Photography and the Glitch

Since 2005 a growing community of artists have been engaged with the potential of the glitch – with processes and aesthetics stemming from visual errors in digital technologies. Photography and the Glitch investigates technology as something beyond the apparatus, including discursive, spatial, social, and political mechanisms.

The research is thus manifold. One aspect is concerned with the glitched body in terms of skin, camouflage and hybridity, and here Legacy Russell’s Glitch feminism Manifesto (2020) is a crucial work. Embracing illegibility, unruliness, vulnerably, and lack of control the notion of the glitch opens for posthuman and non-human relations and visibilities. Another approach centers around the glitch as a bug using the concept ‘insect media’ (from Jussi Parikka’s 2010 book Insect Media. An Archeology of Animals and Technology) as a source of inspiration. The figure of the bug in terms of camouflage and in-betweenness offers reflections on how contemporary machinic or networked photography can be thought of through insect entomology. And yet another focus point is non-human agencies and interferences - from both the machinic and the natural realms, and here Joanna Zylinska’s 2017 publication Nonhuman Photography offers key media-specific observations. 

With a multidisciplinary approach Photography and the Glitch invites practitioners and researchers from art and technology to be in dialogue about how the glitch can provide space for new ways of seeing, making images and ultimately engaging with the world.

Planned outcomes (2021-25) are a series of public symposiums, publications and an exhibition.