Category: Spring 26

I wanted to do something with gifs using p5 – but decided to stick to the basics for now.

In this session, I tried with gifs. This was pretty cool but I don’t know how the gif ended up leaving marks over the canvas even though that wasn’t the case with my other gifs

Group Session

My first impression of the reading is that it looks weird, and then after reading a bit I think it makes sense. 

The syntax of the text itself is a break out of the convention form of standard writing. In this way, it felt disoriented just by reading all the texts and felt a sense of the unexpected in each and every page that constantly allows the reader to break out from the expectations. 

Like what the author said, each noise is a description ruins yet it creates new potentials and energies for new formations. The glitch is a disruption yet a new opportunity. 

I felt like it’s easier to follow a convention as we want things to go the way we predict. The glitches in life are scary. Having a glitch sometimes makes me feel like the self that I was so certain of suddenly breaks into pieces leaving nothing to hold on for the next moments. As well as when making art, especially when new to something. I want things to go as expected,having a  well , nice structure so what I create is something in my hand. 

But reading the manifesto made me realize that a glitch also opens something new, it opens a new structure and constantly generates enormous possibilities. Like the feedback, the constantly changing itself becomes the manifesto that leads us rather than the convention. 

We are taught to chase perfection when writing code or creating a program. To write functions that act when things fail layered with more functions that can act when the first layer of defence fails. Over the years such practices have ensured that users never get a look into the other side of the wall even when things do not go as planned, practically endangering the glitch. I never gave that a second thought until I read Rosa Menkman’s Glitch Studies Manifesto that revealed an upside to a glitch in a program that I would not have thought of before. Describing noise as a “disturbance, break or addition within the signal of useful data” highlighted how it’s only thought of as a useless disturbance that we need to get rid of. Ignoring it’s potential in revealing hidden structures and challenge the norms entrusted upon us in modern technology. Using the glitch as a critique of this move away from noise which created a consumerist culture where we constantly crave newer devices that are more deprived of noise than the ones that came before them.

While I do still understand the desire for noiseless devices, this process of thinking did help me appreciate the noise more. And with the rise in demand for older digital camera and different vintage devices I see on social media now, I’d say there is an overall shift towards the noise in an attempt to reclaim the technological sphere. Artists taking the concept of the glitch and constructing it into their work is another form of reclamation of control over not just technology but also economic and political hierarchies. Taking a glitch and encoding it into a work can be seen as creating structure out of an unstructured phenomenon where you create “a new protocol after shattering an earlier one”. However, the discussion of how this is not the case for the viewer that still view the glitch art as an unexpected disturbance highlights how the world is all about perception, where the creator of the work will now see structure the viewer will still experience the essence of the glitch. Similarly every interaction with technology, whether it’s an orderly interaction or one muddled with noise, is shaped by the perception of the viewer who decides whether this is what a perfect program is.