Bogotissimo!

Mamihlapinatapai (a veces escrita incorrectamente como mamihlapinatapei) es una palabra del idioma de los indios yámanas de Tierra del Fuego, listada en el Libro Guinness de los Récords como la “palabra más sucinta del mundo”, y es considerada como uno de los términos más difíciles para traducir. Describe “una mirada entre dos personas, cada una de las cuales espera que la otra comience una acción que ambos desean pero que ninguno se anima a iniciar”.

(found in ehqcd, who also found it elsewhere)

I bought The Recognitions from a used book store. Sometimes these books are, like advertised, as new; sometimes they contain charming sidenotes and scribbles. Mine had, next to a line of Wyatt Gwyon (in the context of discussing his relationship), one of these interesting sidenotes, written with a yellow-marker pen. It read:

“BULLSHIT!!!”

I took this and other telling signs left by the yellow-marker reader (and by the blue-marker reader, who I suspect was the same person, though there is room for controversy) to speculate what this person was like, and, in a curly, roundabout way, review The Rec elsewhere.

The Recognitions is one of my favourite books, but I’ll admit that it is, being euphemistic, rather uncompromising. This has kept away the ruckus surrounding other writers of long, ambitious novels, but it takes its burden on the reader, and sometimes it is quite a burden. There is, for example, the infamous 80-page long party scene everyone complains about, and I too had a hard time slogging through it (and believe me, I have been to my share of terrible parties). Wyatt Mason, in Harpers Magazine, has decided to share with us one of the notes he made in this scene:

—-

In the Guardian:

Since its inception, e-lit has been struggling to free itself from its generic limitations and now seems to be on the verge of doing so. At long last. Although interesting, its early manifestations were hardly groundbreaking. Collaborative narratives are as old as literature itself. Generative poetry simply adds a technological twist to Tzara’s hat trick, the surrealists’ automatic writing or Burroughs’ cut-ups. Interactive fiction has its roots in Cervantes and Sterne. Hypertexts seldom improve on gamebooks like the famous Choose Your Own Adventure series, let alone BS Johnson’s infamous novel-in-a-box. Besides, if you really want to add sound and pictures to words, why not make a film?

So far, the brave new world of digital literature has been largely anti-climatic. Meade himself confides that he is yet to be “seized by a digital fiction that is utterly compelling”. I can but concur. Technology - the very stuff e-lit is made of - has also turned out to be its Achilles heel. The slow switch to broadband limits its potential audience, e-readers are only adapted to conventional texts - and when was the last time you curled up in bed with a hypertext? In spite of all this, Amerika may well be on to something when he claims that we are witnessing the emergence of a “digitally-processed intermedia art” in which literature and all the other arts are being “remixed into yet other forms still not fully developed”. My feeling is that these “other forms” will have less and less to do with literature. Perhaps e-lit is already dead?

This kinda nailed my concerns about e-lit: sure, the earlier experiments were still clumsy, expanding on modernist strategies or unskillfully recycling the easier recipes of post-modernism. But then the second wave came, and the incipient bud of electronic literature found itself devoured by Media Art folks, realizing text is one among many other possible media. (Which by the way I argue it isn’t: textuality is something more basic and encompassing.)

Of course all literature is, in a sense, meta-linguistic: usually tacitly, in the form of an imperative of honesty. But there is a key difference between textual Media Art, or Media Art about text, and literature; it is difficult to spell out, but it is akin to the distance between Andrei Tarkovsky and Bill Viola. The novelty and the challenges of the new medium steal the scene, and because of this we stray away from engaging with the literary tradition and remembering what’s specific to literature as an art form. In Brazil, we have nigh endured 50 years of “concrete poetry,” which was actually lousy media-art-about-text disguised as literature, and it pretty much ruled universities for a big portion of that time: so trust us, by now most of us can tell the difference. Readers such as the author of the Guardian post can, too, hence their disappointment.

(Need I point this out? I’m all for media art and all that, I even practice the stuff. And the times ask for a revision of what we know about text, and for careful study of what is changing on that front. The ground is moving beneath our feet, and moving ground demands accounting for. But I am also growing weary of this false, throwing baby away with tub-water dilemma. Drawing this distinction is as difficult as it is easy to topple it down; but does anyone honestly think this is not one worth making?)

Let’s look at this closely.

The Night Abraham Called to the Stars

Do you remember the night Abraham first saw
The stars? He cried to Saturn: “You are my Lord!”
How happy he was! When he saw the Dawn Star,

He cried, “”You are my Lord!” How destroyed he was
When he watched them set. Friends, he is like us:
We take as our Lord the stars that go down.

When Abraham first saw the stars, he cried to Saturn: “You are my Lord!” Prior to this Abraham had lived  inside a cave in Northern Chaldea and had no acquaintance with stars whatsoever. This is further illustrated by his confusion when, amazed with the stars, he cries out to Saturn and then to Venus (the morning star) which, though kinda visible to the naked eye, aren’t exactly stars but something else altogether (planets).

But of course Bly is not just throwing the planets on us at random. Saturn, as we know, symbolizes severity (it is the root of the adjective “saturnine”) and patriarchy, and Abraham is a patriarch - whose progeny, it’s prophesied in Genesis, will be as numerous as the stars in heaven. Then the stars set, progeny and patriarch, and we see the morning star, which in Latin is Lucifer - expelled from the firmament, always closely following the sun (Venus is never more than, I don’t remember, 40 degrees? 35 degrees? away from the sun in the sky), the light-bringer. Besides being Lucifer, the morning star is also Venus, a planet that symbolizes love and all that comes along with it (it is the root of the adjective “venereal”).  So Abraham the biblical patriarch first cries out to severe wise Saturn, surrounded by its numerous progeny, but then they leave him and he becomes a worshipper of the morning star (Lucifer-Venus) instead. Thought provoking, but then that leaves him as well. Bummer.

“Friends, he is like us: / We take as our Lord the stars that go down.” In case anybody missed it, we are not really talking about the life of the Biblical Abraham here. This is metaphor. Also, recall that Abraham is the man of the perfect faith, willing to sacrifice his own son if his zany god asks him to.

Notice the enjambent, how it shakes around what would ordinarily be a pretty ordinary verse: “Do you remember the night Abraham first saw / The stars?” Damn good device.

We are faithful companions to the unfaithful stars.
We are diggers, like badgers; we love to feel
The dirt flying out from behind our back claws.

And no one can convince us that mud is not
Beautiful. It is our badger soul that thinks so.
We are ready to spend the rest of our life

Bly reiterates: “We are faithful companions to the unfaithful stars.” Please note it down. It will be on the test.

In the first two stanzas, Bly used the stars as an allegory to the cold, unreachable ideals man is drawn to. In the next two stanzas, Bly surprises us by contrasting this image of ideal-sky with the image of mud, representing the seduction of materiality. The transition is stunning - it comes in the middle of stanza 3, out of the blue, with no warnings that we are changing subjects completely.

According to Bly, we love the stars, but we love the ground, too. You know who also loves the ground? Badgers. They love the ground so much they dig holes to live inside it. And so does man. We have the soul of a badger. We turn our backs to the stars and live in deep dark holes in Northern Chaldea.

Notice again the clever enjambment and how it turns an otherwise straightforward verse into one of sophisticated rhythm: “And no one can convince us that mud is not / Beautiful.” Bly almost makes it look easy.

Walking with muddy shoes in the wet fields.
We resemble exiles in the kingdom of the serpent.
We stand in the onion fields looking up at the night.

We are going esoteric here, with much puzzling symbolism. Is “the kingdom of the serpent” Egypt, where part of Abraham’s numerous progeny will end up as exiles? Until the first verse, we were badgers loving the ground and were quite ready to spend the rest of our life about it. Verse number 2 lets us know that no, really, we aren’t, we are like Hebrews exiled in Egypt yearning for the Promised Land. Again, no transition. Stunning.

We stand in the onion fields - beautiful imagery, onion fields - looking up at the stars again.

My heart is a calm potato by day, and a weeping
Abandoned woman by night. Friend, tell me what to do,
Since I am a man in love with the setting stars.

“My heart is a calm potato by day.” The heart of Robert Bly is like a potato - one of the calm ones -, comfortably half-buried in the ground, peaceful and serene like only a potato, when it is calm, can be. But that is during the day. Then night comes with its stars, and this unsettles the calm potato. It is no longer a calm potato, it is quite upset. It turns into a woman, a weeping woman abandoned by the stars. Stars that she (= the heart of Robert Bly) is in love with. Also: in stanza number 2, Bly addressed us as “friends” - he is speaking to the crowds, the lecturer to its audience. Now he has gone more intimate and talks to us individually, confessing: friend. Or maybe everybody else has already gone away.

Bly is Poet Laureate of the state of Minnesota, and, in 1968, received the National Book Award.

Philosophy of the Silver Box, by Giselle Beiguelman and yours truly (hi!), is in Vivo Arte.Mov São Paulo from yesterday to mid-november. This work was comissioned by the Bienal de Arte Contemporáneo de Sevilla, where it will also be on display* from October 2nd to January.

* It’s the XXI century. Art replicates.

When Paul Muldoon (my favourite living poet*) became poetry editor for the New Yorker, I spouted elsewhere, “maybe now the poems of said magazine will get any better.” Muldoon, afterall, poked fun at the “New Yorker poem” (defined by David Orr as “basically an epiphany-centered lyric heavy on words like ‘water’ and ‘light’“) in his hilarious Capercallies, in Madoc.

Muldoon is also a rock’n'roller. He gathered with fellow colleagues at Princeton (where he teaches Creative Writing) and formed Rackett, a “3-car garage band”, writing lyrics with his characteristic outrageous rhymes. (Also, is there any song half as clever as “My ride is here“, that he wrote for Warren Zevon?)

Well, anyway, Bob Dylan poems in the latest issue of the New Yorker. Enjoy.

* Maybe. I have Charles Wright days also.

(I couldn’t help myself)
I read some Baudrillard when I was in my teens. It was the late 90s, all the cool kids were reading him, and I am, as you know, a fashion victim. I have by now erased most of his vague, unsubtle theorizing from my memory, but some lines, some insights have stayed with me. One of them reads:

We used to live in the internal imaginary world of the mirror, of the divided self and of the stage, of otherness and internal alienation. Today we live in the imaginary world of the screen, of the internal interface and the reduplication of contiguity and internal networks. All our machines are screens. We too have become screens, and the interactivity of men has become the interactivity of screens.

The imaginary world of the mirror: the insurmountable gap between the true self and its representations, interior or exterior. The face always hidden behind the stage mask; or, as the doctor tells the actress in Persona:

I understand, all right. The hopeless dream of being - not seeming, but being. At every waking moment, alert. The gulf between what you are with others and what you are alone. The vertigo and the constant hunger to be exposed, to be seen through, perhaps even wiped out. Every inflection and every gesture a lie, every smile a grimace. Suicide? No, too vulgar. But you can refuse to move, refuse to talk, so that you don’t have to lie. You can shut yourself in. Then you needn’t play any parts or make wrong gestures. Or so you thought. But reality is diabolical. Your hiding place isn’t watertight. Life trickles in from the outside, and you’re forced to react. No one asks if it is true or false, if you’re genuine or just a sham. Such things matter only in the theatre, and hardly there either. I understand why you don’t speak, why you don’t move, why you’ve created a part for yourself out of apathy. I understand. I admire. You should go on with this part until it is played out, until it loses interest for you. Then you can leave it, just as you’ve left your other parts one by one.

Even the actress’s desperate gesture, shutting in so as not to be unfaithful to her true self, fails: life forces you to react, and this shutting in is itself a role she chooses to play.

We are, Baudrillard argues, beyond that, however. Theory has made us wary of such “true faces,” immanent and preceding any enactment, beyond the grasp of language. This suspicion eventually became widespread, or at least so it seems looking from here. We have not, however, become contented egoless Buddhist screens, or learned to live with the thought that “such things matter only in the theatre, and hardly there either.” And this is where I depart from Baudrillard, in claiming that the world of the screen is still a world of otherness and internal alienation. The content of the screen is even more artificial and derivative than that of the mirror and the stage persona; the key difference is that the former does not, like the latter two, establish an overt tension between the authentic and the artificial, the source and the derivation. A source is still assumed, but it’s not next to the mirror or behind the mask: the source of the image on the screen is remote, perhaps impossible to reach or to trace. When one identifies with the screen and the logic of the screen, knowledge of the true self is precluded from the start. It is there somewhere, but if your quest is to find it, you are screwed.

---

Wallace’s characters are all, in his own words, emotionally retarded. They are often very intelligent people, clever enough to learn the norms and expectations of the world around them, develop a keen sense of appropriateness, figure out what they have to say or do to get the desired response. What they haven’t done is attributing meaning to any of this; creating an identity for themselves; to thine own self being true. They are hollow men, dettached from themselves. They have never taken even the first step in that most German of journeys, that of character formation.

But matters are even worse: in Wallace’s world, this step is unthinkable. His characters are all suffering, but of a diffuse pain they cannot articulate (even when it’s obvious to the reader where it’s coming from); they aren’t mature enough even to acknowledge it, until it comes to overwhelm them completely - a situation Wallace mistakenly labels “Psychotic Depression”. Their first route of escape is dealing with pain beneath language and articulation, by falling into addiction - usually to chemicals or alcohol, but Wallace neatly catalogues the wide range of possibilities.

Not that his characters never set a search for sincerity and authenticity, like in Good Old Neon and The Depressed Person. The former shows a character finding that every gesture of his is a lie, and, unable to find anything authentic, finally kills himself (Wallace by the end explains that the story consists of projections of the author - by which he is very unambiguous about being himself, not some fictional author - upon reading about a similar suicide on the news). Good Old Neon searchs outward; The Depressed Person moves inwards, in a spiral of self-denouncement of artifice that never really comes anywhere closer to the sincerity it seeks, but replicates the same artifice endlessly.

The other choice - a better one, one that might actually work - is the approach of the Alcoholics Anonymous. When Wallace’s characters finally get a glimpse inwards, what they see is allegorized by deformed children; something helpless and revolting, both undeveloped and malformed. Wallace’s AA is a strategy of infantilization, of coming to terms with oneself by reducing oneself to one’s lowest, most primitive mode of function: of abandoning pride and becoming this deformed child they ultimately recognize is their present state. The alternative to indulging in vice, in Wallace’s world, is radical self-indulgence.

Wallace is often contrasted to writers such as Paliahnuk, for the former’s advantage. It is true, of course, that Wallace is a much more skillful writer; but when we contrast the works beyond form, we see that Fight Club starts where Infinite Jest leaves us: Tyler Durden, the protagonist of Fight Club, is also a very successful emotional retard, suffering from extreme discontentment he can’t even begin to articulate. He is more advanced than Wallace’s typical character (let’s take Hal here) in that at least he is aware of how his identity has become loose, indistinct and fragmentary. In the beginning of the story, Tyler tries the support groups Wallace so unabashedly eulogizes; eventually he finds, however, that such groups are even a greater travesty than everything else he tried, and a self-degrading one at that. True, the alternative he finds - an aggressive revolt against the world, directed as diffusely as his sense of discontentment - is not the most well-rounded of attitudes. But there is more hope in the world of Fight Club than in that of Infinite Jest, for in the world of Fight Club, however misguided the results of this might be, the notion of human dignity still lives. There is also a bit more self-knowledge there, but one that is crucial.

---

In a letter to Schiller, Goethe comments how Wilhelm Meister is actually no Meister at all, and calls him Wilhelm Schuler. He notices however that as he wanted to write about character and how it comes to form, he could not make his protagonist mature, with a strong character. These things are more evident in the deficient examples, Goethe argues. (Not Goethe’s words, I don’t have the book here to cite them.) We could try to make sense of Wallace’s works in those terms. We would say he speaks exclusively of the most wretched, despicable men - hideous men - because it is there that such troubles are more evident.

It is wrong to speculate on the private thoughts of a writer by his books, and very disrepectful when he has just killed himself. But Wallace’s narrators, his narrative voices, never seem to look at this dispairing world exactly from above; they alternate perspective and participation. His defense of the infantilizing AA - something which, on the terms he describes it, cannot possibly be a satisfactory solution to anyone - is too excited not to sound sincere, even if the story itself casts its doubts. His characters often speak of “self-consciousness,” a sensation that is actually one of the clearest symptoms of self-oblivion and absence of character, the anxiety when the screen is accused of being a screen but there is nothing other than the screen, and one would like to continue living in the travesty of the screen rather than ever probing this revealed abyss. Fair enough; but they speak of it full of vanity, a defense mechanism that tries to turn an horrendous deficiency into some sort of advantage (it’s better to suffer from self-consciousness than not being self-conscious at all, right? We are suffering from the burden of qualities here.); and Wallace seems all too often to validate this vanity, even though the stories themselves always end up making it clear that what they call “self-consciousness” would be properly called “self-oblivion”. The internal alienation Baudrillard supposed we had left behind in the world of the mirror.

---

This post might come off as lofty, pointing to the failure in Wallace’s work even to articulate the problem of character, the telling impossibility of growing up in the worlds he described, the naivety and, let’s face it, dishonesty that are pervasive in all his books - as though I had myself an answer to all this, knew how to chase away the ghosts that haunt all his characters. But truth is I don’t. I think the abysses are all actually there.

It is terrible that we lost him. I spoke disparagingly of him, and of how he seemed to be getting worse rather than better over time; of how his grip on the Zeitgeist seemed to have become loose, how IJ already read like a book of the past, and the recent short stories were still back there. But I was looking forward to his next novel. He was one of our most inventive writers, a master whose tours de force were downright humiliating; there are very few writers working today that I enjoy more than Wallace.

Also, I struggled over Infinite Jest during difficult times, and his books strung chords I was not hearing quite anywhere else. Becoming a fan of Wallace was important to me, and the process of growing over it was the obvious continuation. Through his works, he played the part of a friend, of sorts. And it is sad to see a friend go.

I think I ought to say something about this. I had a love-hate relationship with Foster Wallace: I was amazed at first, but slowly came to dislike him for the, ehm, diseased Weltanschauung behind his brilliant technique. It bothered me, also, that I had never met a Foster Wallace fan who was in it for his brilliant skill, but always because of the parts that made me so strongly dislike him at times. I can’t say, however, that I ever truly dimissed his works, or that I could ever dismiss them and everything they came to stand for to me over time. Making an extraodinarily out or proportion comparison, I had a “Der Fall Wagner” thing with his works. When I get the time to digest the news, I guess some larger post should follow.

We all have a favourite bad poem, something so cringe-inducing, excruciatingly bad you get a thrill off like a 10-year-old might get off a gory movie. A poem you revisit every six months or so, to find with delight that it’s even worse than you recalled.

Well, at least I do. It’s called “The Night Abraham Called to the Stars”, by Pulitzer prize winner Robert Bly, and it is supposed to be a Ghazal, though not a very strict one - actually, it bears no resemblance to the Ghazal form whatsoever, which consists of rhyming couplets and refrains, but I guess Bly needed the ethnic bonus points. Bly entertains us with corny, obvious imagery which he then proceeds to cornily explain, and then finishes the poem with the most absurdly awkward imagery I have ever seen. All the while making very gratuitous use of enjambment, in actual rhythm stead - repeatedly.

Here it goes. Enjoy:

The Night Abraham Called to the Stars

Do you remember the night Abraham first saw
The stars? He cried to Saturn: “You are my Lord!”
How happy he was! When he saw the Dawn Star,

He cried, “”You are my Lord!” How destroyed he was
When he watched them set. Friends, he is like us:
We take as our Lord the stars that go down.

We are faithful companions to the unfaithful stars.
We are diggers, like badgers; we love to feel
The dirt flying out from behind our back claws.

And no one can convince us that mud is not
Beautiful. It is our badger soul that thinks so.
We are ready to spend the rest of our life

Walking with muddy shoes in the wet fields.
We resemble exiles in the kingdom of the serpent.
We stand in the onion fields looking up at the night.

My heart is a calm potato by day, and a weeping
Abandoned woman by night. Friend, tell me what to do,
Since I am a man in love with the setting stars.

Also: notice how he can’t make up his mind about how many people he is addressing - “friends” in s2, “Friend” in s6. I like to imagine there was a crowd at first, but by the end of the poem there was only one man standing in the audience, loving this as much as I do.

Electronic Literature in Europe conference in Bergen starts today, and most papers are available online.

Of note: Serge Bouchardon addressing one of my current obsessions (The Aesthetics of Materiality); Katarina Peović Vuković will talk about hypertext, cybertext, networked text, and their political function; Alice Ferrebe will talk of Japan and Electronic Literature; and Maria Engeberg looks for an Aesthetics of Noise, another obsession here, though her focus is on the literary.

Barbados needed to win the game by two clear goals in order to progress to the next round. Now the trouble was caused by a daft rule in the competition which stated that in the event of a game going to penalty kicks, the winner of the penalty kicks would be awarded a 2-0 victory.

With 5 minutes to go, Barbados were leading 2-1, and going out of the tournament (because they needed to win by 2 clear goals). Then, when they realized they were probably not going to score against Grenada’s massed defence, they turned round, and deliberately scored on their own goal to level the scores and take the game into penalties. Grenada, themselves not being stupid, realized what was going on, and then attempted to score an own goal themselves. However, the Barbados players started defending their opponents goal to prevent this.

In the last five minutes, spectators were treated to the incredible sight of both team’s defending their opponents goal against attackers desperately trying to score an own goal and goalkeepers trying to throw the ball into their own net. The game went to penalties, which Barbados won and so were awarded a 2-0 victory and progressed to the next round.

It’s from Snopes, there’s a “true” tag and even a small video, and I can’t stop laughing.

I read the latest posts at The Teeming Void and nod in agreement. Get this stuff published somewhere I can cite it. (&)

okcupid has turned online dating into a huge statistical problem. Mediamatic instead thinks it is art.

I am 23.

It follows from that that a few years ago I was going through adolescence, and then through the sophomoric stage around 18-21. By then I experienced that urge, typical of those two phases, for newness; of being my own contemporary, of keeping a firm grip on the Zeitgeist (preferably by the balls), of being aware and maybe part of what was going on. (This led me - again pretty typically - to flirt with the works of some authors and artists I am terribly embarrassed about today. And in public, sometimes, to boot.)

Not that I don’t still care about these things. But I have realised of late how dated most of my, oh, adolescent/sub-21 Zeitgeist feels, looking from today. Milorad Pavic is still on the crush-list, for example, but as a grandfatherly figure, as someone whose high time was when I was a toddler. But if Paul Auster had published his New York Trilogy today, I would have just met it with a yawn. (Don’t ask me about Foster Wallace; I have no idea what I was thinking.)

I complain that Peter Greenaway has gone senile, from one of cinema’s last hopes to the director of Tulse Luper and the man responsible for that dreary Last Supper installation. But could we suffer The Pillow Book today? Text, body, inscription? The easy gimmicks of his non-narrative cinema promises?

And on the more popular front - which is where the Zeitgeist really is, I would inform you by the time - I find it funny how movies like Lola Rennt or bands like the Flaming Lips are intolerable now. Even the stuff that is still likeable, like Serial Experiments Lain (yeah, anime), again I can’t quite imagine happening today.

I was excited over Takashi Murakami when reports and pictures of the 2001 Los Angeles “Superflat” exhibition spread. Today I roll eyes most impatiently when the eager arts or design student mentions his name.

The list goes on. Sometimes I would feel there was something missing in the whole Zeitgeist thing, some story that was not being told, blame it on the sorry state of culture (it’s easier when you are in the Third World) and feel the need, like Alec Linderbergh, that someone sound a Call-to-Arms - this expectation itself dated, quite High Modernist. The irony is there is not really a Zeitgeist when you are young, it hasn’t quite formed yet, there is only the shadows of older people - who will either give you anxiety of influence or embarrass you shitless as you wise up. To make matters worse, ours was a post-modernist, post-structuralist shadow that makes the whole “Zeitgeist” concept troublesome (though I never really met a bona fide sub-21 po-mo kid. Of course a lot of us have tried.). So, what, it’s been less than a decade, which makes this then versus now talk sound funny. I don’t really know what “is going on right now”, but I think my grip now is tighter than when I was certain I had it mostly figured out.

I am reporting this because I just learned earlier tonight that there is a transhumanist friend-of-friend in my social network. Yes, a transhumanist in 2008, in Brazil, 2-step distance in my social bloody network. I’m baffled.

1969 video on Internet shopping and banking, home surveillance cameras and stuff. But, as usual with retrotech, they missed women’s lib.

Web Zen covers vintage.

This is supposed to be a lunar map (click to enlarge), but as for me, I would hang it on the wall and deny the moon had anything to do about it.

(via Strange Maps, pretty cool blog by the by)

madiju at flickr

Lately I have been thinking about Glitch-Art, an emerging aesthetics inside Digital Art which takes the computational error as its subject. If this is your first contact with the subject, here are two examples to get started:

From Ant Scott’s “pure glitch” phase.

What Bruegel’s Tower of Babel might look like, seen through the Glitch Browser

Browse around, there are many different examples on the web, I’ll stop at two before I am unfair for not including something.

The first comprehensive study of Glitch Art was Iman Moradi’s monograph in 2004; he and Ant Scott have written a book that will be out soon, and which I’m looking forward to. In the 2004 work, Moradi draws many interesting comparisons between Glitch and twentieth century aesthetics such as cubism (with its jarred images that might look to us today as glitchy). One very interesting parallel is with Mondrian - an artist both of straight, computer-like geometry and of intentionally inserted imperfections, affirming the human behind what is often perceived as coldness in his composition. He also points out the established role of noise and distortion in music and video.

I don’t know what Moradi and others have been up to lately (I have learned he is writing his doctorate on the subject right now), but reading his monograph and looking at the glitch art scene I have formulated three interlocking hypotheses:

Number 1: It is perhaps obvious that most computational art tries to conceal the underlying layers of processing and machinery which generate the pieces: from virtual reality and immersive environments, passing through computer graphics and animation all the way to webdesign, any glitch in the transparency of the interface is a flaw to be corrected: the user/the public should be able to forget, at least momentarily, all the technology that is running below the surface, if they are aware of it at all. And even where the focus is in the process itself - algorithmic art, generative art, fractal art - the algorithm is then treated as a pure, mathematical construct, not as a set of instructions for a physical machine. To refer to this, Katherine Hayles has coined the term “Regime of Computation“: a philosophical attitude or sensibility which projects the algorithmic onto the world, thinking of algorithms as pure objects abstracted from the machines to which they serve as instructions of operation, and as possibly existing in nature itself.

Glitch Art reverses this philosophical attitude - I am tempted to use the word “deconstructs” - by bringing to the foreground the layers of processing and physical operations which otherwise remain hidden to the user (and which he is usually invited to ignore). As opposed to the pure, abstracted interface or to the Regime of Computation of mainstream digital art, Glitch Art is an aesthetics of the materiality of informatics: it affirms both the non-human-like operation and the physicality of computing machines.

Number 2: The computational error has been the domain of hackers from the start. Since the early days, knowing how to creatively exploit a flaw in a computer program was one of the most praised traits of hackerdom (see for instance the Story of Mel in the Jargon File). There is a subversiveness in the glitch, at least as metaphor, in that it defies the totality of a system which by its very nature is hostile to individual expression and tends towards constancy, repetition and homogeneity. The praise of the error in the Story of Mel - and in all of hacker culture - is the praise of creativity, of taking roads less traveled. As computational systems, in an analogy with social systems, are procedural by nature - defining steps both for itself and for the user to follow - any path other than the previously traced path is glitch, often literally. Much of the popularity of glitch art resides, I speculate, in that it so poignantly expresses these tensions.

Number 3: I speculate also that Glitch Art perhaps could be grouped inside a broader category of aesthetics, not only of the error but also of the imperfect, the accidental and the incomplete. This is a troublesome claim because these words are not exactly interchangeable, and this aesthetics is more one of affinities we might trace than the continuity of a tradition.

–

Ok.

Moradi makes a number of very good parallels in his monograph, but I want to add a few of my own, some of which might be surprising at first.

Let’s start with the Tea Ceremony.

Kakuzo Okakura writes in The Book of Tea:

The absence of symmetry in Japanese art objects has been often commented on by Western critics. This, also, is a result of a working out through Zennism of Taoist ideals. Confucianism, with its deep-seated idea of dualism, and Northern Buddhism with its worship of a trinity, were in no way opposed to the expression of symmetry. As a matter of fact, if we study the ancient bronzes of China or the religious arts of the Tang dynasty and the Nara period, we shall recognize a constant striving after symmetry. The decoration of our classical interiors was decidedly regular in its arrangement. The Taoist and Zen conception of perfection, however, was different. The dynamic nature of their philosophy laid more stress upon the process through which perfection was sought than upon perfection itself. True beauty could be discovered only by one who mentally completed the incomplete. The virility of life and art lay in its possibilities for growth. In the tea-room it is left for each guest in imagination to complete the total effect in relation to himself. Since Zennism has become the prevailing mode of thought, the art of the extreme Orient has purposefully avoided the symmetrical as expressing not only completion, but repetition. Uniformity of design was considered fatal to the freshness of imagination.

Moreover:

In the tea-room the fear of repetition is a constant presence. The various objects for the decoration of a room should be so selected that no colour or design shall be repeated. If you have a living flower, a painting of flowers is not allowable. If you are using a round kettle, the water pitcher should be angular. A cup with a black glaze should not be associated with a tea-caddy of black laquer. In placing a vase of an incense burner on the tokonoma, care should be taken not to put it in the exact centre, lest it divide the space into equal halves. The pillar of the tokonoma should be of a different kind of wood from the other pillars, in order to break any suggestion of monotony in the room.

So in the tea-room, the decoration avoids symmetry by very carefully avoiding anything that could suggest it: it looks wrong and mistake-ridden as the result of an effort one takes years to master fully. This is justified on a reasoning that symmetrical, “perfect” environments communicate monotony, repetition and homongeneity, and ultimately stifle the imagination. True beauty is found instead by freshness of imagination, when it finds room to mentally complete the incomplete. Note this is a free, individual pursuit: it is left to each guest to complete (…) in relation to himself. This is, surprisingly, very close to point number 2.

Engraving by Uzaki Sumikazu which illustrates some of these compositional principles.

Another artist “working out through Zennist ideals” was American composer John Cage. Though extremely relevant here, his considerations on what constitutes “silence” and “noise” merits a separate, more careful discussion. But he was a composer of chance operations - the aesthetics of the accidental - and of the prepared pianos, which, as the video below shows, is more of a piano in error conditions than a “prepared” piano:

Now for another surprise, let’s look into Michelangelo.

On the subject of Michelangelo’s unfinished sculptures, Walter Pater wrote:

[t]his effect Michelangelo gains by leaving nearly all his sculpture in a puzzling sort of incompleteness, which suggests rather than realises actual form. Something of the wasting of that snow-image which he moulded at the command of Piero de’ Medici, when the snow lay one night in the court of the Pitti palace, almost always lurks about it, as if he had determined to make the quality of a task, exacted from him half in derision, the pride of all his work. Many have wondered at that incompleteness, suspecting, however, that Michelangelo himself loved and was loath to change it, and feeling at the same time that they too would lose something if the half-realised form ever quite emerged from the stone, so rough hewn here, so delicately finished there; and they have wished to fathom the charm of this incompleteness. Well! that incompleteness is Michelangelo’s equivalent for colour in sculpture; it is his way of etherealising pure form, of relieving its hard realism, and communicating to it breath, pulsation, the effect of life. It was a characteristic too which fell in with his peculiar temper and mode of life, his disappointments and hesitations. And it was in reality perfect finish.

One of Michelangelo’s unfinished sculptures. Click to enlarge.

We have, again, the aesthetics of the incomplete and the imperfect, as a reaction against the totality of a complete work which stifles imagination and drains art of its vitality. But I’d also like to add a second reading to this: this incompleteness works as “the equivalent of colour in sculpture,” communicating liveliness to pure form, because it brings to the forefront the materiality of sculpture. When contemplating a finished, complete statue of a human figure, it is very easy to forget that it was once a rude block of stone (now turned into a gentle block of stone); we take it as pure, abstract form, and remembering it is stone only empowers this triumph of form over conquered matter. Michelangelo instead brings the hidden layers and processes of the work to the foreground: one is forced not only to acknowledge that form is sculpted into stone, but to face it directly, and all that it implies. This clash (or maybe interplay) between materiality and ideality is where the overwhelming sense of vitality of these sculptures comes from. Though of course there are very important differences, compare this to point number one.

Then there is Pollock (which I don’t think I need to illustrate), who interestingly denied any role of the “accidental” in his Action Paintings method. This brings in the question: as glitch art grows, at what point the carefully planned mistake, not radically dissimilar to previous works, starts functioning itself as a system and a language of its own? This has for instance happened to noise in music and video, where it has lost its signifying power and became cliché, no longer processed as disruptive by their audience.

Finally what I think is the most important parallel, the experiments of a previous generation of video-artists with error in video and television; as they examined a new medium - one whose threats of “totality, homogeneity, and repetition” were far more obvious, though not necessarily greater -, it would be easier to catalogue those who used video and television in its “correct” mode than the crowds that “misused” it. Take for instance Nam June Paik’s Magnet TV, TV sets whose images are distorted by magnets:

Nam June Paik’s Magnet TV

We can probably make points number 1 and 2 for most of such works with video and television (point number 3 is complicated), though they obviously had a different context, a simpler one I suspect. And the examples are endless, from Stan Brakhage working on the materiality of film to the exciting emerging technique of Camera Tossing. Though I’m drawing a bunch of comparisons here (and I like talking about most of this stuff, to boot), please don’t take these as equivalencies: there is something very specific about the computational error and glitch art, as to the tea ceremony or to Michelangelo. And to add a fourth hypothesis to the mix, maybe it is in examining these specificities - what the difference is between pointing out the materiality of informatics and the materiality of sculptures, a computer program in error and a television in error - that the really cool stuff’s to be found.