Before I even started reading, I wanted to say that the way the manifesto was structured visually was quite unique and I have never seen someone utilize the form of their writing as part of message.

One point the author points out in the manifesto that especially stood out to me was what they refered to as “conservative glitch art” where we are trying to replicate the aesthetic of the glitch. Although it may look cool, that’s pretty much it. There is nothing beyond that as the glitch is purely visual.

Another quote that I really liked was:” flow cannot be understood without interruption or functioning without glitching.” As we continue to utilize computers for everyday tasks, the existence of this functional piece of technology will always imply a glitch that is bound to happen. Beyond just technology, no matter what medium is utilized, there will always be some sort of glitch.

We know that live coding isn’t necessarily about the final result, but it’s a trial and error process, with a lot of experimentation and glitches. Some glitches end up making the work better, they can work like happy mistakes.


The idea of the black box being broken also applies to what we’re doing, while performing the code is being edited and evaluated in real-time and the audience is seeing exactly what the performer is, full transparency. So when a glitch happens (and perhaps throws an error), the performer may not be able to play it off as smoothly as they would be able to if a black box had been in place.


Given all this, I realize that I don’t let myself experiment with glitches, I usually play it safe in my demos, which while my final result may seem better to me, the reading made me acknowledge that I am probably limiting myself when I do that, and I can’t imagine its as fun for the audience to what me evaluate pre-written lines of code rather than watch me edit and figure out in real-time.

I read this and all I felt was tired. Yes, glitch reveals that systems are not inevitable and impenetrable. Control is an illusion. Hurrah. Storms flatten houses. Rivers of gold ravage Pompeii. Nature subverts itself. Glitch is the trickster spirits and coyotes and spiders and monkey kings represent in endless mythologies. The devil Robert Johnson met on the Crossroads. We detect glitch and feel it as a resolutely involved presence, playmaker, and force in this stupid play. I remember a physicist researcher told me dark matter is like stumbling over something in pitch black. It’s Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Shakespeare knew all about glitch. I guess we are all sacrificial casualties on the pyre of glitch. That’s why it all seems so absurd, so tragic, so funny, so meaningful, so useless. You know when Puck revealed at the end that it was all a dream.

Everything I know and have ever loved is because of people who devoted themselves to what counts as glitch studies, those who were at the behest of glitches, and audiences that produced movements motivated by glitches, commodified, repackaged or otherwise. I don’t mean to be hypocritical and shit on the whole parade, but. The author is personally fascinated by the magic of glitch. Is your fascination contagious? They say they “believe that ‘Glitchspeak’ can democratize society.” Hm.

I don’t really want to be involved anymore. Unfortunately my skin is materially and literally in the game, so. The domestication and commodification of glitch blah blah blah. Glitch studies blah blah blah. Glitch is destructive generativity blah blah blah. I’ve become disenchanted with and disengaged from the gain and the loss, the sun rise and set, the confusion and the clarity. Glitch, ravage your course. I’ll laugh at the funny parts and cry at the sad ones.

The first thing you notice is that the document itself doesn’t look like a normal academic paper. It’s filled with visual noise, fragmented text, and off-margin layouts that act like a glitch. This non-traditional format perfectly sets up her argument that we shouldn’t just ignore the “black box” of our computers and other interesting comments about glitch in the paper.

Menkman describes the glitch as an “exoskeleton of progress,” saying these technical interruptions are actually “wonderful” experiences. When a computer fails, we move from a “negative feeling” to an “intimate, personal experience” where the system finally shows its “inner workings and flaws”. Usually, we use technology so fast that it feels transparent, but a glitch breaks that flow and forces us to be “shocked, lost and in awe” of what the machine is actually doing.

One of the most interesting points she makes is that a glitch is “ephemeral”. The second you “name” a glitch or understand how it was created, its “momentum” is gone. It stops being a mysterious rupture and just becomes a new set of conditions or a “domesticated” tool. For Menkman, the real value of computer noise isn’t in fixing it, but in that brief moment of “devastation” where a “spark of creative energy” shows us that the machine can be something more than what it was programmed to be.

When reading Rosa Menkman’s Glitch Studies Manifesto, I found it interesting how she changes the way we usually think about technological errors. Most of the time, we see glitches as annoying problems that should be fixed. But Menkman argues that trying to make technology completely perfect is not really possible. Instead, she encourages us to see glitches as moments that can lead to creativity and new ideas.

What stood out to me most was her point that a glitch only feels powerful for a short moment. Once we explain it too much or turn it into something normal, it loses that special effect. I also found her criticism of fake glitches interesting, especially when they are turned into filters or effects that anyone can use. That made me think about an important question: if we study glitches too much, do we take away the thing that makes them powerful in the first place?

I tracked down old footage of my friends at a spot we used to frequent long ago. I wanted to evoke nostalgia and the disintegration of memory over time. Coming up with any visuals or sound at all was really difficult. There’s a pacifier wherever my imagination is supposed to be. I wish I had come up with some kind of climax and drop. I also wish I had been able to come up with a visual that syncs better with the arpeggios. I tried tweaking the numbers and couldn’t find the right rhythm to sync to. The entire thing is too chaotic and unbalanced to work as a composition. But at the end, I liked the silence paired with the normal videos, because it felt like reminiscence or reflection. 

s0.initVideo("file:///Users/eloratrotter/Documents/Documents%20-%20Elora’s%20MacBook%20Pro/Code/liveCoding/media/fixed_video1.mp4")
src(s0).out(o0)

s0.initVideo("file:///Users/eloratrotter/Documents/Documents%20-%20Elora’s%20MacBook%20Pro/Code/liveCoding/media/fixed_Video.mp4")
src(s0).out(o0)

s0.initVideo("file:///Users/eloratrotter/Documents/Documents%20-%20Elora’s%20MacBook%20Pro/Code/liveCoding/media/fixed.mp4")
src(s0).out(o0)

s0.initVideo("file:///Users/eloratrotter/Documents/Documents%20-%20Elora’s%20MacBook%20Pro/Code/liveCoding/media/fixed_video2.mp4")
src(s0).out(o0)

src(s0).modulate(noise(.23, 0).pixelate(100, 100),)
.colorama(0.005).luma(0.20).diff(src(o0).scale(()=>cc[0])).out(o0)

hush()
setcps (85/60/4)

  d1 $ slow 2 $ n "~ e7 c8 ~ b7 ~ <g7,g8> ~"
    # s "supervibe"
    # lpf 300
    # sustain 2
    # room 0.7
    # delay 0.6 # delayt (1/4) # delayfb 0.5
    # gain 1.2

d2 $ stack [
  s "bd ~ bd ~",
  s "~ sn:2 ~ sn:2" # lpf 2000 # shape 0.1 # gain 0.8,
  s "hh*8" # gain "0.5 0.3 0.4 0.2" # pan rand # lpf 5000
] # room 0.4 # sz 0.6

d3 $ slow 4 $ n "a2 f3 c3 e3"
  # s "superpiano"
  # gain 0.9

d4 $ slow 4 $ n "a3'min9 f3'maj7 c3'maj7 e3'min7"
  # s "superpiano"
  # velocity 0.4
  # lpf 1500
  # room 0.9 # sz 0.8

d5 $ ccv "[0 127]*1" # ccn 0 # s "midi"

d6 $ jux (rev)
  $ struct "t*16"
  $ slow 4
  $ n (arp "<up down updown diverge>" "<a3'min9 f3'maj7 c3'maj7 e3'min7>")
  # s "supermandolin"
  # sustain 1.5
  # room 0.8 # sz 0.9
  # delay 0.75 # delayt (1/4) # delayfb 0.5
  # lpf (range 800 4000 $ slow 4 sine)
  # pan (slow 3 sine)
  # gain 0.8

d5 $ ccv "[0 127]*8" # ccn 0 # s "midi"

d6 $ jux (rev . (|- pan 0.2))
  $ struct "t(3,8) t*2"
  $ n (arp "up" "<a3'min9 f3'maj7 c3'maj7 e3'min7>")
  # s "supermandolin"
  # sustain 2
  # detune 0.005
  # lpf (range 400 3000 $ slow 8 saw)
  # room 0.9 # sz 0.9
  # gain 1

  d5 $ struct "t(3,8) t*2" $ ccv "127 0 50"
    # ccn 0 # s "midi"


hush

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?