While “The Collapse of PAL” demonstrates that visual glitches are capable of rhetorical engagement, it also highlights an important distinction between glitch and glitch-effects. A computer crash is not a glitch, but rather the effect of a glitch that indexes a deviation within the system; similarly, the scrambled content of a word doc is an effect that indexes a glitch within word processing software. What we see when we view Menkman’s work are not glitches themselves, but rather glitch-effects that serve as something of a “digital fingerprint” signifying some kind of error within a digital signal/system. Although the distinction might seem arbitrary, the popularization of glitch as a visual filter is established on the separation of glitch from its visual effects in much of the same way that decaf coffee and non-fat chocolate allows one pleasure sans risk (Zizek).
The use of glitch-effects as a visual aesthetic and mode of remix has many origins ranging from the art of Kintsugi to surrealist games of chance. Nick Briz, however, suggests that its emergence as a popular digital form arose during early 2009, around the same time that Barack Obama began his first term as President of the United States and the Obama Hope image was experiencing a rapid intensity of remix. Shortly after his election, Kanye West released the music video for "Welcome to Heartbreak." Despite political disparities between the two, Obama and West both rose to prominence during "The Great Recession." This economic crash, which originated from a failure within the US housing market and banks, influenced the rhetorical stylings of both Obama and West. Obama's inaugural address, responding to the corrosion of national trust in such systems, sought to restore confidence by invoking respected historic figures and using repetition as well as carefully measured pauses. Within Obama’s address, such techniques operated as signals cuing his audience to the return of control over an increasingly chaotic economy, environment, and geopolitical landscape. But whereas Obama expressed order, West glamorized collapse. West's visual aesthetics in “Welcome to Heartbreak” signify corruption and failure through glitch-based visual effects such as datamoshing that tapped into the lingering anxiety and dread of the individual amid national failure. According to Briz, West's video was a deeply formative moment for glitch art (personal correspondence). Whereas Obama's address galvanized Americans to face and resolve these failures, West's video demonstrated how the public could embrace and rhetorically harness such failures as a visual digital utterance.
Of course, West was not alone in exploring visual glitch-effects as a modality. Several artists emerging at the same moment also helped ensured that glitchy, broken digital aesthetics reached the larger public. For example, Chairlift's "Evident Utensil," another video featuring datamoshing, was released just a few months after "Welcome to Heartbreak." Although both West and Chairlift feature datamoshing, Chairlift's use of this visual technique suggests connection and fluidity, showing that crashes and glitches can unite as much as they can divide. Similarly, Sonny Moore, best known by his stage name Skrillex, began his solo career innovating and popularizing the glitchy, broken sounds and visualizations of dubstep over the same period. Examples of glitch aesthetics in popular culture including film, digital games, and other media unsurprisingly abound during this period of global unrest and collapse, positioning glitch as a visual vernacular for addressing and understanding the uneasy state of the U.S. and the world from 2009 onward.
Perhaps in response to these problems, 2009 remains a critical moment for glitch art as it marks the moment when visual artists, designers, and programmers began to explore glitch as a visual signifier. In doing so, many began to strip glitches’ visual indexes away from the crashes and failures that produced them. These changes led to the development of tools and scripts that allow users to instantly produce visual glitch-effects over a photo of the user’s choice without having to corrupt a computer—a trend which coincidentally occurred around the same time that visual tools like Obamicon.me began to circulate. In Still Life with Rhetoric, Gries explains that Obamicon.me and similar tools for visual remix allow users to rapidly produce social and political rhetoric through a specific visual discourse. The glitch tools and tutorials of 2009 served a similar purpose, allowing users to rapidly produce social and political visual engagements with technology’s embeddedness within daily life and being. As demonstrated by their widespread use in various social communities such as FaceBook’s “Glitch//Request” group or Reddit’s “glitch_art,” tools such as Snorpey’s “Image Glitch Tool” and scripts like the “GenerateMe” package have become and remain popular because they allow users to easily blend images and glitch-effects to rhetorically deploy visual signifiers for corruption, violence, spectrality (haunted-ness), isolation, disorder, mechanization, digitization, and decay. Common uploads include selfies, various political and popular figures, and places like graveyards, alleyways, etc. Glitch-effects are added to amplify as well as comment on some aspect of the image. A neon-lit alleyway, for example, might use a VHS vertical roll to express the multi-temporality of a place (that the 1980s still resides within the 21st century); similarly, a politician might be datamoshed with another image to imply their entanglement with various corrupt agendas and supporters.
Yet these visual remix tools also create problems. Specifically, while tools facilitate rapid creation and circulation, they do so because they rely strongly on the repetition of discrete visual signifiers. The repetition of the Obamicon, for example, ends up preserving and protecting a “visual DNA” that adheres to the specific visual style and structure the original Obama Hope image. Glitch-effect tools perform similar work, allowing users to change the image while largely reproducing the same visual DNA each time. In doing so, such tools convey a problematic discourse rooted in visual purity, visual gatekeeping, and exclusivity defining as much of what can be said with visual media as what cannot. In short, by granting control over the content and form of digital remixes, tools impose restrictions on an image’s becoming.
Becoming, in Gries’ work, refers to “a virtual-actual process in which any given thing, better thought of as a multiplicity, ‘changes in nature as it expands its connections’ through its constant production with time and space” (31). In other words, becoming refers to the potential transformations and mutations that any visual artifact or media might undergo as it spreads and circulates. To simplify this explanation a bit more, we can understand becoming as the children’s game “Telephone.” In “Telephone,” one player comes up with a phrase and whispers from one player, who whispers it to the next player, who whispers it to the next until the phrase is finally announced by the last player. Although the goal is to preserve the original phrase, the fun of the game comes from the errors that occur during each re-telling, leading to an entirely different phrase at the end. What starts as “I like apples” might end as “I hike Naples.” Becomings are just this: a process through which something, as it moves around and comes into contact with different agents, undergoes transformations that result in a very different something on the other side.
Although tools might inspire, as Gries argues, potential changes in images once they arrive at a link (or whisperer) in the chain, the telephone game shows that becomings can also occur through errors and noise that arise in the transmission of a phrase from one whisperer to the next. We should locate this becoming “in-between,” somewhere within the interaction between user and the tool rather than between user and user. As Steven R. Hammer argues in “Writing Dirt, Teaching N0ise,” tools tend to elide or purposefully guard against this type of becoming:
many still talk of noise as though it is a distinct and separate event-agent that spoils the communication part. We might call this the myth of noiselessness. It is pervasive, available in nearly every advertisement for contemporary digital devices. It is the promise of functionality, the increasingly clean and polished interfaces, the decreasing ability of users to understand or modify digital tools. (Hammer)
Yet noise is critical to the creative evolution and becoming of visual images, and while tools may try to ineffectively cap this form of creative evolution, embracing noise allows for unexpected becomings to emerge. As N. Katherine Hayles explains “noise in a communication channel need not always destructively interfere with the message, but rather could itself become part of the message” (3). The Telephone game demonstrates this fact, showing that “errors” are in fact discursive becomings of the originally transmitted media (be it words, writing, or image) and integral to its exchange—we play because of a fascination with unexpected changes in the information channel that lead to unforeseen transformations in the original media. And perhaps we might research (with and through) glitch to catch a glimpse at visual media and communities to come.
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