Wrapping up the year with Glitch Poetics

After spending some time thinking about AI image synthesis, I felt invigorated by Nathan Allen Jones’ Glitch Poetics (2022), a book that helped me untangle the complicated relations between photographic heritage, affect, and the productive misuse of our technical tools.

There are many passages worth emphasizing, but this one brings many of the book’s most significant ideas together:

“Oscillation is a key idea for glitching because it describes a mode in which the temporalities of a medium outrun perceptive capacity and produce ambiguous, strange, ghostly and illusory effects. Like a thaumatrope illusion, where the persistence of human vision blends the images on two sides of a rapidly spinning piece of card into a single image, the glitch oscillation produces an effect in the receiver that is temporary and virtual, yet ‘real’ and absorbing” (253).

AI and the Future of the Lens and Screen Arts

My recorded conversation with the extraordinary artist, writer, and digital culture theorist Lev Manovich is now live. This talk is the first of a series of events about AI’s impact on image-making organized by the MFA Photography, Video and Related Media department at the School of Visual Arts in NYC. The next event is a one-day symposium on March 18, 2023.

Scrolling left to right: Charles Traub, dept. chair; me; Lev; Lev and I in conversation

A REVIEW OF THE MOVING PICTURE SHOW IN MFJ #76: WORLDS

I’m so pleased my review of The Moving Picture Show, curated by Peggy Ahwesh at Foreland in Catskill, NY earlier this year, was published in the fall issue of Millennium Film Journal. The issue was guest-edited by Barbara London and considers questions surrounding the meaning and makeup of worlds: geographies, ideas, mediums, and people. The Moving Picture Show, which broadly probes the relations between nature and technologies, fits nicely within this theme.

Currently Reading: Mothers, Fathers, and Others

It’s difficult for me to select just one passage from this brilliantly written collection of essays by Siri Hustvedt. Her prose is piercingly honest but is somehow delivered with a velvety quality. I can’t get enough of this book’s fluid intensity, especially in the last two heartbreaking essays. But I’m choosing an excerpt from an essay called “Living Thing”, which resonated with me and speaks to my ongoing interest in confrontations with vanishing points, liminality, and the relationship between presence and absence:

“Memory is another form of presence, more fragile than immediate perception, akin to dream and hallucination and prone to distortion” (187).

ORGANIC MATERIAL: EVENT HORIZON

I had the privilege of writing an accompanying essay for the artist collective Organic Material’s latest release Event Horizon: a collaborative, four-part, web-based, slowly but infinitely scrolling animated work based on an exquisite corpse exercise.

Images from left to right:  Mark Dorf: Refraction; Skye Nicolas: Somewhere Over the Rainbow, Skies are Blue; Amir H. Fallah: Last Prayer; Colette Robbins: Proscenium

Marc Swanson: A Memorial To Ice At The Dead Deer Disco

I wrote about Marc Swanson’s epic installation series, jointly exhibited at Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill, NY and MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA, for Chronogram.

JUST PUBLISHED: CURATING THE DIGITAL

This edited volume was several (turbulent) years in the making, but it’s finally here. The Cambridge Handbook of Material Culture Studies, edited by Lu Ann De Cunzo and Catharine Dann Roeber, is now available for purchase. I contributed the chapter Curating the Digital, which considers the materiality, organization, and cultural significance of digital objects.

CURRENTLY READING: ALBERT & THE WHALE

“Dürer’s prints are revolutionary because of their speed. They swirl and roar. You want to turn the volume down. As Europe lived in fear of famine and plague and war, Dürer danced with death, employing emptiness to evoke things that were both there and not there: clouds and fire and water and air. It was the whiteness of the page which enthralled him. His white is light and heat, sparking saints and demons and civilians into sprawling, brawling life” (102).

ARCHITECTURE IS FROZEN MUSIC, A MONOGRAPH BY LAURE CATUGIER

I’m honored to be included in photo and video artist Laure Catugier’s first ever monograph. It’s an interactive ebook of her work alongside an introduction by Livia Tarsia in Curia, an interview with Élise Girardot, and an essay I wrote about Catugier’s work. The incredible folded book object, an architectural sculpture in its own way, is sold out, but the ebook is available here.

FILE EXCHANGE: CONVERSATIONS ABOUT 21ST CENTURY TOOLS + SENSIBILITIES

I had the pleasure of chatting with hosts and hybrid analog/digital sculptors Sophie Kahn and Colette Robbins on the newest episode of their YouTube series File Exchange. We talked about many things, including topics related to my research: fictional realism, language as a creative system, glitch politics, digital bodies and identities, and more. The episode is archived here, alongside previous episodes featuring digital artists who share their inspiring work, tools, and creative processes.

CURRENTLY READING: PROGRAMMED INEQUALITY

“Understanding this as a labor class, rather than through the lens of a few remarkable individuals, sheds light on the importance of gender as a formative category in technological organization and design. It forces us to rethink many of the assumptions of computer history narratives that hold up individuality and innovation as key explanatory elements. It also provokes a reconsideration of how histories of computing sometimes reflexively and unconsciously privilege those with the most power and implicitly endorse an ahistorical fiction of technological meritocracy. That the workers in this field were disproportionately white is no more a coincidence than the fact that they were overwhelmingly women. Throughout history, it has often not been the content of work but the identity of the worker performing it that determined its status, and these workers, while below their male peers, still occupied a position of privilege compared to other women….

… Histories like this offer examples that help us think about where increased dependence on computerization and digital labor forces may lead in the future. The construction of classes of ostensibly deskilled high-tech workers continues to enable the boom-and-bust cycle of technical advance and shape the social patterns that cohere around these systems” (16-17).

CuRrently reading: index cards

Moyra Davey quoting Marguerite Duras: “To be without a subject for a book, without any idea of a book, is to find yourself in front of a book. An immense void. An eventual book. In front of writing, live and naked, something terrible to surmount” (86).

Currently reading: the whole picture

“All art is political. Everything in a museum is political, because it is shaped by the politics of the world that made it. If you can’t see the views and the agendas coming through, that doesn’t mean they aren’t there: it might just mean that they are close enough to your own for you to take them for granted” (p. 16).

CURRENTLY READING: The CASE FOR RAGE

I’m starting the new year with a thoughtfully written philosophical examination of anger and how to channel anti-racist rage — Lordean rage — to effect change. Cherry writes,

‘In this book, I argue that a particular type of anger, what I call Lordean rage, has an important role to play in anti-racist struggle. Taking its name from Audre Lorde, the Black feminist poet and scholar who first articulated the version of rage I’ll be exploring, Lordean rage is targeted at racism. It tends toward metabolization and aims for change. It is informed by an inclusive and liberating perspective. An organizer who is angry at racial inequality and motivated to end it so that all of us, regardless of skin color, can flourish has Lordean rage. It is not an ideal type of anger. Rather, it is often experienced by the racially oppressed and their allies. Although Lordean rage may not be necessary, it can be uniquely used for anti-racist purposes’ (p. 5).

LOOKING BACK, LOOKING FORWARD

During these last two weeks of the year, I read two books about absence. Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities summarizes the past two years I spent traveling the world only in my imagination and, more recently, fantasizing how to invent the impossible by way of my imagination. As I read, I noted what turned out to be one of the most frequently quoted passages in the text, so instead I’ll share a different one:

‘Phyllis is a space in which routes are drawn between points suspended in the void: the shortest way to reach that certain merchant’s tent, avoiding that certain creditor’s window. Your footsteps follow not what is outside the eyes, but what is within, buried, erased’ (p. 91).

Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart was recommended to me by a friend. I don’t usually read memoirs, but I was drawn to the subject of grief and losing parts of one’s identity along with the loss of a loved one. I tore through this book but was snagged early on by the way Zauner described what it feels like to grieve:

‘Sometimes my grief feels as though I’ve been left alone in a room with no doors… There’s no escape, just a hard surface that I keep ramming into over and over, a reminder of the immutable reality that I will never see her again” (p. 6).

Transitioning out of one year and going into another feels a lot like stepping into an imaginary space. It’s a form of letting go as the calendar commits to the next numerical label in the sequence, and we all follow its lead without protest. In my imagination, there is protest. We will move forward but will continue to look back as our memories and imaginations intermingle, giving way to the impossible.

Here’s to a new year and to letting both holding on and letting go happen.

FLAT JOURNAL ESSAY: A ROBUST FLATNESS

I’m so honored to be included in Flat Journal’s Issue #2: Touch. My essay “A Robust Flatness” considers tactility and tangibility in digital space, from the flattened engagement of Zoom to the perceptual openness of VR.

Pictured above are an image from Matias Brunacci’s Virtualshamanism: Towards an alternative digital reality of consciousness (left) and Sophie Kahn’s Dematerialized virtual exhibition (right).

review: Strange World

My review of Wen-Han Chang’s mesmerizing film and photo project Strange World is now live at Ultra Dogme.

still relevant: Born in Flames

Born in Flames (1983) is a quasi-documentary/sci-fi film directed by Lizzie Borden that takes place in a political post-apocalyptic future in New York City. Though its low-budget scrappiness signals a different (pre-digital) era, its themes and tone couldn’t feel more relevant today. Perhaps that’s why it’s been making the rounds more recently—I watched it last week on Metrograph’s on-demand service—circling back after nearly 40 years since it was first released to remind us that there’s more work to do. It’s a film that refuses to back down, then and now. With a diverse cast of Black women and members of the LGBTQ community, it cleverly uses a variety of communication methods to deliver its message of defiance. Radio broadcasts, newspaper articles, and television talk shows take turns within the film, acting as complementary platforms for characters to speak their minds. Punk music exhilaratingly swells in between scenes, energizing and calling on the film’s audience to take action. Born in Flames is thus essential viewing, as it recognizes the persistence and crushing effects of heteronormative patriarchal power while illustrates the effectiveness of decentering whiteness, taking collective action, and productive resistance.

Seeing the Possibilities, Seeing Red

I was so pleased when the latest issue of Kolaj Magazine arrived in the mail this week. Issue #34 includes my review of Heather Olker’s Seeing Red series, which critiques high-fashion advertising through disassembling and reimagining ads using collage and other techniques.

SIMULATION, PHOTOGRAPHY, AND FLÂNEURIE IN VIDEO GAMES

I wrote a brief summary of the time I spent sifting through archival material at The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, NY in August, and it was published on The Strong blog. I’m still organizing and processing my findings after two weeks of intensive research and game play, but this short text describes a sample of my discoveries. More to come.