What struck me immediately even before fully reading was the visual experience of the PDF itself. The text isn’t clean or stable; it’s fragmented, stretched, interrupted by blocks of symbols and noise. It feels like the document is actively “glitching” as you read it. The manifesto sort of performs the glitch theory rather than just describing it. The layout forces me to slow down, to become aware of reading as a mediated process. It almost resists being consumed in a normal, linear way.

This made me realize that the glitch here is highly embodied in the medium. The scattered typography, the visual noise, and the interruptions act like breaks in a signal, constantly pulling me out of passive reading. In a way, I felt like I was navigating a system that was slightly broken but also strangely expressive. That tension between frustration and curiosity felt intentional.

In livecoding, the process is visible and unstable: errors, unexpected outputs, or crashes become part of the performance rather than something to hide. Similar to Menkman’s idea, the “glitch” is nothing like a failure but a moment where the system reveals itself. When code behaves unpredictably during a live set, it creates a kind of raw, real-time interaction between the artist, the machine and the audience.

I think both glitch aesthetics and livecoding challenge this idea that digital media should be smooth and optimized. Instead they expose the underlying structure: the code, the errors, the limits. They make the medium feel alive. I was browsing albert and ran into one class on named “Experiments in the Future of Producing/Performing” which, according to the description, encourages students to hack the music/visual software and conduct software abuse in order to challenge conventional recorded music/visual products. It says, “Sound (and other kinds of art) is an unstable art form.” Reading this manifesto made me more aware of how much I usually expect technology to “just work,” and how much potential there is when it doesn’t.

It also makes me question my own creative practice: am I just using tools as intended, or am I willing to push them to the point where they break and become something else?