Mark Batty Publisher

Hitches in the Machine

May 18, 2009

The integration of computers and digital systems into modern life is now nearly total: from cell phones (now mostly digital) to ATM machines, through the massive datacenters that channel this webpage to your screen, there is hardly a moment in most people’s working day, or leisure time, that isn’t in some way delivered by a machine. People’s imaginations can respond to this with techno-utopian zeal (think Ray Kurzweil) or with the trepidation and pessimism of a Luddite (think the Matrix or Terminator franchises), but what it really entails is far subtler and surprising, especially as it is revealed in the errors and glitches that now have so great an impact over our day to day. 

 

Last Thursday, for instance, an unknown number of Google users lost access to their email, reader, calendars, and other Google gewgaw. Immediately Twitter was ablaze with irate Googlers who saw the Four Horsemen agallop on the error pages that greeted their screens when they tried access their accounts. Clearly the end of days was at hand. And yet, the apocalypse was short lived, and Google managed to solve the problem in a few hours. Such is the ephemeral nature of a glitch. Google, in fact, has had a few of them in recent months. In January an error in the coding of their antivirus software made every page on the web look like a security risk. Again, within hours the problem was remedied and things returned to normal, but those precious moments of glitch-induced perplexity even made the New York Times look like it might harbor virus threats. 

 

Google’s glitches, and glitches generally, have a tendency to be seen as only annoying and as striking only for their capacity to disrupt routine. But some glitches become something more than mere errors, and rise to the level of, if not objects—the world rendered through computer screens has a hard time making it to three-dimensional space—aesthetic phenomena. A growing number of artists have been drawn to these, the attractive glitches, and their increasing body of work has started to garner broader attention. Websites have cropped up detailing the artists’ efforts and methods. The movement looks primed to explode, and what it demonstrates about the potential beauty in mistakes is at times startling. And, of course, sometimes the chaos of a glitch is exactly what is needed to make a song.

It is this that is the focus of MBP’s upcoming Glitch: Designing Imperfection. Gathering together the efforts of artists from the entire world, the book presents over 200 images of the best mistakes ever made.

–JCD

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