Softcore Post 3: TV Screens

This video is from a mall in Hong Kong.

I have an abiding interest in glitches and low-tech. I found this at a mall. When we had arrived, this was displaying some images--I think news. We went up the elevator to the rooftop, snapped some photos, and came down. When we got off the elevator, the 'recognizable' images had become this. I'm attracted to glitches in part for reasons that artist and scholar Rosa Menkman explains in her 2009/2010 Glitch Studies Manifesto; she writes,

The glitch is a wonderful experience of an interruption that shifts an object away from its ordinary form and discourse. For a moment I am shocked, lost and in awe, asking myself what this other utterance is, how was it created. Is it perhaps... a glitch? But once I name it, the momentum—the glitch—is no more... (Menkman 5).

What actually happens when a glitch occurs is unknown, I stare at the glitch as a void of knowledge; a strange dimension where the laws of technology are suddenly very different from what I expected and know. Here is the purgatory; an intermediate state between the death of the old technology and a judgement for a possible continuation into a new form, a new understanding, a landscape, a videoscape… (Menkman 9).

Although Menkman points to the ways in which the glitch is recuperated by and assimilated into, for instance, dominant epistemologies (or epistemology at all) and capital, she remains nonetheless committed to a utopian vision in the "ruins of meaning" (5). I wonder to what degree someone like Gitlin's notion of hegemony might help us re-situate the glitched screen not as aberrant or essentially resistant or defamiliarizing, but re-enfolded into dominant ideology. I wonder to what degree glitches and noise are constitutive of the informational rather than something to be gotten rid of. I recall Wendy Chun saying something about this in Programmed Visions but I can no longer find it. ("making it difficult to separate error from answer" perhaps? [Chun 142]).


http://amodern.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/2010_Original_Rosa-Menkman-Glitch-Studies-Manifesto.pdf