"Archaelogy" Participants

ABSTRACT
Much of the rhetoric of glitch-art is concerned with the sense of rupture of brought about by the failure of technology, and the surprise and recognition of this disturbance in viewer / listener. As such, it becomes entangled in the contradiction between the shock of a unique glitch, and its capture – either through documentation, encoding, or building – as an aesthetic outcome. Glitch theorists have tended to emphasis the importance of the unfolding of glitch aesthetics in time as a means to keep such artefacts in dynamic tension (eg. Menkman’s ‘moment(um)’, Cloningers ‘Wild Glitch’, Moradi’s ‘Pure Glitch’). But recasting a glitch as art, is a form of conservation that naturally leads to the stabilisation of this aesthetic within a genre, codified by conventions. Indeed, because of this, it is interesting to note that by 2011, Kim Cascone, a writer and composer who discussed glitch-electronica some time before glitch-art began to properly consolidate, was calling for an end to the Aesthetics of Failure, hailing them instead as a failure of aesthetics. This paper will explore an impetus understand glitch not in terms of rupture and shock but as remnants, the slow, fluvial desposits of actants, reframing glitches as scars, revealing multi-layered ecologies of human and machine involvement after the event. Media archaeological techniques are employed to trace and reflect upon the meaning of glitches, as a meditation on media from a historical perspective, rather than an affective injection of disruption the moment.

BIO
Andrew Prior is an artist, composer and researcher. He teaches at the University of Plymouth UK and is a PhD researcher at Aarhus University, Denmark. His research and practice explores ideas around mediality, noise, glitch and media archaeology. He often works collaboratively with David Strang, John Matthias, Adrian Corker, Magda Tyżlik-carver and Morten Riis. Work ranges between online works and installation, to performative pieces and has been performed and exhibited in New York, London, Tokyo, in Denmark, Czech Republic, Slovakia. He is a member of Kurator (http://www.kurator.org/) and Art+Sound (http://www.artandsound.org.uk/) His musical work has been released by Nonclassical Records, Yacht Club Records and Village Green records. More information can be found at www.aprior.net<http://www.aprior.net>