The term “glitch”, in the context of (not only) computer software, denotes an unexpected event in which the running of a system departs from its planned behaviour. Put simply, it is an error, but one that needs to be specified further, because in software development we find several types of them. A glitch as a software error does not refer only to a syntactic, logical or semantic error in the code, but more often to an error where the code is fine and an external factor, such as network throughput, disk speed and so on, is the source of the program’s unexpected behaviour (Fuller, p. 111).
Glitches appear in many objectively perceptible forms, in software mainly in audiovisual form, but with the development of interaction design it is possible to imagine glitches in objects and sensors that target other human senses as well, for example the haptic sensors in modern mobile devices.
Yet it was the audiovisual glitches that established the glitch as a phenomenon worthy of detailed study, and that is why the term “glitch” can be extended to a meaning that refers to the whole culture and the movements that deal theoretically, critically and artistically with the glitch as an object of aesthetic interest. This interest focuses on one of the main properties of the glitch, which is the randomness of its occurrence and appearance. The principle of chance as a factor built into the making of audiovisual works is nothing new in itself, and art history tells us that many avant-garde artists of the first half of the twentieth century played with chance. The way the word DADA came into being, the word that became the name of a whole artistic movement, is just one example of the influence chance had in art.
But chance and the glitch were not attractive to artists and theorists only on a conceptual level. The aesthetics of these audiovisual artefacts was so captivating that the artefacts began to be copied and produced artificially. If chance was at the beginning the dominant aspect of the glitch, how can we then grasp the fact that glitches began to be “collected” like rare souvenirs, whose look was gradually translated into an algorithm that did turn the glitch into a new visual language of its own, yet the mechanisation of their making removed from them their interesting conceptual core, that is, chance? Out of the need to distinguish analytically how a glitch comes into being, the names “pure glitch” and “glitch alike” were introduced, where the first denotes a true glitch that arose from an unexpected problem in a technical system, whereas “glitch alike” is used for a controlled pseudo-randomness created by a human artist for the purpose of aesthetic expression.
The theorists Olga Goriunova and Alexei Shulgin argue that, from the point of view of theory, the glitch as a phenomenon is interesting not only because of its built-in concept of chance, but also because the non-functioning of a system reveals something important to us; specifically, a glitch in the system gives the unsuspecting user-viewer access to otherwise invisible parts of the system, which are hidden behind a working user interface (UI). And it is precisely this voyeuristic look into the bowels of the system that, according to the authors, can also be understood as:
“[…] a manifestation of a genuine software aesthetics. Computers as such do not have a clearly defined aesthetics marked by a certain authenticity and fullness.” (Fuller, p. 111)
The authors go on to argue in their text that the machine has always drawn mainly on the utilitarian principles of its design, which later led to these purely function-oriented designs becoming the very aesthetics of the object/system. According to the authors, the glitch offers a counterweight to such a conception of machine aesthetics by introducing irrational or spontaneous elements into the otherwise technically perfect running of the system. The authors develop their thesis further in the text, yet they keep building on these properties of the glitch in the context of designing software systems. Although I consider the glitch an interesting concept in that it reveals to users what was meant to stay hidden, and so really does give the average user an introduction to the “epistemology and ontology of the machine”, for in the terminology of the theorists Grusin and Bolter: immediate elements are suddenly hypermediated; I see an incoherence in the reasoning of Goriunova and Shulgin, for to me authenticity means above all naturalness. I have no idea why it should be precisely the non-functional, faulty, irrational or human-like properties that represent the “authentic aesthetics” of a software system. On the contrary, I see the anthropomorphisation of machines as what it is, that is, taking something for what it is not, or, put somewhat more obscurely: as de-authentication. None of this changes the fact that the topic connecting the UI, its purely digital aesthetics and authenticity is so interesting that it deserves an essay of its own.
Despite all the obvious dominance of the visual, we find the glitch in music too. My favourite example is the making of the four-part album
The Disintegration Loops
by the composer William Basinski. Shortly before 9/11, Basinski decided to digitise his old audio cassettes, on which he had recorded musical loops. Basinski left the digitiser working for several hours. But when he came back, he found that the tapes had got tangled and that during the digitisation the ferrite layer, on which the audio itself is stored, had gradually been flaking off them. Basinski the visionary, however, let the process continue. The resulting recording is an ambient loop several hours long, expressing a space filled with melancholy. As if the digitisation had captured not only the degraded analogue sound, but also the scene that took place that day, 11 September 2001, and which Basinski could see clearly from his apartment. He saw the collapse of the towers and recorded it on video, from which he then made individual photographs that ended up on the CD cover. Needlessly, in my view: everything essential about that day is embodied, entirely by chance, in the glitched audio track.
FULLER, Matthew (ed.).
Software studies: a lexicon
. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, c2008. Leonardo (MIT). ISBN 978-0-262-06274-9.