by Nahee Kim
What’s the difference between glitch and error? By the definition of Urban Dictionary, a glitch is an error in a structured system. So they are the same but we can sense the difference between them in sense. If you google ‘error’ and open the images tab, there’s a lot of yellow and red symbols which give you the frustration in a glance but if googling ‘glitch’, you can see hundreds of images full of colors within unruled shapes. Anyone who saw those trippy rainbow colors or jagged frames while they heavily used their computers once thought that they were cool and urged them to capture them. Like there’s always someone taking a picture of the poor blue screen of a huge signage monitor in the street. There are even groups of 81k members named ‘Glitch Artists Collective(screenshot below)’ on Facebook where people actively post their randomly captured or deliberately generated glitch images. In the group, the members casually exchange and ask the way to confuse your computer. Some of them even sold manual glitch generating Adobe Premiere plug-ins at a quite high price. People hate errors, the moment of bad communication with your device, but if they come with some kind of interfaces such as graphics or sounds, suddenly the erroneous device turns into toys and provides joys and even sometimes inspiration for some folks. So glitch transforms the annoying stigma around errors into plausible playfulness. For some sense, glitch echoes the garbage from ‘aesthetics of garbage’.
The author of ‘Glitch Feminism’, Legacy Russell, also affirms this transformative power of glitch by mentioning its etymology – “…in the Yiddish glitch (‘slippery area’) or perhaps German glitschen (‘to slip, slide’); it is this slip and slide that the glitch makes plausible, a swim in the liminal, a trans-formation, across selfdoms.” 1 In glitch feminism, glitch’s slimy nature juxtapolitically 2 extends to the human body’s queerness, since we are already cyborgs voluntarily hook their life to small black mirrors. Russell argues that feminism, which started to make women’s voices in binary heteronormative patriarchy world could not open a truly new utopia because it’s still assuming the system exists. ‘Women’s rights’ means there should be someone who falls into that specific group claiming their rights as a human. Gloria Anzaldua said ‘Only your labels split me.’3 The body’s materiality is enough. My sex-and-gender-related social category could be anything. I can override my material body by my will and create the most perfect gender for myself every day. Just like glitch overrides the computer system structure and opens the user’s untouched sensorium. System needs to be glitched to show its beauty from an unruled state. The system treats me as an error and keeps sending users the message in red disturbing fonts saying that they need to delete me but I am actually glitch and the users want to grasp me and hold on to that stuck moment.
What I’m trying to do in this post-Third world is finding the way to spread glitches as my artistic practice to celebrate its gift to captivate the audience by transforming so-called ‘user experiences(UX)’ and as an alliance to my perspective around gender identity. The glitches in my work don’t have to have those glitchy looks. It can be a portrait of glitch(sliding, transforming) bodies in society. The rule of destroying or subverting the existing system should also be considered in the means of distributing the glitches. Here, I would like to introduce a couple of ways to align the subversiveness of glitch aesthetics.
The most common way of sharing artworks these days is posting them on social media. And then the artist needs to hope that they can get as many likes before the other trillion new posts are created over theirs and the algorithm thinks that their posts are not cool or appropriated. In social media platforms, anyone can post and see the posts on the platform, which seems quite democratic, but the truth is not. Every post data is saved in the company (owning the platform)’s a central database, so actually, the people who run the company are the only players who decide whose post should be shown to whom. An artist post’s longevity is only decided by its ability to hold users’ attention, which sounds something glitch artworks are good at. But here the attention is not about visual aesthetics, but more about the economy. This is actually the point where the centralized network system, which we are currently living with, becomes problematic. The companies occupying the gigantic amount of user data are just trying to find a way to legally monetizing them. And because of that, the fate of our life including someone’s artworks is affected by how much attention (here, attention = capital) each of us can get in the daily web usage. To find the way to be free of this stressful but not fruitful impression of glitch artwork, and to keep the ‘ditch the system’ essence of glitches, escaping from a centralized network is unavoidable.
Diagram to show the difference among centralized, decentralized, and distributed networks
Then could there be something which is not a centralized network? Torrents, peer-to-peer protocol, dark web, or blockchain – these are the standout examples of decentralized or even distributed networks that grant more agency on the user side. In the distributed network systems, user data is stored in multiple other users’ devices. There’s no single data ‘center’ – every participant of the network potentially could become everyone’s data center. So it’s almost impossible that a couple of players decide which post should be shown first and others not. This environment could make interesting harmony with the distribution of my glitches. Actually, there are pioneers who already tried to distribute or sell their art using blockchain 4. Around 2018 when the blockchain was on the hype the intriguing aspect of potential art practice in the network was also discovered. Because of the design of blockchain protocol, the original creator of artwork will be recorded forever in the network with the whole other users’ data who had any interaction with the artwork (all data is securely hashed by the nature of blockchain protocol) which means it is impossible to secretly imitate the artwork. Art world seemed interested in this originality preservation of art in blockchain at that time, distributing and selling some pieces using bitcoin. Now the hype went down, maybe it’s better time to examine the possibilities of using platforms of distributed networks as one of the artwork distribution channels.
Scuttlebutt’s client software ‘Patchwork’
‘Scuttlebutt’ is social media in distributed networks. Their relationship initiation(like ‘following’ feature of social media in general) protocol called secure handshake is interesting in their approach of kindly communicating how the protocol works via the documentation. It’s almost like the developers of Facebook explain every step they did to make the platform(which is impossible because they may have too many secret features to sneakily scrape users’ data). Based on the documentation, I made my own interpretation of the protocol and posted the artwork in Scuttlebutt. And somehow the developers of it and writers of the documentation reached out to me and even offered me a small honorarium. This process came to me as one of the possible ecosystems happening in the art scene of distributed networks. By creating their own social network, people can govern their way of communication. If this is the case, there will be hundreds of different protocols and each of them may need documentation of how other folks can securely access the network to make new friends. Visual artists or designers can take jobs with good visual communication skills. By doing so, the institutions could make the documentation more approachable. The users can have the opportunity of both enjoying and discussing their modes of communication while they enjoy the documentation as artwork together.
But if the technical aspects of becoming an artist in a distributed web sound like a big hurdle for some artists, there’s a good segue to the big step. As a hybrid gallery in-between world wide web and blockchain, <Left Gallery> which is an online gallery selling downloadable artworks could be the better start point. It was founded in 2015 by artist Harm van den Dorpel with anthropologist and partner Paloma Rodríguez Carrington. The works can be purchased by credit card, Paypal, and cryptocurrency – bitcoin. Even though the majority of artworks in the gallery are digitally copyable, each piece has around 100 editions. The edition feature is applied to make the artwork more affordable to people. In the main page of <Left Gallery>, what first captures the viewer’s eyes is the file extensions within each artwork’s title in green text. There are .epub, .mobi, .app, .exe, .saver, .mp4, .html, .gif, .txt, .rtf, and .m3u – which reveals the downloadability of the curated pieces.
Left Gallery
In the short introductory text for the gallery’s official launching event in Berlin, the founders mentioned: “the quasi-colonial relations that are increasingly being built into the internet’s infrastructure, a mentality left gallery seeks to confront and oppose.” Although the website of the gallery still lives in a centralized worldwide web, its aim for running this gallery is aligned with the distributed network’s effort to allocate concentrated power around big platforms. Most downloadable objects in our daily life such as mobile apps can be found and purchased in a major operating system’s app stores like Apple App Store or Google Play. And all of them require a very specific file format for each submitted app which only can be created by the software they made, which means the app makers need to learn new software if they want to sell their app in other markets. And of course, no need to mention again about the tiredness and ineffectiveness of competing in the attention economy in those platforms. As an independent marketplace, <Left Gallery> offers freedom in the format of each art piece and an acceptable amount of PR which is screenshots and descriptions of each work.
This research is still limited to give hands-on information on how to find independent means of distributing digital-based art. But I hope that glitch artists, who are sliding either in the physical or digital world in terms of their identities and identities of their art, are encouraged to develop more glitched ways of distributing the artworks by encountering this short text. This documentation will be updated as I do more research and try newly found ways of distribution by myself.
Footnotes
- Russell, “Digital Dualism And The Glitch Feminism Manifesto”, The Society Pages, 2012
- Russell, “Elsewhere, After the Flood: Glitch Feminism and the Genesis of Glitch Body Politic”, Rhizome, 2013
- Anzaldúa, Gloria. The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader. Duke University Press, 2009.
- https://cointelegraph.com/news/cointemporary-the-first-online-gallery-of-art-for-bitcoin