using existing ones. They would purchase classical and pop cds from bargain bins and then alter the surface of the disk using tape, markers, lubricants, etc. When played back the disk would be a chaotic collage of squeaks, squeals and pops, the original recording completely destroyed. Surprisingly, it was actually quite interesting to listen to, full of elaborate textures and rhythms. (As a side note, some of the most beautiful "music" I have ever heard is when I close my eyes and listen to the clacks, chirps and squelches sitting on a moving Subway car in NYC, a full quadrophonic orchestral symphony, created in real time, and each time unique. Try it sometime!)
This strategy has links with Marcel Duchamp, Musique Concrete, and Abstract Expressionism but updated for the 21st century. This also is connected to work of my own such as the 24 Short Pieces series. In some ways I'm thinking about the glitch, the breakdown of image, the rupture of language, the role of the individual in the age of the digital, and how these issues influence contemporary culture. We've all seen the corrupted JPEGs online that result in colorful abstract mosaic patterns. These accidents are interesting to me, but in my own work I don't want the accident to be the end result, but rather an element in the process. I need to bring my hand into the work, to formulate a structure. The frays at the ends are where things get interesting but at the end of the day we need somewhere to plant our feet.