Vague Terrain

'The dominant, continuing search for a noiseless channel has been, and will always be no more than a regrettable, ill-fated dogma.'

So reads the introduction to Rosa Menkman's Glitch Studies Manifesto, a text published earlier this year. There has been a renewed interest in glitch aesthetics over the last twelve months and this buzz can probably attributed to several causes: the appearance of datamoshing in mainstream pop music videos, the publication of Iman Moradi and Ant Scott's long-awaited Glitch: Designing Imperfection and a growing number of integrated AV performance showcases at festivals all over the world. Rosa Menkman has consolidated numerous facets of ephemeral glitch culture and stitched together an exciting document that is both an artistic call to arms and a move to patch "glitch studies" into several recent philosophical movements (eg. bending/breaking as metaphor for différance). As any manifesto should be, the text is charged with energy and numerous digs at the status quo (a personal favourite being one aimed at proprietary tools and software complacency where Menkman urges us to move away from "established action scripts"). An excerpt:

'Whenever I use a ‘normal’ transparent technology, I only see one aspect of the actual machine. I have learned to ignore the interface and all structural components, to be able to understand a message or use a technology as fast as possible. The glitches I trigger turn the technology back into the obfuscated box that it already was. They shroud its inner workings and the source of the output as a sublime black veil. I perceive glitches without knowing where they originate from. This gives me an opportunity to concentrate better on its form - to interpret its structures and to learn more from what I can actually see. They create an acousmatic videoscape in which I can finally perceive an output outside of my goggles of speed, transparency and usability.'

The entire text is available on Menkman's blog and it can also be downloaded as a PDF – which the author cheerfully invites interested parties to "read and destroy". Vimeo users should also note Menkman's group dedicated to noise artifacts.