Glitch Art. Challenging the Myth of Perfect Software.

ii iii Preface This monograph represents the written portion of a PhD thesis which focused on the contemporary field of software art. The other portion of the study was a set of five creative new media works. At one level these works provide examples of software art, but at another level they raise questions concerning the nature and boundaries of the genre. Rather than imagining a clearly delineated and integral aesthetic field, my focusat both a practical and theoretical level -is upon exploring dimensions of discomfort, uncertainty and opening.

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).

Glitch Theory: Art and Semiotics, 2023

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.)

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

2018

The glitch art practice is celebrated as a generative post digital tool which also carries disruptive, destabilizing form with radical potential. It embraces the brokenness of data and the aesthetics of failure. It celebrates faults, malfunctions, bugs, errors and other deviant anomalies bringing a political dimension to arts practice. The failure to communicate breeds miscommunication and error is hence communicable as noise. This method of deviation or misdirection breaks open the logic of control and leaves room for variance, play and unintended outcomes. Miscommunication thus becomes a reconceptualization of what cannot be raised with the existing social and cultural practices. Glitch becomes a destabilizing force offering strategies of misdirection that can serve both as cultural and artistic interventions. Hence I’m arguing in defence of the poor image and lo fi aesthetics which utilises these imperfections to show any media in a critical state and to criticize the inherent politics underlying the medium itself. While it’s crucial to study and reflect upon the creative potential of error, noise and glitch and its subversive quality, however it’s equally necessary to understand that cybernetic systems created these networks of a participatory new media culture that operate within a dominant structure. It is precisely these attempts at breaking the status quo, that underlying tension that I find most interesting if not revealing.

Glitch and Error in Digital Culture, 2011

Historic contingency and the concept are the more mercilessly antagonistic the more solidly they are entwined. Chance is the historic fate of the individual-a meaningless fate because the historic process itself usurped all meaning. (Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics) 2 Computing culture is predicated on communication and control to an extent that can obscure the domain of the error. Between a hermetically rule-bound realm of programmed necessity and ef cient management of the totality of the possible, this chapter situates a realm of contingencydistortions in the strictest signal-to-noise ratio, glitches and accidents, or moments where the social hierarchy of computer knowledge condescendingly ascribes to "user error" what does not compute. Whether one sees the graphic user interface (GUI) as a Taylorist discipline teaching ergonomic interaction, or as yielding to reductions of interaction to resemble what users had already learned-the GUI is pivotal for our culture. 3 And the discursive formation of computer games runs parallel to that of the GUI: interaction revolves around perception, hand-eye coordination, and discerning errors. But while a typical GUI-from the desktop metaphors of Vannevar Bush's Memex to the Xerox Star or Apple Lisa, and beyond-will aim for visibility and patient acceptance (or even anticipation) of user error, games probe the twitchy limits of reaction times and punish user error with loss of symbolic energy. Audiovisual cues pull users into feedback loops that a game might exhibit proudly, while other, perhaps less playful user interfaces will tend to hide them in redundant

2007

This thesis focuses on the emerging field of software art. It is concerned with questions that arise in relation to efforts to think the field of software, and software programming particularly, in aesthetic terms. Centrally, how can software as a technical field of production, as a form of engineering and as a space of abstract, instrumentally-oriented, system elaboration, possibly correspond to art? What are the dilemmas that the notion of software art confronts? How can its space of opportunity be conceived? These questions 7

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.

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.