[-empyre-] Contextual Glitch

[Andrew Prior]

Hello all.
Thanks to Gabriel for inviting me, and everyone else for having me. I’ve been lurking in the wings for a few days, and its been a fascinating read – lots of issues that I really identify with, particularly in terms of the problems of practice as research, the institutionalisation of discourse/praxis and so on.
I was all ready to jump in on that one, with some further questions about whether, if research privileges a sense of finding things out, that naturally occludes other important roles within art? (And therefore, is the prevalence of practice based PhDs eroding aspects of arts praxis…). Or whether it is hypothetically (or actually) possible for a PhD to be entirely practice based – for the conclusions to be left unstated in text, but embodied within practice?
On another subject, my own practice is concerned with glitch / noise. Glitch / noise practices are often (perhaps always?) articulated by an apparent outsider status – glitch is driven forward by its formulation as an oppositional strategy – an ‘aesthetics of failure’ to use Kim Cascone’s seminal phrase – and yet, there is an obvious paradox here: if failure is the goal, then presumably it’s not failure to begin with… Whilst noise is somewhat different in this regard, (it is not so synonymous with failure), it too is often deployed for its ability to articulate oppositional aesthetics. Thus, a general acceptance of noise practices, to some extent compromises their currency.
I noticed that Morton Riis and others brought up this same point in the DARC blog associated with the in/compatible workshop in November (http://darc.imv.au.dk/incompatible/?p=146). Indeed, even Kim Cascone gave a talk in the Piemonte Share festival last year that reworked his ‘Aesthetics of Failure’ title into a statement about the ‘Failure of Aesthetics’ (http://www.toshare.it/?page_id=3565&lang=en), largely based on the recuperation of glitch aesthetics, the ability of the market to co-opt and repackage oppositional aesthetics into something that is popular, and commercial. Although Cascone’s presentation was given as a set of short observations, presumably intended to avoid a too fixed set of conclusions, the basic premise was around a need to re-instate craft, quality, slowness, etc. to counteract too great an emphasis on glitch/noise.  Interesting to think of someone like Cécile Babiole here, whose amazing ‘Stitch n’Glitch’ piece certainly addresses the craft/quality/slowness angle,  but seems to move on from glitch as failure in quite a productive way… http://babiole.net/spip.php?article73
 It was interesting to hear Rosa Menkman - talking at the in/compatible research symposium at Transmediale – who began to frame Glitch practices as a genre, a somewhat provocative move I guess, because it seems paradoxical to attempt to frame oppositional aesthetics in a way that is predicated on its stabilization. And yet, it is also a pragmatic move, because glitch and noise practices are now so common, they have very much stabilized, and moved into mainstream popular culture.
There’s a further difficulty here in that glitch and noise practices seem to provide an eminently sensible way to approach a contemporary culture that is so densely hypermediated, networked, fragmented, and saturated by media technologies old and new. We are surrounded by noisy aesthetics that are not only the product of particular aesthetic strategies but also a symptom of the mediality of culture itself. In such a situation it follows that noise and glitch provide a useful language to respond to such a culture, and yet – to return to my earlier point - this stabilization of such strategies is obviously problematic.
 My own thinking here is that the lack of context provided by many glitch and noise works is often a big part of the problem. As we see processes of databending and videomoshing moving over into popular culture (see for example http://ghosttownmedia.com/videos/heartbreak/ ), becoming monitised and neutralized in the process, it is the style that has been copied rather than the context. Are there ways in which the background, the context, the story, the meaning can be foregrounded within noise works? I think yes – and examples such as Marie Thompson’s performance at Transmediale, and Rosa Menkman’s Collapse of PAL find really interesting solutions to the problem – but I’d also be really interested to hear/read your thoughts.
I’m aware that there has already been quite a discussion around noise on –empyre recently, but hopefully there’s enough life in the subject for round 2!
Best

Andy Prior