Glitch Architecture

Parallelism in Architecture, Environment And Computing Techniques, (PACT), 2016

We now live in a world where architecture is produced through arrays of pixels and this remains as the representation rather than the reality of buildings inevitably ageing their physical forms. So if architecture is kept in this digitally frozen state, then how does architectural form age over time? It glitches. A glitch is defined as a sudden malfunction or fault. Digital decay is not the wear of a tangible material but decomposition of this binary code. We are constantly updating our digital systems with little understanding of the effects on how the data can continue to be read. Files are not resilient to our constant digital updates. We can look to digital forensics and digital cultural preservation or we can embrace glitches as the opportunity for appreciating digital aesthetics. While we find beauty in age within the physical world where it is seen as poetic and nostalgic, our reactions to digital decay are that of anxiety. This paper presents a methodology that interprets the inevitable decay of digital processes involved in architectural design. Employing a data driven process of experimental computational design, we are advancing a type of digital decay, i.e. glitch, from its non-graphical and 2D image representations into meaningful 3D architectural interpretation. We are particularly interested in how the effects of glitch can be instrumental to generating 3D spaces that rectify digital authenticity responsive to adaptation to digital workflows.

The introduction of glitches into the production of architectural drawing has the capacity to open up and transform what is understood to constitute digitalarchitectural production. Traditionally, the architectural drawing uses lines as codified indexical representations of existing or proposed real-world objects. 1 The representation of an edge between a floor and a wall, for instance, requires the line to function through analogy. Vidler 2 starkly points out that over the past two centuries architectural drawing has steadily become more abstract in its use of analogy and its representations of real-world objects. Digital technologies potentially transform the traditional analogue notion of the line from a projected analogy to an analogy in itself, made up of the discrete units used by digital technology, namely zeroes and ones and the pixel. However, the capacity for the image plays a central role in what architecture 'means' and how it is drawn and formulated. 3 The nature of lines, and by extension drawings, in the digital age has fundamentally shifted from being about abstractions of abstractions to "nothing more nor less than the mapping of threeor four-dimensional relations in two [dimensions]". 4

The following essay elaborates on the role of glitch art in re-evaluating and redefining the notion of software's functionality, arguing that errors and accidents are instruments of questioning existing norms. Analysing various strategies of addressing the underlying structure of software, I oppose the artworks Glitchbrowser (by Scott, Moradi and Lima) and Extrafile (by Asendorf) and their approaches to expose software from the outside. Drawing a parallel between creative exploitation of accident in glitch art and art movements in the beginning of the 20th century, I outline the power of this methodology in its strive towards re-evaluation of existing norms and values. Drawing primarily on Menkman's research, I argue that defamiliriasing the underlying software and exposing its dysfunction, glitch art questions the idea of software's perfection and critically reevaluates its technical, social and aesthetic norms, unfolding new facets and perspectives.

The use of digital tools in architecture has led to the definition of a new formal " style ". Increasing complex spatialities can now be modeled and built using contemporary software and digital fabrication tools. The future seems to appear devoted to the " digitalization " of all architectural processes: from building design, construction, and management. An unstoppable enthusiasm about these new technologies seems to pervade the practice of architecture especially among young designers. However, what is the real impact of digital architecture on the society? Its " spectacular " expressions are enough to respond to the occurring globalization of society and cities? At the moment most of the digital research is concerning geometrical/structural exploration which were often not possible to be implemented in the past using analogic tools. Therefore, the result is inevitably the production of " objects " which usually do not establish relationship with their context other than the depiction of their own " iconicity ". In this paper I will describe the contemporary philosophical tendency to understand technique as self-referential purpose instead of being a tool to achieve a goal, I will then examine precedent moments in history where such architectural " styles " were at the center of the architectural discourse but quickly outdated, and finally, I will argue about the necessity for digital architecture to overcome its apparent " futility " in order to achieve a significant contribution for the spatial necessities of the contemporary society.

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

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

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.)

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.

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).