The Ekphrastic Glitch is an essay, ideas assembled into words.
Excerpt: 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.
Read the essay in full here.
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.
Read the essay in full here.
The Ekphrastic Glitch, 2021