Hi Julian (and all),
I just got back from a run and during the run Walter De Maria's
"Lightning Filed" came to mind (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Field ). It seems a good
example of a human-prepared "field" (pun intended) which greatly
increases the chances of (what I want to understand as something
like) a glitch event, while at the same time not "causing the event
to happen (per se). The lightning will more than likely strike, but
you can't predict exactly when. So is it human art or a natural
event? Yes, yes, and something in-between much more rigorously
entangled and problematic. The same holds true with certain forms of
analog electric guitar amplifier feedback. I can set up a guitar rig
to create an environment in which feedback is likely to occur, but I
can't ever tell exactly what that feedback will sound like or exactly
when it will occur.
To conceive of the glitch only as a totally unpredictable,
unforeseeable, and uninvitable event is to imagine a world in which
there are either completely random events or completely hermetically
sealed systems, and nothing in between. This cosmology gives great
agency to the unforseen "natural" glitch event, but little agency to
structured human cultures and systems.Humans are impotent to
trick-out or access the wild agency of the natural glitch event. If
we are ever able to access it, by definition we must not have
actually accessed it, because we were trying to access it. This is a
bit of a semantic catch 22.
Deleuze and Guattari propose a speculative/experimental practice of
deterritorialization. You intend to head somewhere, but by definition
you can't know where it will lead or how things will emerge at the
end of your line. It is a kind of rigorously structured accident.
Such speculative practices presume the possibility of something
between intention and accident, a yet to have emerged space, an event
of emergent becoming (to tap Whitehead). To tap Bergson, an
actualization of the virtual. Such speculative practices might be
relevant politically in terms of teasing out heretofore unseen
tactical fissures between the orchestrated catastrophes of strategic
capital. Then again, they might prove completely irrelevant. Such are
the gambles of this kind of art and theory.
Yes, there are glitches that cause plane crash catastrophes. The 1
plane is flying, then the 0 plane is crashed. But there are other
more analog-esque glitches that fluctuate in the margins between 1
and 0. Less catastrophic glitches. Slower, stranger glitches. The
gradual modulations of human language via grammatalogical homonymic
slippages during lived/uttered events, for example. How might a
glitch theory and glitch art be expanded to allow for and encourage
the entangled spaces between totally unexpected catastrophy and
totally systematic orchestration?
Best,
Curt
Julian Wrote:
I most certainly don't think one can design glitches,
merely encourage them or work with them. Parametric control of a
glitch would be
an oxymoron in that one cannot choreograph an accident, only create conditions
such that one is likely to occur.
For me a great glitch is unanticipated, devastating, wild.
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