Tag: james joyce notes

Brothels and colonies are two extreme types of heterotopia, and if one considers, after all, that the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is self-enclosed and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, from bank to bank, from brothel to brothel, goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why, from the sixteenth century until the present, the boat has been for our civilization, not only the greatest instrument of economic development (I have not been speaking of that today), but also the greatest reserve of imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage replaces adventure, and the police the pirates.

–Michel Foucault

istmos:

(…)We must give up trying to know those to whom we are linked by something essential; by this I mean, we must greet them in the relation with the unknown in which they greet us, as well, in our distance. Friendship, this relation without dependence, without episode yet into which all of the simplicity of life enters, passes by way of the recognition of the common strangeness that does not allow us to speak of our friends, but only to speak to them, not to make of them a topic of conversations (or articles), but the movement of understanding in which, speaking to us, they reserve, even on the most familiar terms, an infinite distance, the fundamental separation on the basis of which what separates becomes relation. Here discretion is not in the simple refusal to put forward confidences (how vulgar that would be, even to think of it), but it is the interval, the pure interval that, from me to this other who is a friend, measures all that is between us, the interruption of being that never authorizes me to use him, or my knowledge of him (where it to praise him) and which, far from preventing all communication, relates us to one another in the difference and sometimes the silence of speech.(…)

Jacques Derrida, “Politics of Friendship”, p. 386-387

Notes on Glitch

29.  Glitch art does not “dirty up” a text, but instead undermines its basic structure. Glitch damage is integral, even when its effects manifest at the surface.

30.  Code is built in layers, each with a metaphor constructed by the programmers building it, to enact and describe its behavior. The tech blogger Joel Spolsky has described these abstractions as “leaky.”10 They are perched on hidden metaphors beneath—those used by the programmers who created the libraries, other software components, the operating system, etc. Each metaphor tries to be completely descriptive of the code’s behavior but the lower levels, with their foreign and seemingly primitive logic, cannot be contained—they leak. The details that are obscured at the lower levels—such as using a two-digit number to store a year which is displayed in four digits—can potentially play havoc with higher level systems, as many feared would happen with the so-called Y2K bug. These hidden layers spill logic upward, sometimes slowly, but often in sudden bursts: a glitch.

http://worldpicturejournal.com/WP_6/Manon.html#_edn2

Notes on Glitch

17.  At some point along the path of actions that culminates in a work of glitch art, it is inevitable that the artist will contemplate whether their work is succeeding at failing, or failing at failing. For some artists, there is a tendency to post online a Warhol-like series of glitches all based on the same image. This embrace of seriality represents an unconscious striving for what glitch practitioners know full well to be unattainable: the perfect error. For instance, one opens the raw code of a PNG image file and searches for the keystone bit of data which, when traded out, will mar the image in the most interesting and unexpected way. One does not achieve the perfect digital error by gradually wearing down the original, or by incrementally educating oneself about time-tested procedures. Rather, glitching is lottery-like: an instantaneous all-or-nothing wager whose guiding principal is at best a kind of intuition and at worst a matter of dumb luck.  

http://worldpicturejournal.com/WP_6/Manon.html#_edn2

Notes on Glitch by Hugh S. Manon and Daniel Temkin

9.  Glitch art is process art: the artist’s hand intervening in digital data leaves its mark in the visual essence of the image. The artist’s process is not exacting, but an invitation of chaos: one triggers a glitch; one does not create a glitch. The limited amount of control the artist maintains is evident in the resulting image.

10.  Glitch practice is surely as much a drive-based oscillation as it is a desire-based quest. Deliberate glitches viewed on screen and on the walls of galleries do not necessarily represent “the goal.” Individual works of glitch art may just as well be residues of “the way,” i.e. a happenstance by-product of the addictively game-like occultations that typify glitch practice: change, save, view and undo; change, save, view and undo. In such an arrangement, the exhibited image, sound, or video is strictly secondary to the process: a kind of notational proof that the technique in fact worked.

11.  For glitch practitioners, the distinction between accidental and purposeful is not irrelevant, but it is also not the most crucial distinction.