Glitch Art in Theory and Practice: Critical Failures and Post-Internet Art explores the concept of "glitch" alongside contemporary digital political economy to develop a general theory of critical media using glitch as a case study and model, focusing specifically on examples of digital art and aesthetics. While prior literature on glitch practice in visual arts has been divided between historical discussions and social-political analyses, this work provides a rigorous, contemporary theoretical foundation and framework.
This book discusses the connections between contemporary uses of technical failure and historical avant-garde materialist film practices. It puts the contemporary "glitch" into a historical framework. Artists producing visual glitches have engaged in a limited range of protocols for their creation and deployment in their work. This book is concerned with the potentials contained by understanding glitch through a general framework addressing the types of manipulation and their relationship to the digital technology that produces the work. This production of glitch falls into five general (historical) categories that begin with the digital file itself and progress towards the physical presentation of the work, shifting from a manipulation of the virtual, digital instructions that are the file towards the literal presentation of that file for an audience.
Michael Betancourt is a theorist, historian, and artist concerned with digital technology and capitalist ideology. He is the author of The ____________ Manifesto, The History of Motion Graphics, The History of Motion Graphics, Beyond Spatial Montage: Windowing, or, the Cinematic Displacement of Time, Motion, and Space, and The Critique of Digital Capitalism. He has exhibited internationally, and his work has been translated into Chinese, French, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Persian, Portuguese, and Spanish, andpublished in journals such as CTheory, Semiotica, and Leonardo.
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