Glitch report

Here at the HAIP festival in Ljubljana, Rosa Menkman, co-author of the In-between manifesto, just gave an interesting presentation about the concept of glitch and its artistic potentials. Contrasting with the phenomenon of speedrunning classic video games, she associated the glitch with a critique of an exclusively goal-oriented logic. She also mentioned Paul Virilio with his collection of accidents and idea of how errors are actually immanent in technology, not some external factor breaking a “normal” flow. Artistic examples were taken from Jodi, Gijs Gieskes, Sven Konig and Goto80 (who arrives to HAIP later tonight).
The theme of HAIP is “hacktopia”, and Rosa Menkman ended her introduction by rethorically asking the question of whether glitches are to be conceived in terms of utopia or dystopia. But of course, it can’t be that simple. We must think in terms of the “in-between” (both in the manifesto mentioned above, and in a recent Copyriot post). Music, for example, can only occur in between the completely predictable and the completely unpredictable. Probably we can not even imagine something such as a “complete glitch”. Beyond good and evil, the understanding of glitch can in some cases be helped by the deleuzian concept of deterritorialization.
Someone asked the obvious question: “Is an intentional glitch still a glitch?” I am not sure how meaningful it is to try to answer that. More interesting is maybe to approach the complex from another simple question asked from the audience: “What is the question between a glitch and a bug?” I tried to answer it like this:
You can write a bug report, but you can’t write a glitch report. Recognizing something as a glitch already has something affirmative to it. You could have stopped it, turned the process off or restarted it, but instead you let your initial plan be changed by the unexpected occurrence in-between technology and you. Glitch is, in other words, a mindset. It is totally performative.

Parallells should be drawn to some currents within contemporary theatre – best described by Hans-Thiess Lehmann – where “glitches” that happen in the stage situation are played upon, rather than masked out. This is relevant because what is commonly counted as “glitch art” or “glitch music” usually reserves the glitching to the digital. Glitches are allowed in the machine, but not in the connection between digital and analog. Often the performative aspect from where glitching actually emerges is denied, and the transformation from the machine to the art gallery or music performance is made as linear and smooth as possible. A widened concept of glitch aesthetics must put light on such limitations, in order not to be trapped in a fetishized kind of glitching (like, eh, certain German electronic music).

Glitching as something performative, happening in-between. If we agree on such a widened concept of glitch, then Piratbyran’s bus project S23X is certainly about glitches; social, aesthetical, legal and technological. (And also some bugs.) The bus did take us from Bolzano in Italy to Ljubljana in Slovenia where we are now. Tomorrow it will hopefully take us further east to Belgrade in Serbia. Later this evening, today’s HAIP activities will be ended with a bus tour around the city, open for all visitors. All the plans for and tours of this city bus have been filled with glitches, small and large. If we would have defined them as bugs, the project would have been dead since long…