Dot, Dash, Scribble.

My zine: Hauntology and Ghostmodernism (2014).

I created this to give a flavour of my, at the time, recently completed MA thesis which was titled: Lest We Remember: Capitalist Realism and Ghostmodernism in 21st Century Popular Culture.

Once upon a time, in a land that now feels far far away, there once lived two dogs. And these two dogs had set up their home upon a utopian plane that was built from sand. Unbeknownst to the dogs, the sand that surrounded them had once resided in the hourglass of Chronos. But one night, many moons ago, a coven of crafty wizards, high on promethean ambition, snuck up upon an unsuspecting Chronos and smashed his hourglass with their technical magic. The sand did fall upon the earth and from it the crafty wizards had so acquired the core material that they did so need to create the new land that they did so desire. And it was upon this newly formed territory, created from the sands of Chronos, that the wizards would attempt to build their new utopia, whereby they, and all that did live there, could be as gods.

And it was so here, upon this virgin land, that the two dogs did but choose to live. For upon this land the dogs could truly feel as though they were free to be themselves. And it was for this sense of freedom alone that they had been drawn to settle there at all. This was because in the land from which they had fled, the dogs had both been enslaved by man. For the land they had so departed was created by an immortal God that did so decree that every living thing that was not man upon his planet’s face was to be subjected by him and his laws. And this world that the dogs had so escaped was indeed ruled over by man as it was man that had been made in the image of God. However, the new world, which had been created by silicon wizards from the sands of Chronos, had so been designed as to wrangle this power away from man. As it was so the wish of the wizards to share and weave this power amongst all those that chose to live within their utopia. For it was this that had always been the wizards’ intention when their magic had smashed the sacred hourglass. The firm laws upon which man had based his power in the realm created by an immortal God were in the world built from sand to be eroded away. In this world built by promethean wizards it was so decreed upon its foundation that all that lived there could be themselves gods of their own devising. And with this promise the world did grow.

The biggest freedom that the dogs did acquire from fleeing the tyranny of man, by setting up home in the land built from sand, was the evasion of the names that Adam had cast upon those that were not man as he. No longer were the dogs to be wholly defined and influenced by his labels, for they did not matter upon the land built from sand. Creatures of all kinds, genders, shapes and creed could meet together, in harmony, and learn from each other as equals there. They could be free from the ties wrapped around them by the tort language of man. It was this that the dogs did most enjoy about their new home for they could express themselves by discarding the cage that man had so placed around them and duly express what they did themselves wish to see. And this was to become a key ideal of the land built of sand, for the wizards did so wish that all that did reside there were to be but gods, with all, and not just man, acquiring the power to name. For within this new utopia, no-one had need know that the dogs were dogs, as the identities imposed by the word of man had lost their potent power in the world built from sand. And it was from this equality that trust did grow, for the fear of the other begot by the labels of man was transformed into the love of what the other (in oneself and others) could be.

And so, in this utopia, one of the dogs did so befriend a mouse who he had thought was a cat. This cat that he did so meet was new and unwise to ways of the land made from sand. One day, the dog did ask his friend the cat, “Cat, why is it you are so fond of cheese?” “For I have never known a cat to like cheese as you so do”. The mouse did not reply. For she felt nervous about revealing her ‘true’ identity to the dog as she did so fear it would end their friendship. The dog did sense this nervousness in his friend the cat so did not ask again.

When they next did meet, they talked fondly as they always would, as equals and as friends. This time the dog did ask the cat, “Cat, why is it you do so seemingly fear other cats when they are around?” “For I know of no other cat to be so frightened when around others of her kind as you so are” Once again, the mouse did not reply. For she felt nervous about revealing her ‘true’ identity to the dog as she did so fear it would end their friendship. And the dog did sense this nervousness in his friend the cat and so did not ask again.

When they next did meet, they talked fondly as they always would do, as equals and as friends. This time the dog did ask the cat, “Cat, why is it that you do so squeak?” “For I have never known a cat to squeak as you so do” The mouse did not at first reply. For she felt nervous about revealing her ‘true’ identity to the dog as she did so fear it would end their friendship. The dog did sense this nervousness in his friend the cat and did not ask again”

However, this time, the cat who did so love her friend the human, decided that she in fact ought to reply. “My dear human, you see, the reason I do so like cheese; and that I do so fear other cats; and that I do so squeak; is that in the land that men do rule, I am not the cat you do here see, for there I am but a humble mouse.” “Please do not let the others know of this my human friend, for you see I do so love my life here as a cat, I would not want them to feel so deceived by my actions as you must so do now” However, the dog did not, as it so transpired, feel at all deceived for he did so love his friend the cat.

The dog did so think that his friend had so bravely told him about her identity in the world outside, for this was, unbeknownst to the cat, seldom done in the land made of sand. He then did say to the cat “Cat, I do not care that you are mouse, and I am so sorry for making you feel as though you had to reveal your identity outside of this place to me.” “For you see, all that you think you see in me is itself not as it seems, for I, in the world of man, am not the human you think you so know, for outside of here I am myself nothing but a humble dog.” And although the cat had always thought the dog she did so love to be but a human, she likewise did not feel deceived by him, for their friendship did not so depend upon the restraints of their physical form. And it was but telling of the utopia in which they lived that they could but meet and be friends at all, for in the world of man from which they had both departed, a mouse and a dog would never have met as equals that could mutually converse. But here, upon the land made from sand, their friendship could but flourish, for the labels that Adam had there sewn had no relevance in the utopia that had been built by promethean wizards.

And so, upon this land, it so transpired, that both the dogs did choose to live their lives as though men; but not as men that did enslave as did their previous masters, but as men of technical skill that did so strive to be as wizards themselves. For in the land built from sand the dogs had found their calling. Their creative compassion could be unleashed, and they did so as men who could change the world around them. And as they lived their lives in this new land they did so use their skills to help others, who like themselves and the cat were setting up home in the utopia dreamt into being by wizards. The dogs did so make it their business to help ease newcomers into the world and would so manipulate the sand on behalf of those less skilled, using the power of man for the good of all and not just the good of one.

And these dogs did so go on to become living legends in this their adopted homeland. They were so immortalized in the lore of the land by the phrase they did so decree, that ‘upon the land built from sand, nobody need know that you are a dog’

And they would, it would at least seem, go on to live happily ever after in that land made from sand.

But, alas, they did not, for the power of man they thought they had escaped, slowly did seep into the land made from sand. And the power of man that was meant to be shared amongst all that did live there, started to gather into private dunes to which the people did flock. These dunes were created and watched over by man who did so wish to be king, fostering a new formation of an older order of mankind upon that land made from sand.

These dunes did so grow and grow, and as they did so they began to coalesce into towers of mirrored glass which reached up high into the clouds. And those that did govern these towers which stretched up high did so suck out of that land made from sand the power that should have been, or so it was intended to be, equally shared forever by those who did call that place their home. These men that would be royalty did hoard this power for themselves, so trying as they might to become a ‘true’ God of the new domain. However, multiple clans did so emerge to attempt to attain this ultimate throne in the land built from sand. And so several fiefdoms do to this day do so continue to challenge each other for the right to rule, offering all kinds of illusions and tricks as lures to get the people of that there land to so yield to them; but what so the fate of the dogs that did choose to call this land their home?

For the empires of towers to amass their strength they did so require that those that did live in upon land of sand to relinquish what they had sought and claimed as their own. For if the rule of man were to conquer the sandy domain they had to reclaim their order of names; the primordial power that Adam did wrought. This was so done by imploring all who did live there to remove their masks and reveal their ‘true’ names in exchange for golden trinkets and slights of hand that did amuse and surprise. They would in this trade be watched over and protected by man who would rule once again. And so people did flock to live under the shadows of these new obelisks, they did so pay fealty to bask in their glory and so dutifully received their chimeric bounty.

But unlike the world of yore, where mankind did so clearly rule, the power that the new lords did wield was not so easy to been seen in the new order that was forming in the land made of sand. For the towers in which the people did so become drawn, were made of mirrored glass that reflected the ethos of land as was before. It was so then believed, that despite the emergence of dunes that had begot towers, that the people still lived in world in which power was still equally shared. It was so believed in the hearts of many that did dwell upon that land that the ideal that the dogs did so express was still alive and well despite the arrival of man. This pretense was so keenly maintained by tampering man as to disguise his power-grab as but a trivial affair.

However, those who could see that their utopia was closing in on rack and ruin did so challenge this fealty compulsion. They did not wish to give up the power they had so once proudly claimed, they did not want to exchange their self-defined identities for that which did glisten. Our dogs did so lead this revolt against those who would so wish to rule and govern the land made from sand. For they did not want to come to heel besides man once more. But as the power of man did grow, their influence did begin to stretch out across the sand, in doing so they did so manage to change the norms of the land. Those that did not offer their knee out of free will were then so compelled by growing might to do so by all conquering man.

The dogs resolve did so remain steadfast in the face of this change, they would never bow down to the whims of those whom would be kings. They continued to live by the norms of the land as were before the dunes that begot towers of mirror did grow. Try as they might the men that would so rule could not get the dogs and their kind to convert to their new order as had so many of the people that did live in that land made from sand.  For this act resistance, so viewed as treachery, man did punish the dogs as to make an example of them for all to see. And they did so hope that this would bring to an end the cause for which the dogs did stand. The men that would be royal cast their power of language to discredit the dogs by transforming them both into the most vilest of trolls, linking their cause with that of the creature most foul. Try as they might the dogs could not shake of this image thrown down upon them, for the power that the invading men had acquired was now too strong to be broken by the simple will of a few.

The dogs were now shunned from what had been their utopia. Once heralded amongst the people who lived in the land built from sand, the dogs were now scorned for running amok. Their reputations were tarnished, and their cause, now linked with the ethos of trolls, had been twisted by man as a tool of their own. For now the positive lore had become a dark warning message for all; if you have something to hide you must be up-to no-good, just like the dogs who were turned into trolls.

And as time did pass in the land built from sand, few would recall the days when the dogs did so freely roam. But the few that still do mournfully remember those glorious days and continue to fight to keep their spirit alive via their joyous lament. But the dark shadows of the trolls that were cast by man remain strong in their deafening rhetoric embrace of that land that was made from sand. For the freedom that the wizards had so once sought remains as but a name tied to no fact. For now in that land where dunes became towers, all that was other became shrouded by blinding storms of sand whipped up by the word of man. This did so force all that did their dwell to either embrace the mirrored havens that stretch up to the clouds or so flee the land they did so once call their home.

Those that do now try to loudly reclaim the ethos of yore in that land made of sand are instantly cursed by vengeful man. Transformed into trolls, as so were the dogs, they are cast down from the towers into the lands of the sand now turned into chaotic windy wilds ravaged by words uttered by man. And the people that now so live within those mirrored towers of man do so willingly fear leaving their loving embrace for it is said that down upon the dusty ground evil trolls doth lurk.

And so, down there, amongst them, our poor lonely dogs do so solemnly roam, eternally lost and obscured by the sand that once upon a time did so liberate them from the heel of man. They do so now forever wander once more, trying as hard as they might to find a utopia that they once again can so proudly call their home.

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The Glitch and the Eel

The highly quotable media theorist Marshall McLuhan in his book Counterblast (1969), a work which in a typographically rich manner addresses issues surrounding media and the human condition, stated that: “Today we live invested with an electric information environment that is quite as imperceptible to us as water is to a fish”(1)

This statement seems to be no less pertinent today than when it was first coined back in the late 60s, in fact for many, in an age of near-blanket internet coverage, it could seem to be not only more meaningful, but perhaps to an extreme even prophetic in summing up our everyday relationship with the digital.(2)

Later in 1977 on Australia’s ABC Network, on a TV program called Monday Conference, McLuhan replied in response to a question about media education that: "The hidden aspects of the media are the things that should be taught, because they have an irresistible force when invisible. When these factors remain ignored and invisible, they have an absolute power over the user”

These two quotes brought together help to initially demonstrate in a palpably efficient manner what I believe to be the core theoretical impetus behind the contemporary use of the glitch aesthetic today when used to its maximum artistic potential. Rather than simply being an interesting look, Glitch Art, when employed beyond mere visual pleasure, aims to reveal the water to the fish; like an electric-eel it thrashes about the data-streams, disrupting the flow to create perceivable ripples in the smooth flow of the normative operational condition of our digitized information technologies. Whereas we once actively surfed the web as a unique act, we no longer find it a necessity to highlight the activity as being distinct, as today rather than simply skimming the surface and riding the waves we are now fully submerged in a data drenched environment.

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Towards a Definition of Glitch

Before continuing further we need to first establish what is meant by the term Glitch. Its origin is not a simple one, the 1989 Oxford English Dictionary does not, perhaps characteristically of the term, provide a straight-forward answer, for it states that the term’s etymological background is unknown. One attempt at applying a history to the term was attempted by the American journalist and lexicographer William Safire in his New York Times Column, ‘On Language’ , in which he put forth the suggestion that the term glitch: “probably originated in the German and Yiddish glitschen, meaning 'slip,' and by extension, 'error”.<...>

Despite this, the commonly (whether correct or not) first attributed use of the term glitch, as we know it today, is attributed to astronaut John Glenn in his 1962 book Into Orbit in which he describes a glitch as: “a spike or change in voltage in an electrical current”.<...> What links this ‘original’ usage of the word glitch then, and today’s understanding of the term, is the notion of a sudden unplanned state change within an electrical system.

Today on hearing the word glitch, as we will explore further, we commonly interpret the term as referring to a sudden humanly unexplainable break or disruption in a computer system. More specifically, according to artist and theorist Iman Moradi, a glitch is an observable “...artifact resulting from error. It is neither the cause, nor the error itself, it is simply the product of an error and more specifically its visual manifestation. It is a significant slip that marks a departure from our expected result.”<...>

This explanation of glitch provides us with an interesting account of the term as it acutely notes that a glitch is only a glitch when it is visibly recognized as such. In other words the glitch operates at the level of the age-old metaphysical conundrum of ‘If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?’. What distinctly then makes a glitch a glitch is when we as end users interpret there to be an error present. Computer systems do not ‘think’ like us, they execute code as a start/finish process; any mistakes are a result of our ghosts operating within the machines, within the code we implanted within and choose to execute. A glitch then does not so much reside in technology per se but within human interpretation of technological outputs. As Curt Cloninger & Nick Britz put in the ‘Sabotage! glitch politix Man[ual/ifesto]:

“Because the machine has no cause/effect expectations. It simply does what it does. A glitch is experienced when a human mis-expects one thing and winds up with something else. Without hope, anticipation, and expectation, without a sense of rightness and the way things are supposed to be, there is no glitch. There are merely events in the world. When humans filter out the glitch as so much noise interfering with their status quo signal, when humans refuse to engage with and be thrilled and terrified by the nuances of the glitch event, they are making a [con/pre]servative political decision.”

Leaving the larger context of the above comment to one side for the moment, the concept of noise in relation to glitch is important and as of yet has not been noted in our search for a clear definition (which itself has been a somewhat noisy affair). The power of glitch as artistic affect is derived via the foregrounding of noise in mediums for which it has been the aim for successive technologies, particularly communication technologies, to minimize and ultimately overcome. Each new technology sells itself as being of higher fidelity than the last (even if in-fact, as with the mp3, data is actually ripped out rather than improved). Take for example the move from what is now retroactively called Standard Definition TV, to High-Definition TV, and slowly but surely the move into 4k TV. The history of our communication technologies show that we continually attempt to move closer and closer to a platonically perfect signal/system. The ultimate techno-utopian dream here resides in a literal realization of Baudrillard’s hyperreal, the development of the ability to create fully immersive virtual realities. In order for the fantasy to materialize into a seamlessly pure fiction the coders and engineers must do battle with noise in order to minimize, if not attempt to try and entirely eradicate, any erroneous disruption in their hypnotic reality emulations. The glitch artist as a reactionary force position themselves by contrast as agents of techno-reality distortion, they aim to insert noise in order to reveal and probe the artifice inherent within the tyranny of images that our communication technologies conjure, they attempt to break the illusion they hold over us. As Rosa Menkman puts it in her Glitch Studies Manifesto from the book The Glitch Moment(um):

“The dominant, continuing search for a noiseless channel has been - and will always be - no more than a regrettable, ill-fated dogma. Acknowledge that although the constant search for complete transparency brings newer, ‘better’ media, every one of these improved techniques will always possess their own inherent fingerprints of imperfection”

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Glitch as Noise

This concept of having to overcome erroneous noise in order to perfect communication systems has its initial origins within the cybernetically informed communication model developed by Shannon and Weaver at Bell Laboratories in 1948. The model provides us with a basic mechanical understanding of communication that views information as being non-context specific, in other words it views communication as a simple matter of getting a desired a signal from one place to another. As such the model is entirely based on the process of data transmission between machines, in doing so it views noise on an entirely mathematical level, it puts aside humanistic considerations such as linguistics, culture and other context based factors in order to ultimately improve the clarity of an intended signal.

                (Visualization of the Shannon-Weaver model of communication, 1948)

The model consists of five basic steps. Firstly we have an information source that produces a message, the transmitter converts said message into a signal or code that is, for the medium being considered, suitable for transmission. This signal is then directed through a channel, be that for example an FM transmission or via internet protocols. This signal is, all being well, then received by the target and translated back into a message that can then be forwarded onto its intended final destination. (Source -> Encoder -> Channel -> Decoder -> Destination.) This could be described as the absolute basic core idealized process that all communication technology models itself upon even today. 

However, in the model is the added external factor labelled as noise. Noise describes interference with the perfect transmission; it disrupts the signal flow and can be interpreted by the human at the destination source as a random error (a glitch). Noise shows up in communication as unexplained variation between what was sent and what was eventually received. In analogue communication technologies this noise can be clearly felt and understood as an interference in the transmission from source to destination, for example static hiss and the blending of sounds on long-wave radio.

In our digital era however the conceptual understanding of noise-error is less easily apparent as our working understand of the technology becomes ever more obfuscated. Media theorist Friedrich Kittler highlighted this issue with digital technology back in 1994 when he explained that on a superficial level the graphic user interface hides the operation of the computer from the user. The point here is that the interfaces of our digital technologies are purposefully designed, initially with the best of intentions in mind, to make their operation seamless, to hide noise, but in doing so they limit the end-users fundamental understanding of how the systems that they use actually work. For all intents and purposes our devices take on the appearance of working like magic(3), the fundamental reason why they actually work becomes veiled to the average user, we just know that they function as long as we input our required spells correctly.

The key difference here between the analogue and digital is that with digital systems a signal is either received as a whole or not at all, there is no clear interstitial state as there is with analogue. This ultimately results in a lot less natively noticeable interference with digital technologies; this does not mean however that error cannot occur, but the manner is not an everyday occurrence as it was with our pre-digital communication devices. Whereas the noise in an analogue system could be clearly understood for what it was in theory, a disruption in signal strength, in a digital system the noise is not so clearly recognized as noise. As far as digital systems are concerned a glitched image that can be opened is being displayed correctly, according to the code at hand, because if the system interpreted their to be excessive noise present, i.e. if the file were corrupted, it would fail to open the image at all. The interpretation of error then, lies ultimately with the analogous end-user. We find that the glitch as a result of this, rather than being a digital or technological phenomenon, is in fact a distinctly human one for it the failure of our worldly expectations to materialize which brings the glitch into being.

Taking a step-back for moment then, we should remember that the Shannon-Weaver model, as noted, does not take into consideration the human, it is an entirely systems-based communications model. The difference between noise in an analogue and digital system is that theoretically there cannot in fact be noise, as we know it in the analogue sense because in digital communication systems, as noted, bits of the signal in a either arrive or they don’t. One should therefore get either a pure signal or an entirely broken signal, there is no technical ether state, no communicational limbo, as there often would be with analogue.

Yet, we know in our everyday lives that this isn’t the phenomenological truth of the matter. Glitches occur all the time in the operation of our devices. Audio can distort, images can in their rendering temporarily look off-kilter, peripherals can become unstable. While our systems appear to getting closer and closer to an idealized noiseless state, these glitchy ripples serve as a reminder that entropy can never truly be mastered.

In the glitch art world, these naturally occurring glitches are known as ‘Wild Glitches’ (or ‘pure glitch’). When they are captured, often via a screen grab, the glitch is no longer actually there, what remains is an artifact of a glitch that once happened. The grab is a trace of a process that took place and appeared incorrect to the human user, this is because a wild glitch is an affective event that happens in real time.

                                                            (a ‘wild glitch’ caught by Curt Cloninger[4])

The crux of the matter here then is that a glitch is only a glitch when observed by the human end-user as such. Crucially what this serves to highlight is that the analogue has not been entirely removed from communications systems, and as such the ability to interpret error in an analogue mode is still in existence. This is because the initial input into computer systems is derived from an analogous world, humans have to initially program the computer systems, which could create unwanted noise. This can come particularly troublesome when one bares in mind that not only are systems becoming more and more complex but more often than not they are being built upon a babble of other computer languages be they contemporary or legacy. On top of this, when the data reaches the required destination, there is a human on the other end which requires analogue representations of the digital sphere in order to be able to understand the languages of data. Our physical senses in other words are not directly compatible with the digital world, they cannot yet be patched in directly, and this is why we require our devices to convert the digital into analogue forms, be that via our digital displays, audio output and in the future potentially haptic interfaces. The glitch fundamentally then serves to highlight that we haven’t yet transcended our bodies, and furthermore, as we will explore, they remind us what it is that our computers actually do, they are translators of data; they act as the village shaman once did, they are intermediaries between us and another magical world that is not natively accessible to the human (despite our hand in its creation). So powerful the act of translation, so seamless and instantaneous, we can often forget that it’s going on at all; the act of glitch serves to reminds us of this fact. To quote H, Manon and D, Tempkin’s Notes on Glitch:

“We tend to think of glitch as a purely digital phenomenon, but nothing could be further from the truth. Glitch is an intersection of analog and digital modes of (re)production. Reveling in the blocky, layered, decomposed underside of digital transcoding, glitch art is an anamorphosis in which digital has been poked by its analog other;; it is “digital gone wild” when grazed by an analog fingertip.”

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Can Glitch Still Disrupt?

Glitch art, when at its absolute best, is utilized by the artist to highlight the biases and errors inherent in any translation, they demonstrate just how much faith and devotion we pay to our digital communications. The glitch artist wishes to reveal the political implications inherent in this, to show how our lack of fundamental understanding could potentially be exploited. Ultimately the purpose of glitch is to highlight that noise and entropy haven’t disappeared, the world is not seamless and we must not simply pay fealty to the technology gods who reside in their manifest clouds. In the more grounded language of Sabotage! Glitch politix Man[ual/festo]:

“a glitch reveals itself as political when it reminds us that technologies are not neutral tools, but rather are symptoms of our worldview and cultural norms: when encryption breaks, leaking user credentials—how have we come to view privacy when facebook fields feedback into themselves—how have we come to view identity when emails garble and voice/video over IP slip/drop—how have we come to view relationships.”

The issue with glitch art today resides in how effective it is in achieving this aim. While it no doubt highlights various issues as noted, does it have the power to maintain its critique of contemporary technology culture? The political power of glitch resides in the very moment when the human engaging with glitch feels implicitly entangled and enthralled by the very systems that gave materiality to the glitch in question. To be effective glitch art has to go beyond a simple revelatory uncanny moment and move towards a subsequent self-analysis of one’s own interaction and relationship with digital technologies. The act of filtering out noise in order to return to the fantasy of a platonically pure/noiseless signal is an attempt to maintain a myth of pure transcendence. The problem for glitch art today however is that the noise it wishes to highlight is itself becoming a mere aesthetic, something which now finds itself doubling-back and cloaking that which it wishes to rip-open.

Glitch as a style has found itself becoming a recognized and codified aesthetic, in doing so it has been integrated and normalized. As it becomes more widely used in everyday popular culture the glitch loses it element of surprise, its uncanniness, the noise of glitch becomes noiseless; when the use of glitch becomes a means unto itself it is no longer noise but the intended signal. In one sense this case could be argued against intentionally produced glitch art from the outset, but the key difference here is that the glitch artist is specifically utilizing the style, and more specifically in their case the method of glitch, to provoke questions. The glitch style when used in popular culture is primarily used as mere aesthetic, a cool style, a signifier of authenticity. The effect of this cultural broadening is that when one now encounters glitch art we automatically begin to filter out the political content inherent in the message. Its normalization serves to neutralize the intent, in the same way in which the punk movement, once brimming with fecundity, is now sterile, sold back to us intermittently as a style hinting at an authenticity which is no longer there, with all the radical questioning content is stripped bare. Glitch art then could be facing a similar fate, as Manon and Temkin state:

“When glitched images appear in mainstream motion pictures—for instance the Joker’s videos in The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008), or the camcorder footage in Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008)—they are always deployed in the name of authenticity, and never in order to call into question the illusion of (digital) cinema itself. Rare is the feature film in which a glitch goes unexcused by the premise of a film-within-a-film. In mainstream popular culture, glitch is deployed not as a marker of artifice, but as a signifier of raw authenticity”

             (Glitch as mere effect - from Post-Glitch by Jon Cates <http://nooart.org/post/81334324619/cates-postglitch>)

                   (Animated Gif from the Adventure Time episode ‘A Glitch is a Glitch)

The core result of this is that the glitch has now seemingly doubled-back upon itself, rather than revealing to us the noise inherent in any communication, instead of provoking us to consider the politics of our communication systems, glitch is used paradoxically to hide away the underside of our technologies. As a normalized aesthetic the glitch just becomes yet another background to either ignore or take notice of only on the most superficial of levels. The issue here filters problematically into news coverage of technology. We frequently find that the term glitch is used simply to brush over discussion of the problems with, and the politics of, digital technology; the term gets used to focus discussion towards the effect of a glitch in a system, but rarely the inherent cause. Companies and Governments alike throw out the term glitch in press releases and interviews to avoid having to explore why an error occurred, as long as it is fixed and the effect of the problem is effectively managed that’s all that seems to matter.

In previous news reporting of computer system error, before the popularization of the the term glitch, the commonly used go-to word was bug. The difference between these two words is of considerable note. The computer bug conjures images of a process gone awry, gone native, something that has to be caught and controlled. While of course still a myth in itself, it nevertheless demonstrates the active element of having to find and eradicate an erroneous error, it demonstrates more actively how wild and unstable computer systems can be. In popular imagination today we tend to see our systems as being seamless, smooth and always entirely efficient. This in itself isn’t entirely baseless, our technologies have naturally improved on these fronts, but as glitch art has demonstrated this appearance can often simply be an environmental illusion, a slight of hand. The substitution of the word bug for glitch in technology reporting only plays into this, for as noted in our search for a definition a glitch, if its origin is indeed as suggested by William Safire derived from the German and Yiddish term ‘glitschen’, meaning slip, the whole conceptual notion of error, when the term is used in this context, is altered. When major errors in systems, such as the recent NYSE outage, are labelled as a glitch meaning mere slippage, we brush away the seriousness as just a blip. If it were again described as bug we may view it very different, as something out of control, and as such we would seemingly take the issue more seriously, in perhaps the same manner that a hack, an attack from outside, is seen as more important than a ‘simple’ glitch.

The term of glitch then, when used in this context and in an environment where glitch is normalized, while admitting to error, is used to paper over the cracks in our digital technology systems, a glitch sounds harmless, a minor slippage that is soon corrected, seamless reality restored. Glitch when used in this context loses its power to interrogate the world. Glitch only works when it is viewed by the end-user as an uncanny disruption, leading to self-reflection; the banalization of the term limits and blocks out this uncanniness from emerging. The term glitch is frequently being used then to paradoxically filter out noise rather than exploring it. The problem with this, as Cloninger points out is that: “...filtering noise is never "politically" neutral; it always involves an initial and sweeping value assessment which then excuses us from having to make subsequent, case-by-case value assessments based on specific individual positions.”

If glitch art is to remain in effective in challenging our assumptions of the digital world it needs to stifle this neutralization of its core motif. Is this still possible? I would say it could just about be salvaged as the glitch-mode currently used in popular culture is only a small segment of the plethora of different methods and styles that reside within glitch art as a whole. Where the battle rests then is in the reclamation of the term, to make it political once-more rather than simply a tool used by the black mages of the PR world to cloak real-world issues of which the public should conversely be encouraged to engage with and question.

To end as we begun, by evoking Marshall McLuhan, it is telling that he states that: “The role of the artist is to create an anti-environment as a means of perception and adjustment”. What is meant by this is that the role of the artist is to create a dialogue, to create other worlds in which we can reflect about our own. If the fish are to see the water they need another environment in which to see there own. Glitch did this, but then the alternative environment got dragged deep-down into the water and failed to make the same ripples in reality, to be effective again it needs to create new paradigms of thought, new anti-environments. This I believe is possible for glitch as it is inherently effective at showing us the ghosts that haunt our machines, this is of great us because as McLuhan states: “propaganda is environmental and invisible.The total life of any culture tends to be "propaganda"... It blankets perception and suppresses awareness, making the counter environments created by the artist indispensable to survival and freedom”

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(1) - David Foster Wallace also uses a similar metaphor in his 2005 commencement speech to Kenyon College titled This Is Water: “There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how's the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

(2) - It is from this that the digital-duality debate emerges, primarily as a conceptual misunderstanding between digital natives and other groups. The argument, put crudely, that the divide between online and offline is a false dichotomy is neither true nor false, like the fish in the water the recognition of the medium (being online) does not efface the fact that the fish is surrounded by water.

(3) - Indeed Apple famously in 2010 utilized the phrase “it’s magic” to describe the iPad. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlgiWO8_BiQ> In more recent times Google, in a blog post discussing their logo change, stated that: “Today we’re introducing a new logo and identity family that reflects this reality and shows you when the Google magic is working for you” <http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/google-update.html> and in the UK Virgin Media state that the reason their broadband is faster than competitors is due to the “...magic in our cables” <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nq9YYISEJzs>. There are of course many other examples out there.

In both an act of nostalgia, and ‘research’ for an art project to do with religiosity and the web, I’ve recently found myself searching through YouTube listening to multiple captures of the jaggedly dulcet tones that are produced by the 56k modem handshake.

None of them sounded quite like my old modem, the pitch never quite as high, the electronic squeal never quite the same. So why the hunt for a personally derived technological haecceity scrap which may or may not exist in the manner in which I remember?

The original search was not initiated with this personal element in mind, but it soon, perhaps inevitably, descended into it. In some small way the fact that what I intended as a quick look-up soon turned into a nostalgia hunt only seemed to confirm my conception of the possible significance of a transcendental affect poetically embedded within 56k handshake sonics.

The idea that instigated my search was the conception that the tones which the 56k modem whined out act very much like Gregorian chanting, or perhaps more meaningfully, like the ‘Om’ mantra emitted during certain meditation practice; the point being that the ritualistic like process of connecting enmeshed with the sounds in a way that perhaps instigated in the individual a mental mechanism allowing for a conceptual switch into another mode of existence. These tones, in some manner, and with hindsight, literally prepared users to adjust to a different level of consciousness. This libidinal association between the 56k noise and the world it subsequently opened up no doubt resulted, for me at least, in a personal attachment to the signal.

It is perhaps from this initial experience of web connection that for many people the digital dualism meme first implanted into their minds. The audio generated by the modem would demarcate clearly both the difference between and transportation from, the material world into a seemingly immaterial one. Like the effect of chanting or meditation, one was forced to think about a change in state, the traversal from one mode of consciousness to another. Yet today, with seemingly instant and ubiquitous connections, from wi-fi to mobile data, this dualism, this personal and deep transcendental reflection about the nature between the physical and digital, which was once built into the connection medium, is dramatically lessened if not altogether lost.

To initially caricaturize Cyborgology’s Nathan Jurgenson et al’s position on this, good riddance to such thinking, the binary opposition of online/offline is now (and always was)  false. The duality was in essence always incorrect despite how the 56k experience created a palpably ontological schism between online/offline. To demonstrate how our experience of the web has since changed Nathan quite rightly points out:

“...what research as well as those who actually use social media tell us is that social media has everything to do with the physical world and our offline lives are increasingly influenced by social media, even when logged off. We need to shed the digital dualist bias because our Facebook pages are indeed “real life” and our offline existence is increasingly virtual“

While this clearly articulates how many people today experience the web and makes a good contribution to dismantling the dualist myth, I nevertheless think that attempting to get rid of a dualist analysis is not entirely useful. Rather, by retaining, in certain instances, the ontological framework of digital duality, we can explore a variety of issues around our interactions with the internet; That is to say, digital dualism can be a theoretically useful fiction. It analytically separates the digital from the physical, pushing us to examine and notice how each influences the other and maintains distinct qualities. Without this useful fiction, it is perhaps all too easy to fall into the strong augmented perspective in which distinctions between digital and physical are erased entirely.

The augmented position is today the commonly experienced perspective, due to the relatively seamless manner in which access to the network is phenomenologically felt. For many we are, in our day to day existence seemingly always already connected. For example, at home, I, via numerous devices, find myself connected to wi-fi, when I leave to go to work my phone switches onto mobile data, when I get to work it switches back onto wi-fi automatically. This all happens seamlessly, ‘like magic’, the duality of online/offline phenomenologically and quite literally under these circumstances, no longer makes sense as we in the West are always already connected.This is not to say that digital dualism was more valid in the 56k era, but that its dismantling maps more logically onto the experiential ways people connect to the Internet today.

However, the ontological fit between an augmented perspective and seamless digital mediation seemingly reduces the useful fiction of digital duality; it affords an easy forgetting of the ways in which digital media pervade, affect, and shape social life.

Today, it is only through breaks and cracks in communication systems that the average user is thrust into reflection about their relationship with technology and technologies’ independent effects. If the dualist framework were to be flattened out of existence entirely we could potentially be left with one-dimensional thought as these breaks can be occluded within the strong augmented perspective.

While using a 56k modem did not particularly require strong technical understanding of how the technology worked or how it interacted with the greater communications infrastructure it nevertheless foregrounded that a technical process was taking place, that a connection was being established where there wasn’t one before. While one didn’t need to know specifically what was happening, we knew that something was, there was a clear distance which provoked reflection. Connections today are silent; , there is a disappearing experiential  divide between digital and physical, and while this reflects a truer sense of how networked technologies are not isolated from our physical world what can and does get occluded as a result is a degree of everyday critical distance.

As such it is increasingly only via system failures, which are becoming less frequent, that one is plunged back into a more palpable dualist relationship with the network, albeit momentarily.

What I should make clear is that I’m not arguing that digital dualism is the only effective means of a critical relationship with digital technology.; However, as an everyday framework, reflection is embedded into the dualist standpoint, making it a useful tool..

While it is right to highlight that the online/offline binary is a false one, that does not mean that the split itself is not a useful one to occasionally have. The everyday erosion of the dualism and the theoretical flattening of online/offline creates a structure which actively encourages a lack of everyday critical thought; it is in part because of this that the Snowden revelations came as such a shock to many who did not consider the socio-political implications of technology and it is equally this same very reason that they soon quickly disappeared as an area of concern as soon as the media circus switched focus. It is my view that a quantum hinterland between the two nuanced camps which both are and are not epistemologically valid is perhaps, in light of all this, the best position to take.

(Posted in response to the recent chatter around Aspiration, seemingly stemming from this article by Tony Blair)

The Only Way is Essex can be said to fall into the broad media aesthetic category known as Lifestyle or Aspirational Television; a category which arguably first came about in late capitalism and has continued to grow and develop into our post-fordist precariat period. As the name suggests, the aesthetic is designed so that the audience do not simply watch the content but also aspire to follow the lifestyles depicted, lifestyles which are always intertwined, made possible, by joyous capital. In looking at the aesthetic, media critic and satirist Charlie Brooker points out that this type of stylisation is not new per se, but that typically such content resided solely within the domain of contemporary advertisings' attempts to sell us products. However, the style of such advertising is not that of a simple a sales-pitch in which the benefits of a given product are promulgated. Through the clever use of signifiers, contemporary advertising wishes to manipulate the libidinal impulses of the audience via a variety of semiotic techniques and direct them towards commodified solutions that can satiate desires which they themselves have attempted to create and provoke. So for example, an iPhone is not simply a technology product, but a signifying tool, portraying ideals such as cultural liberalism and cosmopolitanism; buying the product is to also, on the whole, to buy the semiotics. What we get then with such advertising, is not simply, as marketing 101 theory likes to put it, an attempt to match a product to the customers needs, but as with Barthes two-orders of signification, contemporary advertisements go a step deeper, with the signifiers that product portrays nearly always being just as, if not more important that the item sold; with the product itself ceasing to matter entirely. This is clearly on display in the opening of Norcross's autobiography, in which the items themselves actually cease to matter, whereas the brand names and what they connote reign supreme; commodity fetishism unleashed.

(Norcross: ‘This morning I woke up alone in my own bed. That is to say, my king-size bed, in my three-bedroom house. I looked at my digital Rolex to see the time, then got up and opened my Louis Vuitton curtains to see the view towards my dad Mick's massive farmhouse, with its stables, dog kennels and giant fish pond with thousands of pounds' of koi carp.)

With aspirational television this manipulation of the libidinal has leaked from advertising and into the entertainment content. Such shows do not satiate the audience with its surface product, the content itself, in the traditional Fordist sense. What such TV programmes do provide are lifestyle images, a cornucopia of empty signifiers from which we can selectively indulge as our 'needs' require; the need being that of neoliberal self-actualization, as is pointed out by Allen and Mendick when they write "The production of the neoliberal self requires ongoing 'identity work". TOWIE can be seen as a Baudrillain style gift from capital that assists the audience in this identity work as demonstrable in the introduction to the book titled The Only Way is Essex: Official Guide to Living Life the Essex Way which states:

“But let's face it: looking good takes time and effort and needs to backed up with a firm belief in who you are and what you want - something the TOWIE crowd have in spades. We can all stand to learn a few tips and tricks, yes, even dry academics trapped behind dusty old desks! Whether you're an aspiring Essex boy or girl, or already have attained that glorious state, this book is dedicated to you (p. 7)”

Underlining this then, what aspirational content ultimately promotes is the now seemingly ubiquitous normalization of the ontological domination of capital, or Capitalist Realism, for it is only through capital that life(style) itself can seemingly exist (with the term ‘style’ now seemingly denoting capital or value), or at least that is the image portrayed in the aspirational aesthetic, with existence only being a choice of lifestyle signifiers. As Pawlett points out, it is Baudrillard's belief that "As individuated beings, with symbolic ties broken, we are ill-equipped to be 'social' animals we need help - for example, in displaying 'our' fashion sense or 'our' social status - and the system provides it" Capitalism then, is to be seen as the great enabler, and with alternatives quashed it is unsurprising that Generation Y indulge themselves evermore within its praxis.

It is worth noting here the co-option of the term aspiration by capital. As already demonstrated, but not directly mentioned, the term has become intrinsically linked with capitalism to the same extent that the term 'value' has become 'naturally' tethered to financial worth. No clearer example of this can be seen than in rhetoric of the Conservative Party who in 2013 coined the slogan ‘Aspiration Nation’ in a public relations ploy devised to justify savage cuts to public services, as well to backup the belief that the private sector will make up the resulting loss. The term, which when uttered was often followed up by those espousing it with the explanatory phrase to the effect of "for people who aspire to work hard and get on, was used multiple times in the 2013 Spring budget, as well as at the Conservative spring conference, in which Prime Minister David Cameron hammered home the link between aspiration and capital when he insisted "Don’t let anyone tell you Britain can’t make it in this world – we’re the most enterprising, buccaneering, creative, dynamic nation on earth....To get Britain on the rise we need a whole new economy, more enterprising, more aspirational.”. 

To end then, we can see this use of the co-opted term in many of the autobiographies of the TOWIE cast, by extension we can sense how the term has seemingly now been naturalised into Cameron’s capitalist formation. Gemma Collins' writes in her book titled book ‘Basically...: My Life as a Real Essex Girl’:

“Growing up in Essex had filled me with aspiration. I wanted a big house and a flash car... As I got older I knew I had two routes to get where I wanted to go; I could meet a rich man who would look after me (the dream of a lot of Essex girls) or I would have to work hard and get myself there.”

(Originally posted on In Media Res for Black Mirror Week: http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/2015/05/07/ghost-black-mirror-technology-spectrality-and-magic)

Our modern communication technologies are magical and spectral but their ubiquity has rendered them, along with the world they inhabit, increasingly banal. It’s only when there’s a crack in their seamless operation that we awake to curse that our black mirrors won’t cast our spells.

This utilisation of occult terminology isn’t simply flippant, as Jeffery Sconce documents in Haunted Media, communication technology has since its inception been linked with the spectral; be that a literal belief that they could communicate with an empirically provable ghost-world; to the postmodern condition in which technologically mediated spectres play with our ability to maintain a ‘reality’ distinction from the technological ethereal.

Arthur C Clark’s famous  3rd dictum states: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”; this shouldn’t be seen to simply apply to science-fiction as it also informs our everyday understanding of communication technology whose language is magical; from installer wizards that setup an interface with the digital ether to tech-gurus that assist us when our digital magic goes awry.

Charlie Brooker  literally cracks the surface of a Black Mirror at the start of each episode, in doing so he summons forth the digital ghosts that surround us. Brooker’s catoptromanic divination haunts us by reflecting back uncanny futures from behind the shattered screen. These tales, as with all good science-fiction, are not so much concerned with an actual forthcoming future, for what is presented is a ghost future, a summoning of a present which has not truly existed but has the potential to cross over.

I’m often asked why I don’t have a Facebook profile. The fact of the matter is I don’t really have a complete answer I can fall back on. If provoked further I’ll often cite a privacy argument and go on to roughly explain how Facebook uses tracking cookies to surveil journeys across the web. This is of course not unique to Facebook but they remain one of the biggest beneficiaries of our online surveillance consensus. Many of the people I use this line of reasoning with are surprisingly naive, they are often unaware that this open tracking is taking place and upon hearing about it most remain unconcerned; in fact it can often be the case that the "what have you got to hide" line gets flung my way upon hearing about it. The only simplistic answer I can give in response to this really is that it’s the principle that’s the issue. However, to the average millennial this is an empty argument to make, principles are quaint, an Instagram aesthetic as solid as air.

A recent press release for a not at all bias ‘report’ from PwC about the Future of Work promotes this nonchalant attitude towards our data. It opens by stating that: “The type of data profiling used by retailers and advertisers could soon become commonplace in the workplace”

It goes on to say that: “Our research reveals that employees are more open to sharing their personal data than previously thought. The millennial generation of workers are particularly happy to share their data meaning this kind of data monitoring by organisations could become routine in the years to come”

The press release clearly is very enthusiastic about this integrated data-driven future in which our online social capital would determine our success in the working world. And of course why wouldn’t it be? If HR departments can convince us to share our data with them in the search for work it brings down their costs. We would no longer need to go through the stress of an interview, an algorithm could instantly assess our suitability for a job role based in part on our online behaviours. But from this a permanent level of underlying anxiety would arise. Yes we wouldn’t have that nerve-wracking day, but in exchange we would have to be always policing ourselves online, we would have to make sure we never transgressed ever. With cookies and other mechanisms tracking our every step, one false move could lead to disaster. Who knows what the employment algorithm would consider to be negative, viewing sites deemed even marginally too transgressive could easily land us with a negative flag on our profile, locking us out of decent employment for years. This scenario is naturally excellent for those in positions of power who want to maintain our neoliberal status-quo. This privacy invasion, this further blurring between work and life would freeze the present still, we would be unable to advocate provocative new ideas out of fear it would ruin us economically, the powerful would become unchallengable.

Perhaps all is not lost however, this potential future, despite already in some limited sense operating, does not have to progress. The press release which pushes the positive boon this set of circumstances could have for HR departments attempts to brush over one of its own statistics. It is stated very early on that: “The research reveals that the younger generation are more open to sharing their personal data with their employees, with 36% of Generation Y workers saying they would be happy to do so.”