cross-reader/txt/2009_Glitch_Manifesto_[EN].txt

Glitch Studies Manifesto •
Rosa Menkman •
2009/2010 •
https://beyondresolution.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com •

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Rmenkman@gmail.com
.
Amsterdam/Cologne, 2009/2010
http://rosa-menkman.blogspot.com
The dominant, continuing search for a 
noiseless channel has been, and will always 
be no more than a regrettable, ill-fated 
dogma.
Even though the constant search for complete 
transparency brings newer, ‘better’ media, every one 
of these new and improved technologies will always 
have their own fingerprints of imperfection. While 
most people experience these fingerprints as 
negative (and sometimes even as accidents) I 
emphasize the positive consequences of these 
imperfections by showing the new opportunities they 
facilitate. 
In the beginning there was noise. Then the artist moved from 
the grain of celluloid to the magnetic distortion and scanning 
lines of the cathode ray tube. he wandered the planes of 
phosphor burn-in, rubbed away dead pixels and now makes 
performances based on the cracking of LCD screens. 
 The elitist discourse of the upgrade is a dogma widely pursued 
by the naive victims of a persistent upgrade culture. The consumer 
only has to dial 
#1-800 
to stay on top of the 
technological curve, 
the 
waves of both euphoria 
and disappointment. 
The 
user has to realize 
that improving is 
nothing more 
than a proprietary protocol, a deluded 
consumer myth 
about progression towards a holy grail of 
perfection.
Dispute 
the operating templates of 
creative practice; fight 
genres and expectations!
I feel stuck in the membranes of knowledge, governed 
by social conventions and acceptances. As an artist I 
strive to reposition these membranes; I do not feel 
locked into one medium or between contradictions like 
real vs. virtual or digital vs. analog. I surf the 
waves of technology, the art of artifacts. 
The quest for complete transparency has changed the 
computer system into a highly complex assemblage that 
is often hard to penetrate and sometimes even 
completely closed off. This system consists of layers 
of obfuscated protocols that find their origin in 
ideologies, economies, political hierarchies and 
social conventions, which are subsequently operated by 
different actors.
 Some artists set out to elucidate and deconstruct 
the hierarchies of these systems of assemblage. They do 
not work in (binary) opposition to what is inside the 
flows (the normal uses of the computer) but practice 
their art on the border of these flows. Sometimes, they 
use the computers’ inherent maxims as a façade, to 
trick the audience into a flow of certain expectation 
that the artwork subsequently rapidly breaks out of. As 
a result, the spectator is forced to acknowledge that 
the use of the computer is based on a genealogy of 
conventions, while in reality the computer is a machine 
that can be bend or used in many different ways. With 
the creation of breaks within politics and social and 
economical conventions, the audience may become aware of 
the preprogrammed patterns. In this way, a distributed 
awareness of a new interaction gestalt can take form.
Get 
away from the established action scripts and 
join the avant-garde of the unknown. Become a 
nomad of noise artifacts!
There are three occasions in which the static, linear notion of transmitting 
information can be interrupted. I use these instances to exploit noise 
artifacts, that I sub-divide as glitch, encoding / decoding (of which 
compression is the most ordinary form) and feedback artifacts.
Etymologically, the term “noise” refers to states of aggression, alarm and 
powerful sound phenomena in nature ('rauschen'), such as storm, thunder 
and the roaring sea. But when noise is explored within a social context, 
the term is often used as a figure of speech and as such has many more 
meanings. Sometimes, noise stands for unaccepted sounds: 
not
 music, 
not
valid information or what is 
not
 a message. Noise can also stand for a 
(often undesirable, unwanted, other and unordered) disturbance, break 
or addition within the signal of useful data. Here noise exists 
within the void opposite to what (already) has a meaning. Whichever 
way noise is defined, the negative definition also has a positive 
consequence: it helps by (re)defining its opposite (the world of 
meaning, the norm, regulation, goodness, beauty and so on). 
Noise thus exists as a 
paradox; while it is often 
negatively defined, it is 
also a positive, generative 
quality (that is present in 
any communication medium). The 
voids generated by a break 
are not only a lack of meaning, 
but also powers that 
force the reader to move away 
from the traditional 
discourse around the technology, 
and to open it up. 
Through these voids, artists and 
spectators  can 
understand the politics behind the 
code and voice a 
critique towards the digital media. 
It can be a source 
for new patterns, anti-patterns and 
new possibilities 
that often exist on the border or 
membrane. 
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Use 
the 
glitch as 
an exoskeleton 
of progress.
The glitch is a wonderful experience of an 
interruption that shifts an object away from its 
ordinary form and discourse. For a moment I am 
shocked, lost and in awe, asking myself what this 
other utterance is, how was it created. Is it 
perhaps ...a glitch? But once I named it, the 
momentum -the glitch- is no more... 
But somewhere within the destructed ruins of meaning 
hope exists; a triumphal sensation that there is 
something more than just devastation. A negative 
feeling makes place for an intimate, personal experience 
of a machine (or program), a system showing its 
formations, inner workings and flaws. As a holistic 
celebration rather than a particular perfection the 
glitch can reveal a new opportunity, a spark of creative 
energy that indicates that something new is about to be 
created. 
The glitch has no solid form or state through time; it is 
often perceived as an unexpected and abnormal mode of 
operandi, a break from (one of) the many flows (of 
expectations) within a technological system. But as the 
understanding of a glitch changes when it is being named, so 
does the equilibrium of the (former) glitch itself: the 
original experience of a rupture moved passed its momentum 
and vanished into a realm of new conditions. The glitch is a 
new and ephemeral, personal experience.
Use bends 
and breaks as a metaphor for difference
As an artist, I find catharsis in disintegration, ruptures and cracks. I 
manipulate, bend and break any medium towards the point where it becomes 
something new. This is what I call glitch art. Even so, to me, the word 
‘glitch’ in ‘glitch art’ means something slightly different than the 
term ‘glitch’. 
The glitch art genre moves like the weather; sometimes it evolves very 
slowly while at other times it can strike like lightning. The art works 
within this realm can be disturbing, provoking and horrifying. Beautifully 
dangerous, they can at once take all the tensions of other possible 
compositions away. These works stretch boundaries and generate novel modes; 
they break open previously sealed politics and force a catharsis of 
conventions, norms and believes. 
 Glitch art is often about relaying the membrane of the normal, to create 
a new protocol after shattering an earlier one. The perfect glitch shows how 
destruction can change into the creation of something original. Once the 
glitch is understood as an alternative way of representation or a new 
language, its tipping point has passed and the essence of its glitch-being is 
vanished. The glitch is no longer an art of rejection, but a shape or 
appearance that is recognized as a novel form (of art). Artists that work with 
glitch processes are therefore often hunting for the fragile equilibrium; they 
search for the point when a new form is born from the blazed ashes of its 
precursor.
Even so, glitch art is not always (or by everyone) experienced as an art of 
the momentum; many works have already passed their tipping point. This is 
because glitch art exists within different systems; for instance the system 
of production and the system of reception. Not only the artist who creates 
the work of glitch art is responsible for the glitch. The 'foreign' input 
(wrongly encoded syntaxes that lead to forbidden 
leakages and data promiscuity), the hardware and 
the software (the 'channel' that shows functional? 
collisions) and the audience (who is in charge of 
the reception, the decoding) can also be 
responsible. All these actors are positioned 
within different (but sometimes overlapping) flows 
in which the final product can be described or 
recognized as glitch art. This is why an intended 
error can still be called glitch art and why glitch 
art is not always just a personal experience of 
shock, but has also become a genre; a schematic 
metaphor for a way of expression, that depends on 
multiple actors. 
Realize that 
the gospel of glitch art also tells about new 
norms implemented by corruption.
Over time some of the glitches I made developed into personal archetypes; I 
feel that they have become ideal examples or models of my work. Moreover, 
some of the techniques I (and others) used became easily reproducible for 
other people, either because I explained my working process, or sometimes 
because of the development of a software or plugin that automatically 
simulated or recreated a glitching method (that then became something 
close to an ‘effect’). I have started to believe that the popularization 
and cultivation of the avant-garde of mishaps has become predestined and 
unavoidable. 
The procedural essence of glitch art is opposed to conservation; the 
shocking experience, perception and understanding of what a glitch is 
at one point in time, cannot be preserved to a future time. The 
beautiful creation of a glitch is uncanny and sublime; the artist 
tries to catch something that is the result of an uncertain balance, a 
shifting, un-catchable, unrealized utopia connected to randomness and 
idyllic disintegrations. The essence of glitch art is therefore best 
understood as a history of movement and as an attitude of destructive 
generativity; it is the procedural art of non con-formative, ambiguous 
reformations.
 Nevertheless, some artists do not focus on the procedural entity 
of the glitch. They skip the process of creation-by-destruction and 
focus directly on the creation of a formally new design, either by 
creating a final product or by developing a new way to re-create or 
simulate the latest glitch-archetype. This can for instance result into 
a plug-in, a filter or a whole new 'glitching software'.
 T h i s  f o r m  o f  ' c o n s e r v a t i v e  g l i t c h  a r t '  o f t e n  f o c u s e s  m o r e  o n  d e s i g n  a n d 
end products then on the procedural breaking of flows and politics. There 
is an obvious critique: to design a glitch means to domesticate it. When 
the glitch becomes domesticated, controlled by a tool, or technology (a 
human craft) it has lost its enchantment and has become predictable. It is 
no longer a break from a flow within a technology, or a method to open up 
the political discourse, but instead a cultivation. For many actors it is 
no longer a glitch, but a filter that consists of a preset and/or a 
default: what was once understood as a glitch has now become a new 
commodity.
 But for some, mostly the audience on the receptive end, these designed 
errors are still experienced as the breaks of a flow and can therefore 
righteously be called glitches. They don’t know that these works are 
constructed via the use of a filter. Works from the genre ‘glitch art’ thus 
consist as an assemblage of perceptions and the understanding by multiple 
actors. Therefore, the products of these new filters that come to existence 
after (or without) the momentum of a glitch cannot be excluded from the 
realm of glitch art.
 Even so, the utopian fantasy of 'technological democracy' or 'freedom' 
that glitch art is often connected to, has often little to do with the 
colonialism of these glitch art designs and glitch filters. If there is such 
a thing as technological freedom, this can only be found within the 
procedural momentum of glitch art; when a glitch is just about to relay a 
protocol. Not when “one disruptive click is just about to create a new 
design”.
Celebrate 
the critical trans-media 
aesthetics of glitch artifacts 
I use glitches to assess the inherent politics of any kind of medium by 
bringing it into a state of hypertrophy. 
Within software art, the glitch is often used to deconstruct the myth 
of linear progress and to end the search for the holy grail called 
the perfect technology. In these works, the glitch emphasizes what is 
normally rejected as a flaw and subsequently shows that accidents and 
errors can also be welcomed as new forms of usability. The glitch does 
not only invoke the death of the author, but also the death of the 
apparatus, medium or tool (at least from the perspective of the 
technological determinist spectator) and is often used as an anti 
‘software-deterministic’ form.
 This fatal manner of glitch presents a problem for media and art 
historians, who try to describe old and new culture as a continuum of 
different niches. To deal with these breaks, historians have repeatedly 
coined new genres and new media forms to give these splinter practices a 
place within this continuum. As a result, an abundance of designations like 
databending, datamoshing and circuitbending have come to existence, which 
in fact all refer to similar practices of breaking flows within different 
technologies or platforms. 
 Theorists have also been confronted with this problem. For them, terms 
like post-digital or post-media aesthetics frequently offer a solution. 
Unfortunately, these kinds of terms are      misleading because in glitch 
art ‘post’ actually often means a reaction to a primer form. But to act 
against something does not mean to move away from it completely - in fact a 
reaction also prolongs a certain way or mode (at least as a reference). 
   I think that an answer to the problems of both historians and 
theoreticians could be found when glitch art is described as a procedural 
activity demonstrating against and within multiple technologies. Something I 
  describe as 
critical trans-media aesthetics
. The role of glitch 
artifacts as critical trans-media aesthetics is twofold. On the one hand, 
these aesthetics media     show a medium in a critical state (a ruined, 
unwanted, not recognized, accidental and horrendous state). These aesthetics 
transform the way the consumer perceives the normal (every accident transforms 
the normal) and describe the passing of a tipping point after which the medium 
(might) become something new. On the other hand, these aesthetics critique the 
medium (genre, interface and expectations). They challenge its inherent 
politics and the established template of creative practice while 
producing a theory of reflection.
The 
nomad of noise
 travels the acousmatic videoscape
I am a voyager of videoscapes: I create conceptually 
synesthetic artworks, that use both visual and aural glitch 
(and other noise) artifacts at the same time. These artifacts 
shroud the black box, as a nebula of technology and its inner 
workings. 
What actually happens when a glitch occurs is unknown, I stare at 
the glitch as a void of knowledge; a strange dimension where the 
laws of technology are suddenly very different from what I 
expected and know. Here is the purgatory; an intermediate state 
between the death of the old technology and a judgement for a 
possible continuation into a new form, a new understanding, a 
landscape, a videoscape.. 
 Whenever I use a ‘normal’ transparent technology, I only see one 
aspect of the actual machine. I have learned to ignore the 
interface and all structural components, to be able to understand a 
message and to use the technology as easy and fast as possible. 
 The glitches I trigger show the technology as the obfuscated box 
that it actually is (and not absent or transparent). They shroud its 
inner workings and the source of the output as a sublime black veil, 
while they confront me with a message that I cannot understand. I 
perceive the glitches and the machine without understanding where 
they originate from. This realization gives me the opportunity to 
concentrate better on their formal qualities - to interpret their 
structures and to learn more from what I can actually see. These 
glitching technologies create an acousmatic videoscape in which I can 
perceive an output outside of my goggles of immediacy, transparency 
speed and usability. 
 In the acousmatic videoscape, the critical trans-media aesthetics 
reflect on the perception of technology and its messages; they create 
an opportunity for self reflexivity, self critique and self 
expression. 
In the acousmatic videoscape synesthesia exists not just as a metaphor 
for transcoding one medium upon another (with a new algorithm), but as 
a conceptually driven meeting of the visual and the sonic within the 
newly uncovered quadrants of technology. 
http://videoscapes.blogspot.com
I curate a Vimeo video pool about conceptual synesthetic artifact 
videos:
http://vimeo.com/groups/artifacts