Glitches as Restatements

Glitches as Restatements: Found Footage Glitch Project

Janis Palma

The best ideas are dangerous because they generate awareness.

-Rosa Menkman

Capitalism is designed to suspend the prosperity of the many against infinite, parasitic, growth of the few.

-Sara Rich

Introduction

         Unintentional glitches are often noise, an interruption of some media’s intended flow, a digital invasion of what should otherwise be a pristine (re)presentation of some ideal visual or auditory stimuli: a painting, a concert, a movie, a sculpture. Noise evokes “states of aggression, alarm and powerful sound phenomena in nature ('rauschen'), such as storm, thunder and the roaring sea.“ (Menkman 2009: 4) But the intentional glitches are subversions of the immaculate conception, they are the scarred children of accidental births who are nonetheless welcomed and celebrated, not for their beauty but for their power to propel change. Intentional glitches open up the world of the seer, the hearer, the sentient being who stands in front of it, to unforeseeable possibilities, not always pleasant but not always repulsive, either. This sort of noise is one that “may break some connections, but connections will always continue to grow in other directions, creating new thoughts and new affects. The notion of noise as creation itself is thus an important one that needs to be reconsidered and reevaluated.” (Nechvatal 2011: 10)

         In this found footage glitch project I have placed the perpetual and collective vitality of animals (Lippit 2000: 104) in a collision course with the unleashed violence of global warming, both caught in a vortex of incompatibilities yet cushioned by the optimism of non-obliteration. Whether or not intentional, human agency has felt the backlash of its devastated forests and oceans but, in the end, malfunctioning flora and fauna mark their anomalous territory, remixing, rearranging, and “creating something new from something already there.” (Russell 2020: 107)

New interactions

         Glitches are unveilings as much as they are camouflage. Computer-generated glitches allow us to break away from conventions and manipulate digital media noise so it “exists as a paradox” (Menkman 2009: 4), a negative and a positive. In this project, glitches are deliberate assertions that emphasize the concatenated found footage as both a fractured and unified statement. They are not intentional revelations of the computer’s inner workings, the “data-point intersections” (Jones 2022: 186), or the movement of pixels in a videoscape, and yet the viewer cannot avoid seeing them. Glitches compel an awareness of the malfunction and by doing so coerce their audience to make sense of it, but where glitches function as metaphors their effect on the viewer/hearer is always going to be subjective and imperfect. As such, the point of any intentional glitch, and by extension my project’s purpose, is irrelevant; even though I am intending to spotlight how “[c]limate change and the accelerations of environmental destruction” (Jones 2022: 184) impact and are impacted by life forms on Earth, it is the viewer’s interaction with the images and sounds what will define its rhetorical import. Be that as it may, this project has led me to see glitches in a whole new light, not at all as errors or noise but as empowering misfirings that hit an unpredictable but suitable target. A deviant pleasure, perhaps, in the purposeful malformations of sounds and images that are brought together as though a classical symphony yet not one at all, at least not for the seeker of conservative and traditional aesthetics.

The materiality of the digital subject

         Glitches embody the oxymoron of a digital subject that requires a material expression, an intangible presence that occupies the space of “a lively devastating vitalism, [and] the becoming of obliteration.” (Fuller and Goriunova 2019: 3) Once created, the glitch-subject becomes empowered by its own agency, provoking visceral reactions that will either embrace its aesthetics, as Nechvatal embraces the ossuaries in Rome and Paris, or reject them, as Menkman rejects the domesticated and predictable glitch-as-commodity.

         Glitches elicit the possibility of total obliteration as the materiality of sounds, images, words, become unrecognizable. But “[p]erhaps because obliteration is unimaginable, unrepresentable, that which edges toward it is not yet it. Devastation becomes the negotiable continuum.” (Fuller and Goriunova 2019: 8) Glitches are the body of resistance for the nonconforming, the agential reparation for the socially unseen and the culturally broken. “Glitch carries a technology of remix within its code” and to that extent “[r]emixing is an act of self-determination; it is a technology of survival.” (Russell 2020: 107) In the aftermath of unimaginable destruction, it is the lion who survives, who sleeps on grounds that are now his to command, reinvented behind the shapes and colors of a glitched epilogue.

Defying consubstantiality

         Kenneth Burke defines consubstantiality as "a practice-related concept based on stylistic identifications and symbolic structures, which persuade and produce acceptance: an acting-together within, and defined by, a common context.” (Burke 1950: 46) This is the rhetorical kinship between the found footage and its glitched transformation. Born from the same parentage, one then becomes unrecognizable to the other. By stitching together cuts taken from two different videos, I forced them into a new “common context” that was not innate to either one. The glitched portions are clearly “acting-together” with their un-glitched siblings and yet also acting independently of each other. They engage in a dialogical tug-of-war that is not meant to persuade or produce acceptance; the overall concatenation of cuts and stitches has a rhetorical agency of its own that I can neither direct nor control.

The technical montage

         I created the Glitches as Restatements audiovisual project by experimenting first with various resources, like HxD Hex Editor, Datamosh 2, Runway, and Adobe Premiere, but found Microsoft ClipChamp more practical and user-friendly for the visual footage, which I captured from YouTube using Debut Video Capture software from NCH. For the audio portion, which I extracted from another YouTube video, I used NCH’s WavePad Sound Editor, which was not ideal but allowed for some basic editing and glitching of the soundtrack. I tried out different effects integrated into the two software programs and edited separately, inserting and enhancing visual anomalies and auditory distortions, until I reached a final combination of both that “felt right.” In this sense, the project is not entirely a destructive/creative glitch art process as Menkman or Russell would conceptualize one, but more of a hybrid approximation to a glitch-adjacent-art form.

Coda

This project sent me off on an exploration of new creative horizons I never would have discovered were it not for this class (thank you!) It was pure joy to play with colors, sounds, movement, images, to create something along the lines of Jones’ “poetic truth [that] can be rendered only through collisions and shocks emanating from encounters with the [poetic object].” (133).

References:

Burke, Kennet. (1950) A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: U. of California Press. Cited in Dousset, Laurent. (2005) "Structure and substance: combining 'classic' and 'modern' kinship studies in the Australian Western Desert". The Australian Journal of Anthropology. 16: 18.

Fuller, Matthew and Olga Goriunova. (2019) “Devastation”, Bleak Joys: Aesthetics of Ecology and Impossibility. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press.

Jones, Nathan Allen. (2022) “Lyric-Code Glitch,” Glitch Poetics. London: Open Humanities Press.

Menkman, Rosa. (2009/2010) Glitch Studies Manifesto. Amsterdam/Cologne: self-published. https://rosa-menkman.blogspot.com.

Nechvatal, Joseph. (2011) Immersion into Noise. Ann Arbor/University of Michigan Library: Open Humanities Press.

Russell, Legacy. (2020) Glitch Feminism. A Manifesto. London/New York: Verso.

Video and Sound Sources

Audio

Epic Post Apocalyptic Music – Annihilation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtRuwYMC8Tc

Visual

The Deadliest Tsunamis Of All Time | Mega Disaster | Earth Stories

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXxscnWG8QA&t=150s

Tsunami in Thailand 2004 | Eye witness footage

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgqa7ebMvB8

How NATURE Is THRIVING During COVID-19 | LIVEKINDLY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZZVv937-D4&t=510s