Glitches, Bits, and Switches
2007
With work by:
Mark Baldridge
Katherine Behar
Ben Carney
Galen Curwen-McAddams
Margaret Dolinsky
John Dugan
Morgan Higby-Flowers
Patrick Lichty + Second Front
Matt Nelson
Silvia Ruzanka
Roger Wakeman
And more…
Writing in the mid-nineties, on the cusp of the exploding information age, Katherine Hayles chooses an unusual definition for the word "virtuality": physical objects becoming enmeshed with information. Not just a promise of technologically mediated, transcendent spectacle, this is a way of thinking of the virtual that gets at the underlying material of information, (if information can be considered material), and also at the layer below that, the physical material in which information must always be embedded. In this formulation, a graphical VR environment, an electronic financial network, a thermostat, and organic DNA- all represent different forms of the Virtual.
Little more than a decade later, information is even more closely enmeshed with our physical being, but we've only scratched the surface of the meaning and implications of this condition. The transition between the virtual and the physical, the virtual and the real, or the virtual and the actual is not always a smooth one. Call this rupture the "glitch" - it's the mark that signifies the materiality and construction of the image, the tear in the curtain around the apparatus, but also the mutation that presents new possibility.
Mark Baldridge
Katherine Behar
Ben Carney
Galen Curwen-McAddams
Margaret Dolinsky
John Dugan
Morgan Higby-Flowers
Patrick Lichty + Second Front
Matt Nelson
Silvia Ruzanka
Roger Wakeman
And more…
Writing in the mid-nineties, on the cusp of the exploding information age, Katherine Hayles chooses an unusual definition for the word "virtuality": physical objects becoming enmeshed with information. Not just a promise of technologically mediated, transcendent spectacle, this is a way of thinking of the virtual that gets at the underlying material of information, (if information can be considered material), and also at the layer below that, the physical material in which information must always be embedded. In this formulation, a graphical VR environment, an electronic financial network, a thermostat, and organic DNA- all represent different forms of the Virtual.
Little more than a decade later, information is even more closely enmeshed with our physical being, but we've only scratched the surface of the meaning and implications of this condition. The transition between the virtual and the physical, the virtual and the real, or the virtual and the actual is not always a smooth one. Call this rupture the "glitch" - it's the mark that signifies the materiality and construction of the image, the tear in the curtain around the apparatus, but also the mutation that presents new possibility.
