…ambient guerrillas…
This post contained an draft version of a dissertation section. A more recent version is now available on the works page.
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…ambient guerrillas…
This post contained an draft version of a dissertation section. A more recent version is now available on the works page.
synthetic zerØ 
Artifacts: A Conversation Between Hito Steyerl and Daniel Rourke: http://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/mar/28/artifacts/
“Digital information is thus characterised by transformation, degradation, circulation, but also by its surprising ability to mutate and produce unpredictable results. The glitch, the bruise of the image or sound testifies to its being worked with and working; being passed on and circulated, being matter in action. History inscribes itself into the image in forms of bruises and scars” – Hito Steyerl
“Glitches expose us to the inner dynamism of the digital, but I wonder what it is about the current conditions of our society that tend to turn us away from the tensions and contestations locked up there in the first place?” – Daniel Rourke
The glitch is to the digital what the accident is to substance.
i like that… Is it a reminder of finitude and/or the ever-presence of pure difference as différance, or the death principle as metaphysical constant?
We are the glitch in the smooth signals of certainty and its parasitic relation to capital.
I use “accident” in the sense Virilio means it: when you invent the car you invent the car crash. Innovation always comes with an immanent new disaster. Art has a kind of accident as well. For Virilio the accident of art is the way in which new forms of art “accident” a previously established way of seeing the world; this doesn’t leave us blind, it produces a new way of seeing, a new kind of vision. Just so, the car crash, when it actualises itself often enough and in the correct conditions, provides us with a new form of car. While I’m talking about the car crash we can even say that the car is a new form of mobility and that the car crash is actually the accident of that mobility. Somewhere, I can’t recall where, Virillio states that “the accident reveals the substance”. It is only through the accident that some latent capacity of the substance can be seen.
A glitch might not be an accident but the precursor to an accident. I can’t help but remember in the presence of glitches in the Matrix (yes, I know…but bear with me) where those glitches warn that an “agent” (an enemy programme, a destroyer code) has been inserted into the hero’s locality. These glitches reveal the discontinuous interruptions in the apparently smooth running of the digital. In this way, while they don’t “crash the network”, they do insist on the network’s contingency, its necessary incompletion.
In real digital realms a glitch might crash something. What would a system wide cascade of glitches do to the finance markets?