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Vendela Grundell FLOW AND FRICTION: ON THE TACTICAL PO T E N T I A L O F I N T ERFAC ING WITH GLITCH ART Vendela Grundell Flow and Friction On the Tactical Potential of Interfacing with Glitch Art Vendela Grundell © Vendela Grundell, Stockholm University 2016 © Cover image: Phillip Stearns’s Year of the Glitch no. 64, 2012 © Case study images: Phillip Stearns, Rosa Menkman, and Evan Meaney. Images reproduced with kind permission of the artists. ISBN 978-91-7649-412-7 Printed in Sweden by Holmbergs, Malmö, 2016 Distributor: Department of Culture and Aesthetics Funded by Konung Gustaf VI Adolfs fond för svensk kultur, and Anders Karitz Stiftelse. Contents Introduction 7 Aims and Questions 9 Material 10 Method 12 Case Study 12 Phenomenology 14 Theory and Previous Research 19 Systems Aesthetics 20 Glitch 22 Interface 28 Photography 30 Outline 34 Building an Unstable Photograph: Phillip Stearns’s Year of the Glitch 35 Screen Image I: Index 35 Screen Image II: Archive 39 Photographic Instance I: Apparatus 47 Photographic Instance II: Text 56 Photographic Instance III: Materialization 64 Interfacing an Unstable Photograph: Rosa Menkman’s Sunshine in My Throat 71 Screen Image I: Index 71 Screen image II: Videoscapes 81 Photographic Instance I: Compress Process 82 Photographic Instance II: Combing 90 Photographic Instance III: Negotiation 98 Sharing an Unstable Photograph: Evan Meaney’s Ceibas Cycle 107 Screen Image I: Ceibas Cycle 107 Screen Image II: A Similar History 114 Photographic Instance I: To Hold a Future Body so Close to One’s Own 122 Photographic Instance II: The Unseeable Exchange of Our Parts 130 Photographic Instance III: Portfolio 135 Concluding Discussion 143 Phillip Stearns’s Year of the Glitch: Access and Misalignment 145 Rosa Menkman’s Sunshine in My Throat: Fluidity and Disruption 152 Evan Meaney’s Ceibas Cycle: Coherence and Splice 158 Becoming a Tactical Spectator: Attention, Reflection, and Action 164 List of Illustrations 168 Illustrations 170 Swedish Summary 228 Acknowledgments 229 Bibliography 230 Introduction A glitch is such a minute change in voltage that no fuse could protect against it. Astronaut John Glenn 19621 A glitch is a problem: an error message on a blank website, a camera failing to render correct data. As the quote above implies, the power of a glitch lies in its minuteness. Media theorist Alexander R. Galloway notes that the first glitch was a living bug stuck inside a machine – a bug that is now generated by code that runs digital systems yet also disrupts them enough to reveal their hidden operations.2 To media theorists Caleb Kelly and Peter Krapp, the glitch causes a built-in yet unexpected break in the system – a destructive yet creative act in between design and accident.3 It is embedded into a system yet behaves precariously towards it. Accordingly, glitch is defined as systemic friction in this thesis. The study explores systemic friction in interfaces and photo-based media as they mirror, create and question a flow of information that affects spectator- ship in the wake of ubiquitous computing.4 I use glitches to find such effects, 1First mention of glitch, John Glenn: Into Orbit, 1962, p. 86. Glitch, Oxford English Diction- ary: “a surge of current or a spurious electrical signal / a sudden short-lived irregularity in behavior / a hitch or snag; a malfunction / to experience a glitch, setback, or malfunction; to go wrong / to cause (something) to experience a glitch”, oed.com; Merriam-Webster: “an unexpected and usually minor problem (…) with a machine or device” from Yiddish glitsh, “slippery place”, glitshn “to slide, glide”, merriam-webster.com (retrieved August 8 2015). 2 Alexander R. Galloway: Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization, MIT Press, Cambridge (MA) and London 2004, pp. 185–186. See theory and previous research. 3 Peter Krapp: Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis (MN), and London 2011, pp. 53–54, pp. 67–68. Caleb Kelly: Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction, MIT Press, Cambridge (MA) and London 2009, p. 4, p. 9. 4 Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey: Evil Media, MIT Press, Cambridge (MA) and London 2012, pp. 11–14, pp. 17–18, p. 81, p. 95–96. Landi Raubenheimer: “Spectatorship of screen media: land of zombies?”, Image & Text Volume/Number 22 2013, pp. 27–41. Sarah Kember: “Ubiquitous Photography”, Philosophy of Photography, Volume 3 Number 2 2012, pp. 331– 348. Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska: Life after New Media. Mediation as a Vital Process, MIT Press, Cambridge (MA) and London, England 2012, pp. xviii–xix, pp. 101–102, p. 112, pp. 169–170, pp. 185–186. Adam Bell: “Foreword” and “Photographs about Photographs”, Charles H. Traub: “Introduction”, Ken Schles: “Excerpt from A New History of Photography. The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads”, Vision Anew: The Lens and Screen Arts, Adam Bell and Charles H. Traub (eds.), University of California Press, Oakland (CA) 2015, pp. xiii–xv, pp. 1–6, pp. 15–22, pp. 23–28. Joanna Zylinska: “Photomediations: An Introduct- ion”, Photomediations: A Reader, Kamilla Kuc and Joanna Zylinska (eds.), Open Humanities 7 as a machine that acts out of order reveals its coded configurations as un- stable.5 To consider a break is to consider what is broken – in this thesis, a break in systems governing how photo-based media is made, shared and viewed online. The disruption is minute yet affects how the flow gains mea- ning for a viewer. It points out systemic power and frailty, individual stance and formability: flow and friction. The friction of glitches makes visible a flow that is trivial and abstract enough to be invisible to a viewer. An act of making-visible thus holds a tactical potential: it reveals a pervasive system.6 This thesis is about the tactical potential of such a making-visible, and its effects on the viewer. To articulate how a tactical spectatorship unfolds, I carry out three phenomenological case studies on the websites of three contemporary artists who work with glitches, photo-based media and inter- face display: Phillip Stearns, Rosa Menkman and Evan Meaney. I focus on their photo-based work – displayed through a website interface – to show how online environments can be as much about friction as about flow. As artists’ websites, their display contexts combine art and everyday interfacing. Art thus functions as a means to address an everyday flow by concentrating the experience of a viewer who interfaces with specific artworks in specific displays. Moreover, the viewer’s experience is concentrated on artworks and displays that involve photo-based media and glitches – thereby inserting friction into the flow. I understand art’s ability to sharpen a viewer’s attention as part of an interro- gative practice through which experience is exposed and problematized. As aesthetics philosopher Alva Noë puts it, art may be understood as investigat- ing and exposing the hidden ways in which we are absorbed in organized activities – organizing and reorganizing our ways of being in the world.7 In this thesis, the organized activity that absorbs the individual is the act of in- terfacing with the digital flow – especially with photo-based media. The friction brought about by glitches intensifies absorption as well as questions it. As a consequence, a digitized way of being in the world may be reorgan- ized by tactical action. Such a shift is increasingly important as viewers be- come integrated into visual technologies of reproduction that both mediate and constitute their relations to both self and world. Press, London 2016, pp. 7–17. Martin Lister: ”Introduction”; David Bate: “The digital condi- tion of photography: cameras, computers and display”, The Photographic Image in Digital Culture, Martin Lister (ed.), Routledge, London and New York (NY) 2013, p. 1–15, p. 78. 5 Fuller and Goffey 2012, p. 96. Galloway 2004, pp. 64–69, p. 224. 6 Michel de Certeau: The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, Berkeley (CA), Los Angeles (CA), and London 1984, pp. xix–xxiii. See theory and previous research. 7 Alva Noë: Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature, 2015, pp. 11–18, p. 145–147, pp. 165– 167. See also respective articles by Gabrielle Jennings, and Charlotte Frost, and Sarah Cook, Abstract Video: The Moving Image in Contemporary Art, Gabrielle Jennings (ed.), University of California Press, Oakland (CA) 2015, pp. 13–14, p. 142. 8 As computer and camera merge, being a viewer online is to be placed in an interface that shapes experiences of the system and of the individual within it.8 I explore flow through its ephemeral yet pervasive phenomena – such as interfaces and glitches – to add knowledge about their process of becoming and their manifestation within a fast-paced digitization that needs a user who is attentive to its effects.9 The user in this thesis is a viewer who observes flow by taking part in it on the three artists’ websites – representing three historically situated segments of flow. My analyses thus serve to sharpen a viewer’s attention through the intended yet uncontrolled moments of friction that glitches insert into the flow of interfacing. Aims and Questions This study builds on two related premises: firstly, that spectatorship online is shaped by systemic operations that mainly stay invisible to the viewer, and secondly, that glitches can make both system and viewer visible. The rele- vance of this making-visible – for increasing the knowledge about how ob- scure yet inevitable conditions situate the interfacing individual – motivates my two-part aim and main research question: to analyze how interfacing affects viewer experiences and viewer positions, and how such an effect is made visible in glitch art online. These two parts signify a relation between individual and system that directs the study.
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