TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

Introduction, by Samy Benammar

In 1999 a film was released in movie theatres which would quickly become the symbol of the beginning of the digital age, providing this age with some of the visuals which would soon constitute its characteristic aesthetic. This film was The Matrix, by the Wachowski sisters. On screen appear green letters on a black background showing transitions in synthetic images on the border between the figurative and abstraction. These symbols were a reference to the encoding of data, which would become a major concern leading up to the twenty-first century. But The Matrix did not invent this visual technique; it borrowed it from the group ASCII Art Ensemble, founded in 1998, which used it to alter images of popular culture. The most remarkable example of this was Deep ASCII (1998, Vuk Ćosić), which repurposed the pornographic images of Deep Throat (Gerard Damiano, 1972). The ASCII Art Ensemble, in a way not unlike a kind of irreverent visual avant-garde typical of Dada, extended its visual experiments, whose true origins were online, in the homes of Internet denizens using their computers to appropriate images which had escaped their reach before then.

Various techniques for manipulating the image developed using this model: in the online community, where the free exchange of information prevails and in the context of a digital medium in which various chance elements emerged out of unstable software, Internet users and artists seized hold of this new form to create unusual visuals quickly and with few resources. In these visuals digital errors due to the manipulation of information, the multiple encoding formats and the lack of standards for handling files were increasingly put to use. This is how, in a process which is difficult to date, as it took place through volatile discussions and in discussion spaces of which little remains, the term glitch – initially used by NASA to describe a problem with its machines which had not yet been explained – gradually came to describe any inexplicable digital error. After aesthetic use was made of these errors, the term ended up being employed in a new expression: glitch art.

In 2010, the movement reached peak activity, leading to a symposium organized by Nick Briz, Evan Meaney, Rosa Menkman and Jon Satrom – some of the most influential artists working in glitch art. This meeting of artists and scholars examining this aesthetic, entitled GLI.TC/H, was held again in 2011 and 2012 before coming to a halt when the vogue for glitch art passed. During this short, condensed period, thinking about the glitch took form, examining in particular both the nature of glitch art, which involves an uncontrollable digital error and the controlled aesthetic use of this, and whether the term was appropriate: although new, it appeared to refer to image deterioration practices from before to the digital age (such as Mothlight by Stan Brakhage, who in 1963 worked on film stock with the same idea of texture, or Decasia by Bill Morrison, who in 2002 created an aesthetic out of the decomposition of nitrate).

A fairly simply definition of the glitch was provided by Gregory Zinman in his article “Getting Messy: Chance and Glitch in Contemporary Video Art”:

A study of glitch should attend to the practice as a material mode of expression, as well as a means of seeing and thinking about the world. [...] We understand a glitch as something that indicates a technology’s inability to perform its assigned function.^[1]

In her book Glitch Studies Manifesto (2009-10), Rosa Menkman emphasizes the idea that glitch art should not be confined to an aesthetic, or to a purely technological dialogue, or to a marginal social posture. In this way, the glitch, in its ontological interrogation of the digital, becomes an aesthetic in the service of an experimental, non-compartmentalized fringe. This fringe is a form of expression derived from communities appropriating popular culture – think of the work of Jon Satrom distorting Rihanna – and seizing hold of the digital medium, as seen in the work of ASCII.

Finally, glitch art was very strongly marked by this period of reflection and experimentation, which appears already to constitute a historic moment. In 2008 there was, just as we saw in The Matrix, a use of these techniques in spheres far removed from experimental milieux, such as the Kanye West videoclip Welcome to Heartbreak (Nabil Elderkin, 2008), which uses datamoshing and in which some saw the end of glitch art, once it was taken over by mainstream media and became a stylistic effect, losing its subversive dimension. Nevertheless, the work of artists such as Jacques Perconte and Takashi Murata shows that this period of defining the glitch can also be seen as a birth, because the popularity of glitch art has made possible a shift of the issues from an ontological perspective to a more aesthetic dimension, in which, for numerous contemporary artists, the glitch becomes a new opportunity.