The term “Glitch” in the environment of (not only) computer software stands for an unexpected event in which the running of a system deviates from its planned behaviour. Put simply, then, it is an error…
Glitch as an artistic mode of expression, through its various metamorphoses prompted by the rise and fall of the dominant technologies of the time, focuses on the critical examination and use of random, often disruptive elements in an otherwise ordered technological system. In the past it was television and video; today glitch artists and theorists (alongside music, too) deal with objects affected by digital code, algorithmisation and programming languages, in other words by the whole ecosystem of modern computers.
An important characteristic of a “glitch” in a system, whether hardware or software, is the fact that it is a deviation from smooth running whose outcome cannot be estimated in advance (Fuller, 110). Especially in the context of software, a glitch means not the syntactic and logical errors of a program but a momentary technical problem that may be external to the running of the program: for example, a brief drop in the transfer speed of an internet connection or in the write speed of a hard disk. Players of online computer games will recall the term “lag”, which denotes, for example, the chaotic behaviour of the player’s character, showing itself as “freezing” or jumping around in the space of the virtual world without the intermediate steps being rendered.
Put simply, a glitch is an error. We need not qualify it further in order to say that as soon as a Glitch appears in a software system, the smooth running is interrupted and the system does not respond as anticipated not only by the user but also by the designer. If we label the pre-designed, planned behaviour of a system, together with all the unplanned behaviours that are nonetheless valuable to the user in the end because they satisfy his goals, as A, then a Glitch is something that stands outside A, as the negation of A, NON(A).
This arithmetic clearly privileges utility and focuses on the software system as a tool designed by its creator to provide the friendliest possible functionality, guiding the user quickly and without problems towards fulfilling his needs. The approach to making software in which the elementary unit of the design philosophy is a “need” or a “goal” is not the only one in use; on the contrary, over the last 40 years several theories and methods of how to design software could be seen in software development. Among the best known are participatory design, goal-oriented design, human-centred design, activity theory, the phenomenological approach, or, in the last two decades, the emphasis on user experience and a holistic approach to designing software, and technology more generally, in which the designer takes into account not only the situational context of human-machine interaction but also the wider context of the environment in which the interaction takes place, which ultimately leads to a conception of software as digital artefacts that participate in socio-cultural processes. The approaches mentioned above are studied in detail by the academic field of HCI or, more specifically, interaction design. In the literature of these fields, however, we will not read about Glitch as a concept that would influence the discourse of human-computer interaction. On the contrary, if the technical literature mentions Glitch at all, it is “glitch” with a small “g”, errors that must be avoided in design. The question is: what does Glitch have in common with software, or even with user interface design?
Glitches interest artists and theorists because they make accessible to the user-viewer parts of the system that were not meant to be seen; they uncover internal mechanisms that are normally hidden from the user’s eyes. Glitches in video playback can uncover otherwise invisible steps of compression algorithms; a glitch on a web page may, for example, show the user a system pop-up window, a so-called “alert”, in which, apart from a generic error message, a highlighted position in the code may appear, signalling where the program stopped working.
Since the code of a program itself is today as a rule always hidden from the user behind a graphical user interface (GUI), the glitch materialises precisely as a visual artefact. Its appearance can be aesthetically interesting enough for artists to begin formalising an initially random phenomenon with an algorithm and then using it as material and as an artistic palette. This evolution from a one-off system error to controlled chance demanded that the kinds of glitch could be precisely named and distinguished. That is why we speak of the former as “pure glitch”, whereas a glitch imitated for aesthetic purposes is called “glitch alike”.
The theorists Olga Goriunova and Alexei Shulgin note that Glitch represents a genuine, authentic aesthetics of the computer and of software. They argue that the aesthetics of software has always adopted elements and conventions from other spheres and media: the ubiquitous metaphor of the desktop, or even the older paradigm of human-computer interaction, the command line, takes its inspiration from older technologies such as the telegraph.
Goriunova and Shulgin’s argument starts from a “negative” definition of an authentic software aesthetics: only when something does not work does the computer, and software, show its true nature. Since the computer is a technology existing in a wider socio-cultural context that defines what relationship people have with the computer, we know historically that most of the population became interested in computers only when computers were both financially affordable for them and offered them a certain utilitarian value, that is, the fulfilment of user goals and desires already mentioned at the beginning of the text. Computers became part of society without users knowing how a computer works. Even today, for most people the computer is a black box whose content is mediated mostly by a graphical user interface. It is the GUI that is the contact surface between the machine and society (Brejcha). If, then, we are looking for the nature of the computer and its authentic aesthetics, which is a social construct, we must in my opinion look for it precisely “at the interface” (which need not be only graphical; see, for example, the popularity of NUI – natural user interface). That is where we should look for that authentic aesthetics, because it is there that the authentic nature of the computer and software is formed. The aesthetics of software = the aesthetics of the (G)UI.
(2) One can certainly agree with Goriunova and Shulgin that the making of GUIs continues the concept of re-mediation, defined by Grusin and Bolter in their book Remediation: understanding new media, in which the GUI makes use of the metaphors and idioms of earlier media. In the end, every medium re-mediates, makes use of media that already exist; therefore to accuse software designers that their creations, which re-mediate and absorb existing metaphors and elements above all from the real world, produce an inauthentic aesthetics is to say that no making and design of software can meet their requirement of authenticity. And that for one simple reason: only God creates ex nihilo. New solutions build on what exists.
Jan Michl, a design theorist, describes this relationship as an “umbilical cord” by which the results of continuous, systematic and purposeful inquiry are connected with the past, the present and the future. In the words of the philosopher of science Karl Popper: “[…] if someone wanted to start from Adam, he would get no further than Adam…” (Popper). For Jan Michl, as an advocate of realistic design, sees design as redesign. Michl claims that every functional complete product, as the output of design activity, is not created ex nihilo but is inevitably “the result of redesign, i.e. the outcome of the work of many designers, or rather of the gradual small and radical improvement of previous solutions, whereby none of the individual participants in this process is able to foresee or plan the complexity of later solutions” (Michl, p. 24). Michl adds that knowledge of such precedent solutions, one’s own or other people’s, distinguishes an experienced designer from a beginner (Ferenc, p. 47).
That is why borrowing, copying, re-mixing, synthesising montage and the like cannot a priori be judged inauthentic or uncreative. The problem is not the use of these methods but the question of when quantitative changes lead to qualitative ones. That is no simple task, and the answers may often be arbitrary, because evolutionary changes are continuous rather than discrete in character; nevertheless, they will differ from Goriunova and Shulgin’s search for an authentic aesthetics in one important point: instead of defining the aesthetics negatively, an authentic aesthetics can be defined positively. By that I mean an aesthetics that starts from the existing form of software design, from the existing solutions of designers. It is an evaluation of the aesthetics of software based on what the great majority of software users experience, on what shapes social thinking about software design and on what software designers draw from for their new and upcoming projects. Glitch draws on what does not work; the positive aesthetics of software on what works.
(3) In the last decade, software designers have realised that carrying metaphors over from the physical world into the context of software considerably and needlessly affects the behaviour of digital products.
The media theorist Steven Holtzman notices the limits of imitating non-digital objects too faithfully in the digital world:
“After all, however interesting, pleasant, comfortable or enthusiastically received these practices (remakes) may be, they rest on borrowings from existing paradigms. They were not created with digital media in mind, and as a result they do not exploit the specific and unique potential of digital worlds…” (Holtzman, p. 15)
After the success of the American company Apple in applying the design philosophy of skeuomorphism, which proclaimed that for user-friendliness and usability it is important that users can make use of already learnt patterns of behaviour that they commonly use in the physical world — in the terminology of design theory, that they discover as quickly as possible the “affordances” that a product provides — it was inevitable that other companies too would want to follow the same, it must be said successful, strategy. But software development moved forward hand in hand with newly available hardware. Ranges of available devices of variable dimensions and capabilities demanded of software makers either adapting the code for each device separately, or changing their approach to making software so that a single code base would work on as many devices as possible. Software had to adapt to hardware, to be responsive. At first it was the makers of web pages who faced this problem; with the arrival of mobile, smart devices, however, the makers of native applications ran into the same problem too. The solution was to break away from the tried-and-tested but limiting theoretical-aesthetic skeuomorphism, which used detailed bitmap graphics to simulate the look and textures of natural materials. Bitmap graphics, by their very nature a fixed raster of pixels, are not suitable for making software that is supposed to adapt to different screen sizes.
The first elaborate alternative to the ageing skeuomorphism came only from Microsoft, which for the new version of its mobile operating system created a design language, originally called Metro, that through typography, photographs and animated interactions brought “authentically digital” experiences and that “goes beyond the rules and properties of the physical world to create new and engaging possibilities in a purely digital world” (Modern design at Microsoft: Going beyond flat design). Microsoft’s designers drew directly on the “International Typographic Style”, that is, the modernist graphic design of the first half of the 20th century influenced by practice in Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands and Russia. The authenticity Microsoft proclaimed was not merely an advertising slogan. The designers of this American giant were aware that they were creating something truly new. They deliberately gave up most of the metaphors and idioms of software user interfaces used until then, and refused to draw on the physical world and its affordances. They flattened the whole UI and pushed the unnecessary graphic elements of the interface (in English, chrome) into the background, with the result that the content itself came to the fore: text, photographs, videos, sound and so on. Metro design appeared at precisely the moment when the community of software designers was tackling problems arising from the rigidity of bitmap graphics. Metro design, or “flat” design, which is the name of the design style derived from Metro, uses vector graphics, which can be described entirely mathematically and are therefore arbitrarily scalable. An ideal property if we do not know on which device the resulting software design will be displayed. The arrival of Metro design marks a real breakthrough in the aesthetics of software. Its mathematical basis is much closer to software and to the culture of the computer. It is “digital-native”.
Apart from mathematisation, Metro also announces another trend: a desire for transparency. Every user interface mediates. When we want to pick up a book from the table in the physical world, we do not click on the START button and choose the relevant command from a menu. We simply do it. Software designers may have realised that the graphic imitation of the world limits them and is unsuitable for the digital world; yet they understood that the less the human user has to click to get to the desired goal, the more functional the user interface will be. In other words, the less UI, the better.
That is also why in recent years, thanks in part to existing hardware, user interfaces have been appearing that allow the user to manipulate data faster, more naturally, without mediation. This style of software design is called NUI — Natural user interface. It is a further evolutionary stage: from the command-line interface (CLI), through the GUI (graphical user interface), to NUI.
At present, by NUI we mean above all multi-touch devices, but also new types of controls for game consoles, in which the player’s own movement is translated into commands in the game. An interesting historical contribution that took a critical stance towards the dominant paradigm of displaying data while browsing the internet was the alternative web browser netomat. Its author, Maciej Wisniewski, designed a browser that did not display data from the internet in a traditional rectangular window with all the usual elements we know to this day; instead netomat, which had no fixed GUI, simply displayed the data in a virtual space as objects flying around. The power and above all the aesthetics of the concept were multiplied at the Data Dynamics exhibition at the American Whitney Museum, where the flying data objects of netomat were projected onto the walls of the gallery room. The user interface, the software design, was removed. What remained was an immersive experience and an “intimate” connection with digital data.
Bolter and Grusin notice this desire for a transparent UI:
“Designers often say that they want to create an ‘interface without interface’, in which there will be no recognisable electronic tools — no buttons, windows, scroll bars or even icons as such. Instead, the user will move through space and interact with objects ‘naturally’, as in the real world.” (Dvořák, p. 72)
We arrive at a surprising conclusion. Judging by the current direction of software design, and by some theoretical texts, it seems that the positive aesthetics of software is fluidity, transparency, the minimisation of GUI elements; that is, the ideal of the user interface is, paradoxically, its complete removal.
Although it would be tempting to say that the authentic aesthetics of software design really is the focus on an “interface without interface”, that would be an inaccurate claim, for it would overlook an important analytical distinction that Goriunova and Shulgin also neglected: software divides into code and interface, and while code can exist without an interface, the reverse is not true. This means that code as material has no inherent form. Just like the material for making, say, a kettle. Atoms of metal and plastic do not inherently constitute any shape of objects; they are only one of Aristotle’s four causes of the coming into being of objects: causa materialis. It is only the causa efficiens, for example a craftsman or a designer, that gives form to the object and the material. The purposes for which a form comes into being, and hence the aesthetics of that form, vary. Here lies the mistake of the Glitch theorists mentioned: they understood software above all as material for digital art objects, but not software as design. This leads them to regard the successful interaction elements for designing GUIs so far as insufficient for an authentic aesthetics of software; they write: “we consider dynamic menus, [..], direct manipulation of on-screen objects, buttons, system sounds, models of human-computer interaction” to be insufficiently rich. (Fuller, p. 112)
Although in the history of software making there were tendencies in which “richness of interactions” was regarded as uncritically desirable, for example the use of Flash technology on the web platform, current software design, also under the influence of a more critical and theoretically better informed approach, is more minimalist. It is not that designers blindly follow functionality alone; that can be rejected given their growing interest in user experiences and the pleasure of using software systems; so neither can it be some “engineering-rational dictate” of the aesthetics of software, which, on the contrary, the modernists of the first half of the 20th century, such as the artist Van Doesburg or the architect Le Corbusier, really did call for:
“Our epoch is against any subjective speculation in art, science, technology etc. […] in order to be able to create new objects, we need a new method, in other words, an objective system” (Van Doesburg, Van Eesteren)
A house is a “machine for living in”, designed by means of objective design (Cross)
Metro design and flat design are a response to more complex changes in the role of technology in society: the growing number of smart devices that contain some form of GUI; devices that users use outside the standard spaces of the home, so that a demand (but also an opportunity) arises for designers to take position, space and time into account in both the look and the functions of software. It is not sustainable, economically, technically or visually, to design a different GUI for each type of device. That is why we speak of current software as adaptive and responsive, reacting to context. Designing for today’s software world means understanding that the aesthetics of a design must be a helper, a partner, to its users. I cannot imagine Glitch being the visual language and strategy for designing software for the moments when I run out of petrol in a traffic jam on the main avenue and need to find the nearest hospital on my smartphone as fast as possible, because my partner on the back seat has just gone into labour.
Is this too instrumental a view of software? It is a view from the opposite side to the one from which Goriunova and Shulgin approached software. A view which they nonetheless neglected and whose inclusion in the discussion of the aesthetics of software is somewhat eye-opening: if we take the image of the kettle mentioned earlier as an illustration, it is clear that a non-functional, holed, leaking kettle that gives electric shocks and does not heat is an interesting object for techno-artistic inquiry; if we come home tired from work and want a cup of coffee, a “glitched” kettle will probably be the last thing we would wish for.
In my text I have proposed examining the aesthetics of software as the aesthetics of current software design. At the moment it is adaptive, responsive, contextual and minimalist. It is a view that tries to overcome the negative view of software as defined in their contribution by the theorists Olga Goriunova and Alexei Shulgin, and that offers a view of the aesthetics of software when it “does what it is supposed to do”. I reject the idea that Glitch uncovers something fundamentally authentic about software. For software as design it certainly does not hold, and although I agree that Glitch offers itself as a palette for new media artists, if any aesthetics of software is to be truly authentic, it must be essentially present both in software as design and in software as art. If we find it only in one view, its claim to universality fades.
My view is conservative. That does not mean I cannot imagine a situation in which Glitch really could uncover something universally authentic: if an unforeseen system error leads to software beginning to show signs of consciousness, Glitch will be not merely an aesthetic authenticity but an ontological one as well. More on that in roughly 25–30 years.
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