Academia.eduAcademia.edu

Outline

Title
Abstract
Conclusions
Introduction
Questions of Intentionality
Material Markers
References
All Topics
Art
Digital Art

Glitch Theory: Art and Semiotics (Introduction)

Profile image of michael betancourtmichael betancourt

2023, Glitch Theory: Art and Semiotics

Abstract

Introduction from the book Glitch Theory: Art and Semiotics. Glitches and Glitch Art illuminate the unseen assumptions, ideology of dialectical thinking, and role of established knowledge that shapes as well as determines our engagement with the world. Betancourt builds on the role of perception in guiding these interpretations to explore the possibilities offered by glitches for addressing digital media. Not confined to esoteric questions of semiosis, this study presents an expansive model of ambivalence and ambiguity whose ramifications address how initial assumptions and beliefs create meaning. Tracking glitches across technical media old and new, and moving from early abstraction’s attempts to visualize a transcendental spiritualism through to contemporary AI generated art and media, Betancourt describes how glitches are not just technical failures but products of the instabilities between human interpretations and autonomous machinic operations that create a ‘discursive aesthetic’ guided by cultural fantasies of digital media’s immateriality that idealize it as a perfect, transcendent form. (This is a low resolution preview. If you find it useful or interesting, please consider buying a copy.)

Related papers

Instrumentalising the Accident. Critical Methodologies in Glitch Art.
Anna Blumenkranz
View PDFchevron_right
“Investigate the misusage of technology as a gesture of freedom”: Glitch Dysfunction in New Media Art and Art Education
Robert Sweeny

Visual Arts Research, 2020

Digital dysfunction in contemporary new media art can be used to outline possibilities for productive and even radical applications of the digital in art educational practices. In this paper, I will analyze the work of a number of contemporary new media artists who use the motif of the glitch. I will provide suggestions for pedagogical approaches that relate and respond to these specific artistic tactics: the provocative, playful, and probing ways that new media art deals with various forms of dysfunction. Art educators at many levels can learn much about how digital technologies can be used to make art by studying how digital technologies fail.

View PDFchevron_right
Critical Glitches and Glitch Art
michael betancourt

Hz, 2014

same time establishing the glitch as a definitional precondition: it is a recovery of technical failure as the formal basis for media practice. These mechanical interruptions of the typical functioning of digital media-whether in audible or visible forms-have been employed in electronic media for decades (Nam June Paik's video processing effects initially appear in technical repair manuals for television receivers produced by RCA in the 1950s. 1) The aura of the digital's separation of the physical and digital dimensions of digital art from consideration is especially pronounced with media works; user-audiences for these technologies rarely become concerned by the interruptions posed by technical failures: just as the aura of the digital serves to strip the physical dimensions of media from consideration, the identification of these digital artifacts as 'glitches' equally insures that they vanish from consciousness, naturalized as momentary (transient) failures in an otherwise functional system. The theorization of 'glitches' in media art function as an index for the intersection of earlier Modernist aesthetic and theoretical priorities with more contemporary concerns with digital capitalism and its ideology produced in/through media. The fundamental issue for this analysis and its object, the glitch, is the status of the audience; in examining these issues, this analysis returns to a set of underlying

View PDFchevron_right
Research Art: glitches, poetics, typography and the aura of the digital
michael betancourt

2021

This is a low resolution preview of a book. If you find it useful or interesting, please consider buying a copy. “Research Art: glitches, poetics, typography and the aura of the digital” is about margins and marginality in the art world as sources for critical engagements in the studio. It builds on the pioneering work of critical theorist and artist Michael Betancourt, who has used glitches as an integral part of his art since the early 1990s. This book presents his thinking about his own work linking theory and practice in a larger context of conceptual and theoretical concerns that are neither a statement of intentions, nor merely a subjective series of claims about past accomplishments. With 21 illustrations in full color, this book discusses his digital glitch movies, typoetry, abstract photography, and the Instaglitch series as direct examples of the connections between theory and practice, illuminating his proposal for “Research Art” as a domain equal to the “Business Art” familiar from exhibitions in the gallery-fair-museum network. Polemical and often challenging, it explores the role of expectations in making and interpreting art from the vantage point of the studio, rather than as a critic or historian, arguing that “Research Art” is the evolution of the critical position developed by Conceptual Art and Situationalism as the avant-garde program in art came to an end, an adaptation to the changed Contemporary reality of AI, globalization, and digital technology—an oppositional art made in the shadows of digital capitalism.

View PDFchevron_right
Error / Glitch / Noise: Observations on Aesthetic
Charu Maithani

Sarah Cook (Ed.) INFORMATION (Whitechapel Documents of Contemporary Art). London and Cambridge, Mass.: Whitechapel and MIT Press., 2016

We see the world through different forms of projectionscinema, digital, print and also nature (extending Feuerbach's notion of God being the outward projection of human nature).

View PDFchevron_right
Of Glitch and Men: The Place of the Human in the Successful Integration of Failure and Noise in the Digital Realm
Greg Hainge

Communication Theory, 2007

Linking the concept of high-fidelity reproduction to histories of representation, we suggest that the former contradicts widely held beliefs about the nature of representation throughout the 20th century. Through analyses of advertisements for certain sound reproduction technologies at different points in history, however, we propose that a shift is taking place that complicates the high-fidelity ideal. This ideal is complicated further still in the musical genre known as glitch, but the full extent of this problematization can only be apprehended through an analysis of the material ontology of the technology used to create this music. Digital technology thus only appears to surpass all previous standards of high-fidelity reproduction because it displaces a human perceptive faculty into the technological apparatus itself.

View PDFchevron_right
Mechanical Drawing Machines and the Glitch – Visualizing Technology through its Failures
Andres Wanner
View PDFchevron_right
Glitch Moment(um)
Rosa Menkman

In this book, Rosa Menkman brings in early information theorists not usually encountered in glitch’s theoretical foundations to refine a signal and informational vocabulary appropriate to glitch’s technological moment(um) and orientations. The book makes sense of recent glitch art and culture: technically, culturally, critically, aesthetically and finally as a genre. The glitch takes on a different form in relation to noise, failure or the accident. It transitions between artifact and filter; between radical breakages and commodification processes. Menkman shows how we need to be clearer about the relationship between the technical and cultural dimensions of glitch culture. Honing in on the specificities of glitch artifacts within this broader perspective makes it possible to think through some of the more interesting implications of glitched media experience. Using a critical media aesthetic orientation, Menkman addresses the ongoing definitional tensions, paradoxes, and debates that any notion of glitch art as a genre must negotiate, rather than elude.

View PDFchevron_right
We can be heroes: On the nature of glitches in glitch art [English]
Matthew Austin
View PDFchevron_right
Interpret: Glitch Redefined
Tom Barwick

Compressed version of paper for publication in Varoom OCT 2014. Varoom is the journal of the UK Association of Illustrators. Over the last decade ‘glitch’ culture has emerged in art and music as creatives explore the possibilities of harnessing error in digital tools. By describing his own creative experimentation, Thomas Barwick demystifies the ‘magic’ of software to help us rethink materials and forge a creative discipline of error

View PDFchevron_right

References (117)

  1. Glitch Art, works by Contemporary Glitch Artists:
  2. Suture Blue, trying to find a pattern (2020);
  3. Aleksandra Pieńkosz ale.png, fingerprint_1.png (2022);
  4. Shrine (Sky Goodman and Jim Jam), untitled installation (2018);
  5. Sabato Visconti, # 20 Images Adrift (2014), photograph of model Hale Hagen, processed with the Pixel Drifter pixel-sorting script by Dmitriy Krotevich;
  6. Kaspar Ravel, Never Send A Human To Do A Machine's Job (2017); Used with permission of the artists.
  7. REFERENCES
  8. Polan, D. The Political Language of Film and the Avant-Garde (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985) pp. 36-40.
  9. Tarasti, E. "The semiotics of A. J. Greimas: A European intellectual heritage seen from the inside and the outside" Sign Systems Studies vol. 45, no. 1/2 (2017) pp. 33-53.
  10. 3 Betancourt, M. The Critique of Digital Capitalism (Brooklyn: Punctum Books, 2016) pp. 153-190.
  11. Eco, U. A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979) p. 233.
  12. Deleuze, G. Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1989) pp. 25-26.
  13. Piaget, J. La psychologie de l'intelligence (Paris: A. Cohn, 1947).
  14. Bogdan, C. The Semiotics of Visual Languages (Boulder: East European Monographs, 2002) pp. 10-12.
  15. 8 Ziehen, T. Lehrbuch der Logik auf positivistischer Grundlage mit Berücksichtigung der Geschichte der Logik (Bonn: A. Marcus & E. Webere Verlag, 1920).
  16. Eco, U. A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979) pp. 232-233.
  17. Betancourt, M. "The 'Intentional Function' in Still and Moving Photographic Images" Semiotica: Journal of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, vol. 246 (2022);
  18. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/sem-2020-0065
  19. Eco, U. A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979) pp. 232-233.
  20. Eco, U. A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979) p. 216.
  21. Paul, C. and Levy, M. "Genealogies of the New Aesthetic" Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation and Design ed. David M. Berry and Michael Dieter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) p 31.
  22. Flusser, V. Into the Universe of Technical Images trans. Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
  23. Danto, A. After the End of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
  24. Scott, F. "Networks and Apparatuses, circa 1971: Or, Hippies Meet Computers" Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia ed. Andrew Blauvelt (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2015) pp. 103-105.
  25. Manon, H. and Temkin, D. "Notes on Glitch" World Picture 6: WRONG (2011); DOI: http://worldpicturejournal.com/WP_6/Manon.html, par. 5.
  26. Manon, H. and Temkin, D. "Notes on Glitch" World Picture 6: WRONG (2011); DOI: http://worldpicturejournal.com/WP_6/Manon.html, par. 29.
  27. Cloninger, C. "GltchLnguistx: The Machine in the Ghosts / Static Trapped in the Mouths" Glitch reader(ror) ed. Nick Briz, Evan Meaney, Rosa Menkman, William Robertson, Jon Satrom, Jessica Westbrook (Unsorted Books: 2011) p. 33.
  28. Cascone, K. "The Aesthetics of Failure: 'Post-Digital' Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music" Computer Music Journal vol. 24, no. 4 (Winter, 2000) pp. 12-18.
  29. Applegate, M. "Glitched in Translation" Amodern no. 6 (July, 2016); DOI: http://amodern.net/article/glitched-in-translation/
  30. Popper, F. Art of the Electronic Age (New York: Abrams, 1993) pp. 179-181.
  31. Ernst, W. "There is no 'Error' in Techno-logistics" Miscommunications: Errors, Mistakes, Media ed. Maria Korolkova and Timothy Barker (London: Bloomsbury, 2021) pp. 79-92.
  32. 26 This expanded scope is apparent from studies of "glitch" such as Legacy Russell's Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (Verso, 2020) or Nathan Allen Jones' Glitch Poetics (Open Humanities Press, 2022).
  33. Briz, N. Thoughts on Glitch Art 2.0 (December 20, 2015) https://nickbriz. com/thoughtsonglitchart/
  34. O'Doherty, B. Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, Expanded Edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
  35. Manon, H. and Temkin, D. "Notes on Glitch" World Picture 6: WRONG (2011); DOI: http://worldpicturejournal.com/WP_6/Manon.html, par. 29.
  36. Warde B. The Crystal Goblet, Sixteen Essays on Typography (London: Sylvan Press, 1955).
  37. Barker, T. "Aesthetics of Error: Media Art, the Machine, the Unforeseen, and the Errant" Error: Glitch, Noise, and Jam in New Media Cultures ed. Mark Nunes (New York: Continuum, 2011) p. 52.
  38. Menkman, R. Network Notebooks 4: The Glitch Moment(um) (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2011) p. 38.
  39. Tanaka, J. and Taylor, M.E. "Object categories and expertise: Is the basic level in the eye of the beholder?" Cognitive Psychology 23 (1991) pp. 121-149.
  40. Betancourt, M. Glitch Art in Theory and Practice: Critical Failures and Post- Digital Aesthetics (New York: Routledge, 2016) p. 130.
  41. Le Grice, M. Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age (London: BFI Publishing, 2006) pp. 275.
  42. Fried, M. "Art and Objecthood" Minimal Art ed. Gregory Battcock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) pp. 116-147.
  43. Gidal, P. Materialist Film (London: Routledge, 1989) pp. 15-16.
  44. Burger, P. Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) p.11.
  45. Genette, G. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987) pp. 10-11.
  46. Flusser, V. Into the Universe of Technical Images (Electronic Mediations) trans. Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011) pp. 46-48.
  47. Betancourt, M. The Critique of Digital Capitalism (Brooklyn: Punctum Books, 2016).
  48. Reichardt, J. Cybernetic Serendipity: the computer and the arts (New York: Praeger, 1969).
  49. Popper, F. Art of the Electronic Age (New York: Abrams, 1993) pp. 179-181.
  50. Derrida, J. "Différance" Margins of Philosophy trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982) pp. 1-29.
  51. Ballard, S. "Information, noise and et al" M/C Journal vol. 10 no. 5 (2007) pp. 1-8.
  52. Brown, S. "Introduction" Synthesis: Processing and Collaboration (San Diego: The Gallery@Calit2, 2011) p. 5. 150 BETANCOURT
  53. Marzec, A. "Postdigital aesthetics -an art of imperfection, disturbances and disintegration" Unframing Archives: Essays on Cinema and Visual Arts ed. Eugénia Vilela, Filipe Martins and Né Barros (Porto: Universidade de Porto, 2017) pp. 31-42.
  54. Larkin, B. "Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds: Nigerian Video and the Infrastructure of Piracy" Public Culture vol. 16, no. 2 (2004) p. 292.
  55. Temkin, D. "Glitch && Human-Computer Interaction" Non-Object Oriented Art, Vol. 1, no. 1, January 2014; DOI: http://nooart.org/post/73353953758/ temkin-glitchhumancomputerinteraction
  56. Zinman, G. "Getting Messy: Chance and Glitch in Contemporary Video Art" Abstract Video: The Moving Image in Contemporary Art ed. Gabrielle Jennings (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015) p. 107.
  57. Cascone, K. "The Aesthetics of Failure: 'Post-Digital' Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music" Computer Music Journal vol. 24, no. 4 (Winter, 2000) pp. 12-18.
  58. Tarasti, E. Theory of Musical Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994) pp. 73-76.
  59. Chapman, S. "Guerrilla Television in the Digital Age" Journal of Film and Video vol. 64, nos. 1-2 (Spring/Summer 2012) p. 46.
  60. Larkin, B. "Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds: Nigerian Video and the Infrastructure of Piracy" Public Culture vol. 16, no. 2 (2004) p. 291.
  61. Kahn, D. Noise, Water, Meat (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999) p.25.
  62. Attali, J. Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985) p. 6.
  63. Cascone, K. "The Aesthetics of Failure: 'Post-Digital' Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music" Computer Music Journal, vol. 24, no. 4 (Winter, 2000) p. 3.
  64. Paul, C. and Levy, M. "Genealogies of the New Aesthetic" Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation and Design ed. David M. Berry and Michael Dieter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) p 31.
  65. Harris, R. "The Integrational Conception of the Sign" Integrationist Notes and Papers 2006-2008 (Gamlingay: Bright Pen, 2009).
  66. Eco, U. Kant and the Platypus (New York: Harvest Books, 2000) pp. 125-126.
  67. Betancourt, M. The Critique of Digital Capitalism (Brooklyn: Punctum Books, 2016) pp. 153-190.
  68. Peirce, C. S. The Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Volume 2: 1867-1871 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982) p. 56.
  69. Betancourt, M. Ideologies of the Real in Title Sequence, Motion Graphics and Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2020) pp. 177-204
  70. Betancourt, M. The Critique of Digital Capitalism (Brooklyn: Punctum Books, 2016) pp. 37-49.
  71. Eco, U. A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979) p. 221.
  72. Betancourt, M. Cinematic Articulation in Motion Graphics (New York: Routledge, 2022) pp. 134-138.
  73. Fineman, M. Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop (New Haven: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012) pp. 128-129.
  74. Menkman, Rosa. Network Notebooks 4: The Glitch Moment(um) (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2011) pp. 35-36.
  75. Betancourt, M. Glitch Art in Theory and Practice: Critical Failures and Post- Digital Aesthetics (New York: Routledge, 2016) pp. 49-76.
  76. Betancourt, M. "Critical Glitches and Glitch Art" Hz, no. 19 (July, 2014) np.
  77. Brown, S. "Introduction" Synthesis: Processing and Collaboration (San Diego: The Gallery@Calit2, 2011) p. 5.
  78. Meagher, J. RCA Television Pict-O-Guide: An Aid to TV Troubleshooting, Volume 1 (Harrison, NJ: Radio Corporation of America, Tube Department, 1949).
  79. Brown, S. "Introduction" Synthesis: Processing and Collaboration (San Diego: The Gallery@Calit2, 2011) p. 5.
  80. Fielding, R. The Technique of Special Effects Cinematography (Oxford: Focal Press, 1984) pp. 405-406.
  81. Sherman, T. "Vernacular Video" INC Reader #4: Video Vortex Reader- Responses to YouTube ed. Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008) p. 162.
  82. Bazin, A. What is Cinema? trans. Timothy Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009) pp. 8-9.
  83. Sontag, S. On Photography (New York: Anchor Books, 1977) p. 5.
  84. Manseau, P. The Apparitionists: A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man who Captured Lincoln's Ghost (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2017) pp. 93-100.
  85. Vanhanen, J. "a099: Loving the Ghost in the Machine," CTheory (November 26, 2001); DOI: https://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=312 152 BETANCOURT
  86. Owens, S. The Ghost: A Cultural History (London: Tate Publishing, 2017) pp. 202-209.
  87. Kaplan, L. The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008) pp. 169-179.
  88. Roh, F. "Introduction" Abstract Pictures on Film: The Technique of Making Light Graphics (New York: Viking Press, 1964).
  89. Betancourt, M. Cinematic Articulation in Motion Graphics, Routledge Studies in Media Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2021) p. 30.
  90. Cloninger, Curt. "GltchLnguistx: The Machine in the Ghosts / Static Trapped in the Mouths" in Glitch reader(ror) ed. Nick Briz, Evan Meaney, Rosa Menkman, William Robertson, Jon Satrom, Jessica Westbrook (Unsorted Books: 2011) p. 35.
  91. Betancourt, M. "The 'Material Function' in Cinema: Resolving the Paradox of the Glitch" Semiotica: Journal of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, no. 236-237, 2020, pp. 251-273; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/sem-2019-0006
  92. Grundell, V. Flow and Friction: On the Tactical Potential of Interfacing with Glitch Art (Stockholm: Art and Theory, 2016) pp. 28-30.
  93. Betancourt, M. Glitch Art in Theory and Practice: Critical Failures and Post- Digital Aesthetics (New York: Routledge, 2016) pp. 86-100.
  94. Merrell, F. "Toward a concept of pluralistic, inter-relational semiosis" Σημειωτκή -Sign Systems Studies, vol. 35 no. 1-2 (2007) p. 17.
  95. Betancourt, M. "The 'intentional function' in still and moving photographic images" Semiotica: Journal of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, 2022; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/sem-2020-0065
  96. Cloninger, C. "GltchLnguistx: The Machine in the Ghosts / Static Trapped in the Mouths" in Glitch reader(ror) ed. Nick Briz, Evan Meaney, Rosa Menkman, William Robertson, Jon Satrom, Jessica Westbrook (Unsorted Books: 2011) p. 33.
  97. Meagher, J. RCA Television Pict-O-Guide: An Aid to TV Troubleshooting, Volume 1 (Harrison, NJ: Radio Corporation of America, Tube Department, 1949).
  98. Wiesing, L. Artificial Presence: Philosophical Studies in Image Theory trans. Nils F. Schott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010) pp. 18-23.
  99. Zinman, G. "Getting Messy: Chance and Glitch in Contemporary Video Art" Abstract Video: The Moving Image in Contemporary Art ed. Gabrielle Jennings (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015) pp. 98-115.
  100. Poggioli, R. The Theory of the Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968) p. 125.
  101. Betancourt, M. "Critical Glitches and Glitch Art" Hz, no. 19 (July, 2014) np.
  102. Betancourt, M. "The 'Material Function' in Cinema: Resolving the Paradox of the Glitch" Semiotica: Journal of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, no. 236-237 (2020) pp. 251-273; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/sem-2019-0006
  103. Foster, H. The Return of the Real (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996) p. 40.
  104. Betancourt, M. The Critique of Digital Capitalism (Brooklyn: Punctum Books, 2016) pp. 37-49.
  105. Betancourt, M. "The 'intentional function' in still and moving photographic images" Semiotica: Journal of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, 2022; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/sem-2020-0065
  106. Eco, U. A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979) p. 216.
  107. Bogdan, C. The Semiotics of Visual Languages (Boulder: East European Monographs, 2002).
  108. Barker, T. "Aesthetics of the Error: Media Art, the Machine, the Unforeseen, and the Errant" Error: Glitch Noise and Jam in New Media Cultures, ed. Mark Nunes (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011) pp. 46-48.
  109. Eco, U. A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979) p. 216.
  110. Betancourt, M. Glitch Art in Theory and Practice: Critical Failures and Post- Digital Aesthetics (New York: Routledge, 2016) pp. 21-48.
  111. Wittgenstein, L. Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000) p. 198.
  112. Deleuze, G. Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1989) pp. 25-26.
  113. Flusser, V. Schriften, vol. 4: Kommunikologie eds. Stefan Bollmann and Edith Flusser (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996) p. 150.
  114. Eco, U. A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979) pp. 208-217.
  115. Eco, U. A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979) pp. 256-258; 275-276.
  116. Knapp, S. and Michaels, W.B. "Against Theory" Critical Inquiry vol. 8, no. 4 (Summer, 1982) pp. 717-728.
  117. Eco, U. A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979) pp. 135-136.

Related papers

Glitch Art Narratives: An investigation of the relation between noise and meaning
Virginia Sotiraki

2014

This thesis investigates the ontological meta-narratives of glitch art and focuses on it as the transition from images with noise, into a site of meaning. In the first chapter I will discuss glitch art as a failure in communication that stimulates our perception. By relating glitch art to noise art, I will describe the prevalence of a common artistic approach towards errors, while through Fiske's notion of 'entropy' I will examine how unconventional information affects us. These findings, combined with the analysis of distinct glitch art typologies in the second chapter, will highlight the instrumentalization of accidents as a method for processing reality. This method will be investigated through a content analysis of a digital glitch-art work that will be bound with Lyotard's notion of the 'aesthetics of post-modernity' and Virilio's concept of a 'vision machine'. This contextualization will introduce glitch art as a metonym for reality and as a mechanism that revolutionizes our perception and reinforces our tolerance against the stress that Virilio ascribes to the unknown source of the Original Accident. The third chapter is investigating hybrid glitch art forms as the result of this meaning making process. Through the examination of an oil painting that imitates the visual manifestation of digital errors, I will demonstrate that there is a semiotic interrelation between glitch art and the Accident, which simultaneously redefines the ontology of the former, as glitch art is becoming the Myth of the Accident. As a result, this thesis will investigate the connections of ontological meta-narratives in contemporary art to mechanisms for acquiring knowledge and processing reality, in an example of the current phenomenon of glitch art.

View PDFchevron_right
Some Problems and Propositions for a History of Glitch Art
michael betancourt

2024

Prepublication paper: The contemporary digital genre of "Glitch Art" emerges from an extended and complex developmental lineage that reflects its multiple sources in art, design, and popular culture. The question confronting its history is not 'who did what first?' but 'why does it spontaneously reappear?' Unlike the historical avant-gardes, Glitch Art is not the product of a specific manifesto or expansive propagandizing by a select group of originators, but rather a spontaneous and emergent response to the wide spread adoption of digital technologies (the home computer, the Internet) in the final quarter of the twentieth century. Instead of a singular or linear progression, Glitch Art was repeatedly and independently reinvented. This multiple origin reflects the convergent mixture of cultural ideas and established responses to the use of machines for making art since the invention of photography in the nineteenth century that forms the sociological matrix that imprints the use of malfunctions, breakdowns, and errors with aesthetic significance. It describes an aesthetic response to a specific network of concepts in common circulation that confront the relationship between technology and human action. Glitch Art provides an empirical demonstration of these historically informal network effects created by shared cultural ideology, and their explicit and formal magnification via social media and peer-to-peer communications technology; how this lineage shaped the international community of Glitch Artists establishes the potential for network effects as an alternative model for historical apprehension than the institutional framework of the Modernist avant-garde movement.

View PDFchevron_right
Technology, Error and Fetish: Through the Lens of Glitch Art
Pengpeng Z E P P R A Zhang
View PDFchevron_right
Parasites at Work. An Essay in the Aesthetics of Glitch Art
Alice Iacobone

Trópos. Rivista di ermeneutica e critica filosofica, 2023

The paper considers the field of glitch art and aims to analyze it historically and theoretically. In the first section, the glitch is addressed in its general features, i.e., as a minor malfunction that calls into question the ordinary functioning of both technical and socio-political machines. Then (section 2), I sketch a history of the ways in which the glitch has circulated across different artistic media and genres. The third section draws attention to an often-overlooked aspect of glitching dynamics, i.e., the fact that the glitch differs logically and practically from the bug that generates it. While these three sections are also intended as a critical survey on the existing literature, the fourth section aims to outline an original proposal for an aesthetics of glitch art. Such account unfolds as an aesthetics of parasitism, where the bug plays the role of the parasite (the material and yet invisible element that perturbs the artwork's digital code) and the glitch plays the role of the symptom (the artwork's hyper-visible, disturbing phenomenal appearance).

View PDFchevron_right
"gLossing Over Thoughts On Glitch -A Poetry of Error"
Jeffrey F Donaldson

In the past 10 years a proliferation of visual work that embraces the style of digital error has crept into mainstream advertising and popular culture. Recent and ongoing events such as GLI.T/CH in Chicago and Bent Festival in New York City have helped to establish an international dialogue for artists working in this digital underground. As more institutions begin to recognize glitch as an art form and more people begin to theorize its relevance, we must ask, where is the genre heading and where has it been? /////AN UNANTICIPATED ART In our modern, networked world, the glitch is everywhere. A dropped phone call, a dropped frame during a televised broadcast, and the Windows operating system's "Blue Screen of Death" are all examples anyone working with technology has experienced as our tools of communication and entertainment have progressed into the digital realm. As a result of this paradigm shift, the errors of our instruments have taken on a new character; analog static has been replaced with digital precision. We have accepted this new imperfection into our everyday lives as a byproduct of progress and have welcomed it as the personal computer has steadily replaced what is now old media. Where there were once neon lights there are now display panels wired to present the latest in high definition commercial advertisement. As the natural elements erode the electronics, these new displays fragment into colourful, geometric forms, sometimes retaining their original content, sometimes creating entirely new images. A bad electrical contact or an improperly connected cable is enough to elicit novel geometric forms. This broken visual landscape is omnipresent, familiar to anyone living in our urban environments and to those who are paying attention, a new form of readymade machine art surrounds us. Conventionally, a glitch is an error. It is a break from an algorithmic flow. Its unanticipated appearance simultaneously frustrating and mesmerizing. But a glitch uncovers another ordering principle. It is chance made manifest and a spontaneous reordering of data, like the wave function collapse of quantum theory. In its pure, wild sense, a glitch is the ghost in the machine, the other side of intention, a form that is hidden until it manifests itself of its own accord. It is a true type of machine art and a crude form of artificial intelligence inasmuch that once an algorithm is let go to run free, due to the architecture of digital systems, a break from routine creates an ordering of its own. The pixel grid of the computer display provides the framework and serves as the canvas for this manifested algorithmic hiccup. It's as if the computer is freed from its normal task and instead displays what it wants, the architecture of the electronics giving shape to sudden random

View PDFchevron_right

Related topics

  • Critical Theory
  • Semiotics
  • Media Studies
  • New Media
  • Digital Humanities
  • Media Arts
  • Digital Culture
  • Digital Media And New Literacies
  • Glitch studies
  • New Media Studies
  • Glitch Art
  • Glitch Aesthetics
  • glitch theory
    • 580 California St., Suite 400
    San Francisco, CA, 94104
    © 2025 Academia. All rights reserved