Glitched lit

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Journal of Visual Art Practice, 2022

The contemporary digital video art genre of ‘Glitch Art’ enables artistic research with motion pictures to address liminal questions of articulation that were impossible in traditional analogue media. The Glitch Art technique of ‘datamoshing’ exploits the encoding of digital media to create a paradoxical separation of ‘image’ from ‘movement’ that demonstrates the central role of audience perception in parsing experience. This paper considers how artistic exploits of digital glitches enable novel analytic questions about the identification of kinesis and the role of the ‘frame’ and the ‘shot’ in cinematic articulation: [1] the relationship of the ‘long take’ where editing is minimized to the continuous progression of the ‘datastream’ in digital media, and [2] the role of differentiation between succeeding frames in the audience's identification/construction of ‘shots’ that are foundational to the technique of continuity editing.