Glitch Poetics

In the Dec-Jan 2015-16 issue of Art Monthly, there's an article by Nathan Jones. Here's the start - "Technological breakdowns stop us at the moment of dissolution into a mesh of media, tools and technologies, offering us a fleeting moment of insight about the things we use and how we relate to them. In this sense, our experience of media is precisely - and perhaps uniquely - the experience of their failure".

Artists like Caroline Bergvall "force and accentuate errors in language ... to extend what language can say into the formerly unspeakable territory of its own production". "What I am calling glitch poetics operates to extend and make critically available the liminal moment of our relationship with technologies through language".

Bergvall mumbled recordings, "Inhabiting the accidental slippage and the inherent noise of analogue recording as purposive tactic". Others have used predictive text to "overload the desire of the technological algorithms for ever-greater intimacy and complicity".

Finally we learn that "at the frontier of language and technology, artists are extending what is sayable in order to articulate the formerly withdrawn but now increasing coercive apparatuses which are involved in saying and in doing. By engaging with timeless questions about the interior self and exterior self in language, these artists are addressing increasingly insistent issues raised by computational prostheses".

He describes a performance by Scourti as "containing many words of apparent significance, phrases which gestured towards making a statement of some kind, but the cumulative effect being one of circularity and incoherence ... it continually appears to make sense yet ultimately says nothing at all".