The Aesthetics of the Accident

“I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement…There is no accident, just as there is no beginning and no end.” ~Jackson Pollock

The digital age complicates the very basis for determining not only what constitutes “Art”, but also threatens complete destabilization of the current mediums which exist.
I reference a classic Jackson Pollock painting, Autumn Rhythm, I need not assume you have visited the museum in which it is displayed, or even have access to a book that reprints it. I can digitally reproduce Pollock’s work before your eyes:

So, as digital technology transmutes physical artistic labor into easily consumable packets of information, what then is the task of an artist? What experiences to convey to a spectator? And where can we find a stable medium for this exchange?

Digital artist and new media theorist Lev Manovich argues the first step forward is to reformulate the conditions for how art and audience connect. Rather than a medium-by-medium theory, Manovich posits a totalizing theory of “interactive art” – the advent of the software interface allows an active exchange between viewer and artist mediated through software interfaces. For example, my ability to take a Pollock painting, throw it in a program, and mess with it.

From the perspective that art is a strategy for organizing data, the artist’s cultural prerogative, according to Manovich, has always been devising a novel algorithm for data implementation. So, montage filmmakers such as Eisenstein developed techniques which “coordinate data in different media tracks to achieve maximum affect on the user.”

Manovich’s theoretical position offers a universalizing paradigm for what constitutes an artist – a savvy architect of data structures. But this definition, in conflating data manipulation and creative expression, has some truly problematic implications. Essentially, this means any and all works of art are a set of instructions which program us to reach a pattern of feelings or thoughts. The data-reception model not only compresses the flow of creative possibilities through a single channel of data, but also re-entrenches the viewer’s passivity under the false guise of software-based interactivity .

I’d like to issue a different project for the digital artist. The project of smashing the code. Or, to use digital vernaculars, glitching the interface.

The glitch aesthetic is a postmodern digital technique implemented by DJs and VJs alike, who reformulate and manipulate broken code into a new sequence.

Digital information exchange is a syntagtic model which interpolates the viewer into a preordained mode of interpretation which precludes an ambivalent and reciprocal exchange of ideas. The glitch is a broken artifact in an otherwise smooth stream. A relic of imprecision. An accident.

As Digital Artist and Scholar Michael Betancourt notes, in breaking the smooth flow of information, the glitch exposes the materiality of digital code. Rather than perpetuating a sequence of references to information, the glitch ruptures into a recursive signifier which highlights not only its own unintended presence, but the facile construction of the very code it dismantles. The glitch inflects authenticity into the code by virtue of its indeterminate significance.

Beyond resisting the hegemonic communication model of digital capitalism, I contend glitch art is new media’s cultural link back to the origins of creative impulse. Art Historian John Onians presents a methodological twist on art history he terms neuroarchaelogy – linking neuropsychology to art history – in order to consider the origins of artistic representation in the cave paintings in Grotte de Chavet.

The inhabitants of Grotte de Chavet had developed sufficient mental capacity to recognize and recall images of the animals which they hunted. Archaelogical investigation suggests the first markings in these caves were those of a bear’s claws. The neanderthals in the cave, seeing the bear’s markings, registered the bear marks as icons of the bear’s presence, drawing it on cave walls themselves as a means of symbolic communication. At some point, however, one member mis-drew the markings, creating an accidental symbol lacking a referent – a glitch in his collective’s symbolic code.

This accident, reproduced unintentionally, developed a life of its own due to a phenomenon known as neural plasticity – repetitive actions become increasingly pleasurable until they form a new habit. First, other neanderthals tried to understand the accident-symbol’s meaning. Unable to see meaning, they reproduced it for no other purpose than study. Finally, they developed a new means of communication outside the bounds of normal behavior patterns. Hence, the original glitch incited the creative impulse – an entirely new method of communication based around expression rather than illustration.

Art, whether in pre-civilized cultures, early modern cities rejecting photographic representation, or our own age, can be seen as a means of rupturing the fixed-fast rhythms of society. It is an explosion into new means of expression. And in rewriting the dictates for symbolic communication with ambivalence, Art symbolizes new patterns of communication, behavior, and consequently of experiencing reality.

Here’s a glitch GIF I threw together from a silly picture I found on the internet.