By Kyle Bohunicky
Figure 1. A video introducing the various types of glitches discussed in the article and providing a brief glimpse at their production/occurance using Shepard Fairey’s (2008) Barack Obama “Hope” poster. (This video has no audio.)
In charting out a compendium for doing digital visual studies, many contributors to this collection focus on “remix” as a key technique for creating and researching digital images. Remix, broadly, refers to “collage, a recombination of existing reference images or music or video clips from popular digital culture, elements of which are mashed up into something new” (Stepanek qtd in Gries). Put perhaps less elegantly: remix is digital culture. We laugh at it in Obama and Biden friendship memes, nod along to it in auto-tuned Obama interviews-turned-songs, and play it in fan-made games re-appropriating Obama and his administration’s policies. Digital culture lives and breathes remix, and Obama Hope has been one of the most popular sites for practicing remix in recent years. The methodological approaches offered in the preceding chapters highlight this fact by demonstrating how remix can provide inroads to study the identities and discursive practices of various communities that have interfaced with Shepard Fairey’s iconic Obama Hope image.
While Stepanek’s definition provides a general overview of remix, and remixes of Obama Hope model how remix often unfolds within digital culture, on a micro level remix takes on many different styles, techniques, and modalities. Surrealist word and image games like the Exquisite Corpse, for example, rely on a group of players who collectively assemble an image by drawing part of the picture, covering it, and passing it to the next player to continue the drawing. Tijuana Bibles, on the other hand, merge together genres and popular icons into illicit comics that depict famous comic and cartoon characters engaging in sexual acts with characters who represent social archetypes of the early 20th century. The type of remix practiced in Tijuana Bibles has connections with Renaissance paintings, which took icons from the Bible and brought them into contact with the people, places, and events from the 14th to 17th century in Europe. Permutations of remix, each with distinct techniques, can also be found work in molecular gastronomy, graffiti, music, and more. In short, while digital culture (and the arts in general) thrives on remix in general, in each adaptation of remix we can find it taking on alternative styles of practice.
One style of remix provided by digital technologies and media is “glitch.” Glitch typically refers to unexpected, and usually unwanted, changes in a technological system. In “Glitch/Glitsh: (More Power) Lucky Break and the Position of Modern Technology,” Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa explains that "in electronic systems the term [glitch] mostly references an unexpected event, a surging, a misdirecting, a severing of the flow of energy and information" (3). While glitches often completely crash software or hardware, on occasion the software will remain operable but in a transformed state. Some of these transformations can include mild visual effects including artifacts, distortion, and noise that interfere with a software’s visual aspects. They might also result in changes to operation, disabling functions that once worked and creating new functions that were previously impossible. Glitches can even completely re-organize interfaces and images, merging bits and pieces of an image or multiple images and re-combining them unexpectedly. In these ways, then, glitch also functions as a form of remix in that glitch takes “hold of the data and creatively remix[es] it into the reality of the moment” (Amerika). As Mark Amerika explains, the rhetorical power and sublime dimensions glitch-based remixes exude from how each foregrounds the myriad and nigh imperceptible ways that digital technologies and data are deeply interwoven into our day to day experiences. Glitch-based remixes unearth these blended techno-data-reality optics that challenge us to question how both our vision and view are always compromised and constructed.
Due to such affordances, glitch-based remixes can provide digital visual studies scholars with a productive means of revealing and engaging the underlying logic and ideologies of digital technology. Benjamin Mako Hill, specifically, suggests that we can use glitches to expose the inner logic of an operating system. According to Hill, glitches are a form of digital “utterance” that signifies how digital systems operate and are used: "An inverted u exposes a human typesetter, a letterpress, and a hasty error in judgment. Encoding errors and botched smart quotation marks—a ? in place of a "—are only possible with a computer" (30). Whereas Hill explains how glitches reveal the processes and operators at the core of communication software, Casey Boyle addresses the possibilities of using chance-based utterances rhetorically. Because glitches index various mediators that are typically obscured during normal operations, they help inform us of how these mediators act on our communication and decision making. Used rhetorically, then, glitches make systems work in ways that can benefit the digital rhetor (such as, for example, revealing classified information under the guise of glitch), leading Boyle to classify glitches as “something that manipulates and something that can be manipulated." In addition to mediation, glitches can also reveal and challenge practices, beliefs, and principles embedded within digital technologies. Rosa Menkman’s “The Collapse of PAL,” for example, prominently features glitch-effects that can only emerge from a PAL signal. Although these effects are the result of an accident, Menkman captures and displays them to reflect on PAL’s obsolescence and expose how (through a lineage of visual artifacts) newer signals like DVB “inherit…or appropriated from” older signals such as PAL (Menkman). In doing so, Menkman’s glitch showcase provides just one example of rhetorical engagement with planned obsolescence by performing media archeological “art-work.”
While such work exists on the rhetorical and artistic applications of glitch, less work has been done on its potential applications for research, especially digital visual studies. As the examples from Hill and Menkman both demonstrate, glitch is a form of remix that creates equal opportunities for engagement and education about how software and digital media operate. In this chapter, I reflect on the latter, and I present glitch as a form of research-creation for digital visual studies and highlight several of its potential applications. I do so by applying a homemade glitch technique called “image melding” to Fairey’s Obama Hope image. In the first section of the chapter, I begin by tracing the popularization of visual “glitch-effects.” My account in this section specifically engages with a potential conflict between the tool-based- and chance-based techniques for actualizing digital visual images’ potential becomings. In the section that follows, I position glitch-based remixes as a research creation practice for Obama Hope and digital visual culture broadly. Here, I describe how I developed and applied image melding to the Obama Hope image. Image melding works across modalities, combining by corroding and corrupting the boundaries between digital games, digital images, and digital film. The results are a sublime, chance-based aesthetic engagement that amplifies the potential rhetorics within the field of digital, data-fied images, allowing the expansion of our perception from reality as such, to reality as techno-data-reality construct. This widening gestures towards the presence of invisible discursive actors on and surrounding the image, as well as potential actors and communities that might possibility emerge from the multimodal meld of various discourses—digital scrying, in a sense. The chance-based optics provided by glitch-based remix cannot be re-created, so this section does not offer a step-by-step tutorial to re-create specific melds. For readers interested in playing with and creating their own melds, however, I provide a general description of the technique that will allow readers to experiment with image melds and potentially discover techniques of their own. By melding, we can glimpse at the invisible and potential (as well as potentially unrealized) futures of visual discourse and digital communities as they collide with and amplify the content of various digital images.
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