brilliant essay on glitch linguistics: the Machine in the Ghost Static Trapped Mouths by Curt Cloninger

 

 

 

 

 

 

GltchLnguistx: The Machine in the Ghost / Static Trapped in Mouths Curt Cloninger 2010

Republished in Nictoglobe, Vol. 18, Issue 4 (2010), Amsterdam, The Netherlands, with the kind permission of Curt Cloninger
'This essay applies Mikhail Bakhtin's language theory of "the utterance" to the machinic event of "the glitch" in order to illuminate contemporary glitch art practices, and to suggest fruitful ways in which they might proceed. I understand "the glitch" to be an affective event generated by a media machine (computer, projector, game console, LCD screen, etc.) running in real-time, an event which creates an artifact that colors and modulates any "signal" or "content" being sent via that machine. In 1962, John Glenn famously defined "glitch" as "a spike or change in voltage in an electrical current."¹ "Glitch" has since come to demarcate a set of audio/visual artistic practices which capture, exploit, and produce glitch artifacts.
My goal is not to end all conversation about glitch art by ontologically overdetermining what a glitch is and how exactly it works. Instead, I pose this specific, particular position in the hopes of ending some of the more dead-end and circular conversations about the glitch. I also hope this essay will open up more fruitfully problematic conversations, and will lead to less banal, more conceptually rigorous works of art.' ... for more click here