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This is an excerpt from a new article (slated for publication in Hz no 19) on the use of glitches in art, and how that use related to a critically engaged media practice:
The term glitch art is an attempt to distinguish between the specific use of glitches in an artwork as opposed to those happening spontaneously in non-art contexts/works: it is also a term that describes a particular media practice identified as being critically engaged. However, the distinction between an unpremeditated technical failure, unstable and transitory, and the use of audio-or-visual artifacts that coincide with these incidental errors, stable and repeatably a part of a finished work may be difficult to identify when encountered in a work since they can (and in artistic practice often are) indistinguishable; the ontological origins of any particular glitch are not necessary apparent in the form of the glitch itself. Various writers on glitch art have proposed terms to identify this ontological distinction between a transitory technical failure (always called glitch) and other variants that are then given a different designation, but which may have the same formglitch-alike (Morandi), domesticated glitch (Menkman). These distinctions are problematic in art, as theorist Curt Cloninger has observed: The term glitch art might apply to all domesticated glitches and all wild glitches that have been captured and recontextualized as art. The might opens the potential scope of glitch art beyond simply those glitches captured in a recording to include wild glitches orchestrated to occur on demand within a specific performace. Digital technology itself, based in sampling, enables the apparently perfect reproduction that is the hypothetical norm which allows the identification of the glitch. What is produced by the immaterial processing of digital technology is an always perfect new example of the work in question, made specifically for the moment of encounter; it is an original. This human-readable form is a pure product of the digitized samples (data) transformed by the decoding protocol. Glitch art is a reflection of how artists have engaged with this underlying structure by looking for, producing or exploiting the errors emergent in any complex system.
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