Glitch Art in Theory and Practice

2The Heritage of Materialist Media

“Glitch art” is ambivalent. It confuses the relationship of signal::noise, while at the same time establishing the glitch as a definitional precondition: it is an attempt to recover technical failure as the basis for media practice, putting it within the general history of Formalist art. Conceptualizing the critical function that a glitch (stoppage) may have requires a consideration of the linkages between glitch and earlier theories of media. This critical role returns, either explicitly or implicitly, to Theodor Adorno’s aesthetics where the interruptive capacities of art produce an inherent criticism of capitalism that necessarily denies ambivalence by ratifying the audience as passive. His argument is a ...