If today, when we have perhaps a thousand different machines, we can distinguish a thousand different noises, tomorrow, as new machines multiply, we will be able to distinguish ten, twenty, or thirty-thousand different noises, not merely in a simply imitative way, but to combine them according to our imagination.
— Russolo, Luigi. The Art of Noises. 1913.
A glitch is stunning. It appears as a temporary replacement of some boring conventional surface; as a crazy and dangerous momentum (Will the computer come back to “normal”? Will data be lost?) that breaks the expected flow. A glitch is the loss of control.
— Goriunova, Olga, and Alexei Shulgin. “Glitch.” Software Studies: A Lexicon. Ed. Fuller, Matthew. Leonardo. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2008. 110-19.
Avant-garde artists inspired or disgusted by technology and its societal influence have created a range of artistic responses, the aesthetics of which today’s glitches strangely seem to comply with. A glitch reminds us of our cultural experience at the same time as developing it by suggesting new aesthetic forms.
— Goriunova, Olga, and Alexei Shulgin. “Glitch.” Software Studies: A Lexicon. Ed. Fuller, Matthew. Leonardo. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2008. 110-19.
A glitch is a singular dysfunctional event that allows insight beyond the customary, omnipresent, and alien computer aesthetics. A glitch is a mess that is a moment, a possibility to glance at software’s inner structure, whether it is a mechanism of data compression of HTML code. Although a glitch does not reveal the true functionality of the computer, it shows the ghostly conventionality of the forms by which digital spaces are organized.
— Goriunova, Olga, and Alexei Shulgin. “Glitch.” Software Studies: A Lexicon. Ed. Fuller, Matthew. Leonardo. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2008. 110-19.
I think that Arnulf Rainer is the film that best approximates to the essence of cinema as it exists because it uses the elements that constitute cinema in its most radical, purest form. There’s light and the absence of light, there’s sound and the absence of sound and their becoming in time. Just that.
— Peter Kubelka, interviewed by Christian Lebrat. 1988.
Glitching represents an attempt to understand the liminality between translation and interpretation though methodical alteration and systematic intervention of digital files.
— Meaney, Ewan. “On Glitching”. 2008.
(…) still, many artists seem interested in keeping the technical medium silent in their work. Notable exception can be seen to the world of avant-garde filmmaking, those celluloid scientists who scratched and warped and, through a process of their own hands, reminded us that cinema was a medium and not just a vehicle.
— Meaney, Ewan. “On Glitching”. 2008.
Visual representations also undervalue the knowledge we have by virtue of having bodies. Sensitivity to changes in our environment through time develop best if we learn to use all our senses, not just sight. (…) In his 1945 book The Phenomenology of Perception, the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that perception is a process in which an active body enters into a “communion” with its surrounding. Perception, for Merleau-Ponty, is a continuous interaction that involves the subject’s intentions, expectations, and physical actions. There is no purely active “sender” nor any purely passive “receiver,” he wrote; without action, there can be no experience of anything “external” to the subject. “The body is our general medium for having a world; sight and movement are specific ways of entering into relationships with objects,” he wrote. For Merleau-Ponty and other critics of visuality as a privileged medium of understanding, it is meaningless to talk about perceptual processes of seeing without reference to all the senses, to the total physical environment in which the body is situated.
— Thackara, John. In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2005.
These systems [John Conway’s Game of Life] are not models or representations of something else but, rather, evolving, self-organizing entities whose behaviour cannot be described as the sign production of a human programmer. It would be wrong to classify them as simulations (dynamic models that mimic some aspects of a complex process), since there does not have to be any external phenomenon they can be said to simulate. The fundamental question, however, is whether a system capable of producing emergent behaviour based on an initial system and a set of generative rules should be considered a semiotic system at all. Since it can exist without any semiotic output, as a closed process running inside a computer, the semiotic aspect is clearly arbitrary and secondary to the process itself. To the researcher, the semiotic aspect is indispensable as a front end, a practical means to observe and gain knowledge of the evolutionary process going on inside, but this does not imply that the process is basically a semiotic one or that the studied object should be classified as a sign, only that the activity of observation by necessity has to involve a semiotic system of some sort.
— Aarseth, Espen J. Cybertext, Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
In all this, process is still not present as something essential, only as something mechanical. In our profession of architecture there is no conception, yet, of process itself as a budding, as a flowering, as an unpredictable, unquenchable unfolding through which the future grows from the present in a way that is dominated by the goodness of the moment.
— Alexander, Christopher. The Nature of Order, an Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe. Book Two: The Process of Creating Life. 1980. Berkeley, California: The Center for Environmental Structure, 2002.
