The nature of the computer, of technology, is that it breaks.

Including excerpts from the panel Digital Art and the Glitch, presented at the Digital Arts and Culture conference in Bergen, Norway in 2000.

A forest of live wires

The thing about digital art is that it takes its technology seriously, it must take its technology seriously, because it is the computer which generates the signal we are calling art.

The nature of the computer, of technology, is that it breaks. Programs run out of memory, systems crash, information is garbled as it falls before the cursor. Wandering through a digital art gallery, it is not surprising to see an ‘out of order' sign pasted on the exhibits, or reach an Error 404 at the end of a hyperlink. Although often occurring unintentionally, some artists recognise the glitch as a substantial part of their artwork.

Glitch is an aesthetic that plays with errors and noise in the presentation of the artwork. Glitch can also be incorporated as a component of the creative process, where the conflicts between software, hardware, and wetware e.g. Human bodies, including brain cells and thought processes. play an important (and unpredictable) part in the generation of the artwork. The ongoing process of (artistic) development becomes a performance in itself. Here the glitch is a driving force for a play between the human and the machine, with the final outcome as a fleeting target that can be radically changed through interaction.

As computer systems become increasingly complex, the processes that make them work fall far beyond the reach of people who do not participate in the development process. The average computer user knows that this thing called "information" or "code" is what makes computers work, but they don't necessarily know how. It is hidden, incomprehensible; we cannot touch it, and most of us do not need to deal with it directly.

For most people, the modern computing environment is a seamless landscape of point'n'click, a Pavlovian field of links and buttons. It has a strict behavioural grammar, but we are all so accustomed to its WIMP interface (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer) that we are often unaware of it.

The seamlessness and rigidity of the interface must be violated. Scratched and cracked or pulled from the screen, so its borders become elastic and transparent, revealing the world behind.

We rarely come in contact with the world behind the screen, the reams of code, the protocols and puppet strings. The information creating this landscape for us. Historically, "information" is a theoretical entity. It has its origins in cybernetics, in the idea that the universe of objects is interpenetrated by ethereal "information patterns" that might be divined and controlled. It is a fragile entity, open to corruption. }

In the digital landscape, ‘content’ is contained in ‘windows’. Point and click, scroll and slide. You need a trigger-happy mouse finger. There is an encyclopedic aspect to this. The quest to progressively reveal a hidden meaning. From Grolier's encyclopedia to the web, mainstream media is about seamless content retrieval.

jodi >> leitmotiv string, "we serve no content", rests uncomfortably in the encyclopaedic world of the web.

We must make human-computer interaction less about (re)presentation of content. The computer is not a representation machine. It is a performance machine, engaged in shaping of itself through a generative process. We can encode strange and unexpected interfaces to draw people into the making of the work (the construction of the now).

The familiar ‘restart’ button begins to blink and skid across the screen in a most user-unfriendly fashion, with my cursor in hot pursuit. After a while, I discern that the key navigational organ is the ear. I must re-adjust myself to a sound-based interface.

Sound moved in and out of existence, and did not tolerate slack. Movement through sound was much more continuous then movement through a visual interface. The total user control was impossible, as different timelines intersected. The interaction became more a free play in time and less a rule based game in space. Storming the Interface

Is it broken, or is it meant to sound like that?

Think of time when you encountered a glitch or error in a digital system. Did you immediately consider it as a failure? How might it have been different if you approached it as a meaningful, aesthetically interesting event?

Noise throws us from the seamless experience and sucks us under the surface of the computing environment. It exposes the arbitrary ruleset of its behavioural and procedural grammar. Code stripped of functionality, code drawn from the innards of computer hardware and set loose across the surface of the screen, code as an end in itself. "Noise" is deviation from the defined parameters of the signal. It is information's corollary, the enemy of the seamless interface. It interferes with perfect reproduction, the presumed goal. In the 1940s, mathematicians like Claude Shannon and Norbert Wiener considered the role of noise and entropy in communication systems, laying the groundwork for later artistic explorations of glitch and error.}

All that is not information, not redundancy, not form and not restraints is noise, the only possible source of new patterns. Gregory Bateson

With glitches, human-computer interaction becomes more like drifting within inter-reality membranes and less a predefined menu browsing of digitized shop-windows. The glitch is a wilderness resort without a shopping mall attached to it. A forest of live wires.

There is no central meaning, no content to be progressively unveiled. Only peripheral visions.

Unpredictable interaction and spontaneous generation happen on the periphery of understanding. When we move away from the well known paths. Where we don't know what to expect.}

How might the "wilderness" of the glitch hold space for resistance and/or critique within contemporary digital culture?

Glitch lives on the other side of the web, the side filled with incompatibilities and error messages, machines speaking to machines in a language we don't speak.

Error during translation: (-3030) Translation path does not exist.

In this space, legacy metaphors from the physical world do not exist; the skeuomorphs of superhighways, windows, desktops and elevators. elements of graphical user interfaces which mimic physical objects

Error during translation: (-3030) Translation path does not exist.

The glitch draws our attention to the arbitrary and constructed nature of information itself, usually concealed. It is the enemy of a stable system, of a seamless user-interface, of the point'n'click universe. What if the dominant paradigm of human-computer interaction was not based on the WIMP interface? How would this change our relationship to glitches and noise?

Glitch is political, anarchic. It inserts an element of play into the corporate genome, like a virus. It brings us back to the surface, to an awareness of the tools which are progressively colonising us. And yet, machines do not intend to colonise anything. Humans do. Artists and theorists such as VNS Matrix, Rosa Menkman , Laboria Cuboniks and Legacy Russell have been exploring how the disruptive potential of the glitch might be harnessed to challenge dominant narratives of gender, race, and identity in the digital sphere.

We ask questions, technology answers, but it answers with something which humans fed into it. A rigid, mapped and marked structure of reality, one which does not respond to the living world.

What happens to life in our embodied actual when the object of our investigations becomes the virtual replicator?

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noise _ thermal stimulation of taste
patent _ art.4rm
xx _ luvl!
Xy _ kostly - speeding thieves on the international genostrada

=cw4t7abs _ the future
= life form [gene konglomerat] the only possible source of new patterns.

01 virtual architecture assemblage of crumple-free materie
the chaotic tremor of finite resolution towards the progress of
01 trajectory as noise constantly resetting the trajectory is

nn

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