A standard dictionary definition describes glitch as a small mistake, something to be overcome easily:
In fact, if we treat the glitch as an aberration, we miss something critically important. Glitch reminds us of the persistence of the unknown. It contains a certain kind of poetry: a machine made miracle. In order to consider the potential salvation that the glitch may offer, it’s helpful to come to a precise understanding of what glitch is. I’ll offer this narrow definition: a glitch is an analogous anomaly, produced by a mechanical system.
If we accept that glitch has a continuous relationship with the mechanical, we quickly arrive at the digital glitch: small instances of binary
non-compliance, existing within our ever-expanding cybernetic infrastructure. While analog technologies can experience flaws and distortions that might be called glitches, I would argue that the glitch is inherently digital, and such analog disruptions can find more precise definition in other words. It is due to the over-aestheticization of the glitch that it finds its way into our language, expanding its influence and confusing its origin.
We live in close proximity to technology
today, in constant interface with smartphones, computers, tablets,
touchscreens, tap to pay. A glitch, when produced from a digital system, is
evidence of unpredictability. It’s a reminder that barriers between the
digital and analog realms are permeable. It’s a reminder that every
computation, every algorithmic string, contains within it small traces of
the human hand and mind, mostly invisible to the naked eye but still there.
It’s a reminder that regardless of any contrary evidence, the digital system
does hold flaws and therefore must be challenged.
The glitch as a
philosophical perch to consider digital ontology becomes a compelling
argument for open source. A binary system occasionally sputters something
back to us. When technology is held in a black box, we risk missing the
message and jump too quickly to assign magical qualities to technology. This
missed opportunity is exploited everyday by the arrogance of Silicon Valley,
in declarations of their ability to “disrupt” our lives with their products.
These products often, if not always, insert themselves opaquely between our
analog experiences and needs and the relentlessness of the binary. We’re
supposed to be grateful for their mediation of this fraught relationship
that our corporeal bodies and minds have with the merciless, never-ending
strings of 0s and 1s, but what if we didn’t ask for an interpreter but
rather a teacher?
The distinction between interpreter and teacher
is one worth some thought. Perhaps we can say that the ultimate
outcome/output of both the interpreter and the teacher is that of
understanding, but the interpreter places themselves in between the two
systems, acting as a singular point of comprehension and synthesis. The
teacher does the opposite; perhaps first behaving somewhat like an
interpreter but the eventual goal of the teacher is to put two unlike
systems in close contact so a natural comprehension emerges. Both the
teacher and the interpreter create ontological “knowledge” but the processes
are completely different.
All of this to say: our understanding of
the profound importance of glitch may well be positional. Can we lean into
the glitch while resisting the urge to aestheticize? Yes, but only with some
nuanced understanding of both digital and analog systems, both concurrently
at work, in constant flowing tension, in need of one another. The glitch
then becomes an indication that these frameworks can be spontaneously
permeated. The spontaneity of a glitch is key to accepting it as a
‘analogous anomaly’ produced by a mechanical system. A digital system can
contain the potential for a glitch. This potential lies dormant until the
analogous crashes into it, prompting an unexpected digital expression.
Glitch becomes a digital expression of analog energy.
Digital
ontology relies on combinatorial logic. There is no memory, there is no
history; there is only input/{computational.process}/output. If glitch is
output, glitch must be input. Luciano Floridi describes Wheeler’s ‘It from
bit’ participatory universe as a place where “every item of the physical
world has a bottom- a very deep bottom, in most instances- an immaterial
source and explanation” that eventually reduces to 0 or 1 (Floridi 2008,
155). Digital systems attempt to take ownership of domain at a scale that
the analog system would not dare; and when confronted with a glitch outcome,
the digital system can only attempt to reconcile by looking within its own
operation.
The analog world, on the other hand, relies on
sequential logic, built on observations of what came before. The analog
system necessarily recognizes its limitation; within it, we are small, at
times poetic and always carry the faint stink of our pasts. When Kaja
Silverman writes, “...an analogue photograph is the umbilical cord
connecting us to what we have loved and lost, to what is gone because we
failed to save it, or to what might’ve been, but now will never be.”
(Silverman 2015, 4), she’s reminding us that in the analog, we live with
contradiction. Our world is unpredictable and vast. When confronted with an
anomaly, we can only look to the stars and admit that there is much we don’t
know.
Digital systems often carry an illusion of immortality, like
cybernetic dodder weed that’s overrun a landscape; large, consistent,
overwhelming, ineradicable. Glitch reminds us of death, transformation,
release. The act of transposing meaning onto the glitch is further proof of
its sublime nature. The glitch indicates where we stand in relation to the
machine. When we look at a jumble of datamoshed pixels and see something
pleasing, we see ourselves in the machine. To a layperson, a glitch can be
maddening, beautiful or unreproducible. To an engineer, a glitch is a signal
of the human hand in the computer, it’s an invitation, a provocation. The
glitch gathers all this multiplicity, analogicity so near to the
motherboard, and it reminds us of life's beautiful failures.
As
Silverman writes of photography, “it helps us to see that each of us is a
node in a vast constellation of analogies.”, so does the glitch, as it's
tethered to the machine and yet so inexplicable and beautifully flawed. We
see ourselves inside the machine, via the glitch, bound by the system and
yet able to break the system. Silverman continues, “These similarities are
authorless and untranscendable because there is no metaphysical agency to
which they could be imputed, and no other domain to which we might retreat,
in order to be alone...It is also only through this interlocking that we
ourselves exist. Two is the smallest unit of Being.” (Silverman 2015, 11).
If the glitch is a byproduct of the union of two discrete ontologies, the
digital and the analog, could it represent the existence of a third space? A
radical space of 2, the union, a hybrid, a place to acknowledge and visit
but not a place that can currently sustain the full pressure of being.
Floridi,
in his denunciation of digital ontology, essentially argues that there are
two ways to interrogate this framework: metaphysically and mathematically.
He allows that the metaphysical argument is stronger but less knowable,
mathematical argument is weaker but more defensible (Floridi 2008, 155).
Thomas Metzinger calls this ‘the ineffability problem”, the inherent
difficulty or even impossibility of arguing with metaphysics. We, as analog
beings, are always constrained by the limit of our perception of the world.
With our sequential logic, we anticipate the digital output. When we meet a
glitch, the non seamless interaction with technology reminds us of things it
often wants us to forget; our bodies, control over our compulsive behaviors,
our relationship to these products.
This casual forgetting of self
is interesting when we consider Deleuze’s idea of the paradox of infinite
identity (Deleuze 1969 (1990), 2). Within an analog framework, this idea
results in Alice in Wonderland, who Deleuze observes as an embodiment of
vastness, containing all paradox within. She can be large or small, there is
no fixed identity only the continual process of constructing understanding
of the world around her. This idea seems to be foundational to Metzinger’s
self-model. “The self is not a thing, but a process”(Metzinger 2009, 208),
every day we wake up and reinforce and reconstruct our ‘selves’. This
ability for continual reinvention, reinvigoration of identity clashes with
the sequential logic of the analog world. Vastness grounded within
ourselves, our bodies, is an almost incalculable concept. It is a limitation
that our analog framework cannot handle well; but the digital easily enjoys
the concept of vastness, so long as it can reduce and quantify the input.
Metzinger writes “Maybe metaphors can help.
Metaphorically...you—the organism as a whole—were continuously mistaking
yourself for the content of the self-model currently activated by your
brain. But whereas the Ego is only an appearance, it may be false to say
that it is an illusion; metaphors are always limited. All of this is
happening on a very basic level in our brains (philosophers call this level
of information processing “subpersonal”; computer scientists call it
“subsymbolic”). On this fundamental level, which forms the preconditions of
knowing something, truth and falsity do not yet exist, nor is there an
entity who could have the illusion of a self.” (Metzinger 2009, 209).
Similarly, Deleuze recognizes that good sense is not merely metaphor,
it is the fundamental underpinning of analogical thinking. He states of good
sense: “it affirms a single direction; it determines this direction to go
from the most to the least differentiated, from the singular to the regular,
and from the remarkable to the ordinary; it orients the arrow of time from
past to future, according to this determination; it assigns to the present a
directing role in this orientation; it renders possible thereby the function
of prevision; and it selects the sedentary type of distribution in which all
of the preceding characteristics are brought together.” (Deleuze 1969
(1990), 76).
Digital frameworks cannot really handle paradox but
they can hold metaphor, if we can get close enough. This is why the logic of
both the digital and the analog are relevant and important. We mustn’t be
made to choose between them or we will quickly find ourselves ill situated
to take in all the paradoxes of being. As two parallel systems, moments of
intersection are of particular importance. Hence, the glitch.
In his 1955 lecture series, Jacques Lacan stated,
“...nothing unexpected comes out of the machine.” (Lacan 1991, 305). This is
perhaps correct, with the singular exception of the glitch. He also notes
that the emergence of cybernetics in the last 100 years necessarily relied
on the ability of the digital to function as the real, without subjectivity.
And yet we would miss so much if we only lived in a real world, devoid of
subjectivity. The idea of subjectivity carries the burden of a singular truth. And yet we know that the world is complex, holding the lived experiences of the multitudes. Silverman rightly points to the analog photograph as important well beyond its “evidentiary value” (Silverman 2015, 4), noting that photographs do not merely document, they also reveal. In this, she's pointing to the revelation of connection through difference. Within our contrasting experiences, there is some, not absolute, but some, possibility for shared understanding. The real and the subjective have a relationship; as sad as a world without subjectivity would be, a world without the real would also be a chaotic horror. Perhaps we can also say that a world without digital would be less vast and vibrant.
All of these conclusions seem logical, but in closing, I’d suggest that it’s important to
hold the glitch in regard, as a passageway between these two worlds. A
glitch begins energetically in the analog, is held dormant in the digital,
and is activated by the analog, resulting in a hybrid expression. A
phenomena. If we receive the glitch as an invitation, we might be able to
step outside of aesthetics, outside of productivity, outside of all these
concepts that freely hitch themselves to these ontological frameworks. We
can perhaps begin to use the digital as metaphor, allowing us to see
ourselves and to understand ourselves better. In this process, there is a
promise for a more interesting future, one that isn’t self replicating but
rather one constructed from new possibilities.