For some time, I was in conflict about whether glitches could be categorized along the lines of analog or digital, intentional or accidental, authentic or fabricated, only to come away with a sense that, while these distinction are not without their place, there was something more to talk about.  Year of the Glitch has been a process of coming to understand the context and the situation of glitches and artifacts within contemporary visual media culture.  While there is much left to explore in regards to the coupling of concepts concerning glitches and their projections outward as frameworks for approaching larger societal topics, here I will focus on some of the material questions concerning the relationship between glitches and artifacts in an attempt to locate a common grounding for dealing with further transdisciplinary inquiries.

A certain form of Glitch Art has recently exploded due to the proliferation of digital media tools falling into the hands of artists, who are either by chance or through intention exploiting the imminent artifacts specific to these tools.  The result is a range of creatives practice built on digital artifacts—both “material” and conceptual (as in shifting perceptual frames)—unique from other forms in that the tools are technically different; therefore, the artifacts as well as the conceptualization of how they come to be are distinct.  The aesthetic of these practices is of a different kind of materiality, not of that inherent to physical transcription/inscription media, but of the particular qualities of transcoded information and the mediated experience thereof.

Concerning Glitch Art as a specific grouping of practices and works, what we find is frequent usage of digital artifacts, the results of transcoding processes, among other things, slipping away from their normal modes of representation or being pushed beyond their designed capacities.  When carrying this idea of slippage over into physical realms of “analog glitches” things become complicated, mostly due to the fact that we have already developed a rich vocabulary to talk about artifacts of analog media; they’ve been around a bit longer than digital media and have already passed through their period of material investigation and aesthetic research.  But what it all comes down to is that a glitch doesn’t care what system it operates on.

To glitch is simply to slip.  An analog inscription system has its own artifacts, but what sets digital artifacts apart from analog ones (and in my mind why artifacts of analog media are already something else) is the fact that the inscription process involves multiple steps of coding (encoding/decoding).  The impression of an object into a digital media device leaves no residue, there is no trace.  Intensities are registered by a surface which does not change physically, but passes current through sensitive electronics.  The current generates voltages which are then quantified numerically, and assigned a representative configuration of bits.  Only a narrow dimension of its physical presence is measured, meanwhile the both the recording surface and media are designed to be reset to a perfect zero state, primed for the next acquisition.  In digital photography, the image is indexical of the numbers used to encode other sets of numbers which represent voltage levels on particular regions of a sensor.  The image’s referent becomes the process of encoding that stands between it and the subject.  Entropy introduced into this process of encoding and decoding, of through the transmission between the former and the latter, reveal this fact.

Artifacts are evidence of the medium at play.  Interpretive systems crunching away on numbers produce artifacts which bear little resemblance to the objects they represent, and speak more to the ways in which they’re represented or acquired, stored, transmitted, encoded, decoded.  In this process, data is discarded, optimized to facilitate transmission.  Noise is introduced masquerading as signal, and it takes only a slight disturbance to expose.  Artifacts here indicate at which point an interruption occurred what data was disturbed, but do not reveal their source or cause.  Whereas, artifacts produced by analog systems of transcribed intensities from one physical medium to another (without numerical intermediaries) speak more to the common physical grounding and coupling of systems in analogous interchanges.  The artifacts are themselves traces indexical of their source.

While digital technologies are themselves built upon analog substrates, the product of entropic processes acting on the underlying medium manifest in distinctly different ways.  So while entropy in analog systems may not be featured in what is today categorized as Glitch Art, which has recently emerged as a practice that takes as its topic the very digital systems by which it is produced, we have located our common ground.

The glitch, this moment of slippage is itself immaterial, it is an incident and an interstice, the point of contact between systems, the moment when entropy acts on some structure within an interpretive system.  The moment of the artifact takes place as a consequence of this instant, a cascade of interactions culminating in something of note.  For all systems, the glitch and its artifacts are not accidents or errors.  Although our own projections and attitudes towards them may reveal underlying values regarding ideas of utility, function, purpose, intention, and desire, these moments illuminate the limits of human imagination and offer opportunities reevaluate our position and complicate our understanding.  Negative projections upon instances of glitches and artifacts alerts us to a need to change and adapt; a threshold has been crossed and there’s no going back.  These hiccups and slips are evidence of the universe working its magic upon itself, testing the resilience of its own inner workings.  There is only change, and every system, every thing is subject to it.  To strive for the idea of permanent stability, to become resistant to change, is to become inert and dead to the world.  To pursue a static image of perfection is to pursue a terminus, to die.