Glitch: The Art of Error and Imperfection (With Reference to the Photography of Julia Margaret Cameron)

Julia Margaret Cameron: The Holy Family (1872) [1]

The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

 

 

I. 

 

Thanks in large part to Jews working in the American entertainment industry, a fair few words of Yiddish origin have been adopted by English-speakers: chutzpah, klutz, mensch, schlep, schmooze, shtick ... etc.

 

But my favourite such word at the moment is the rather impish-sounding glitch, which first entered everyday English during the period of the Space Race (1955-1975).  

 

Whilst it now refers to a temporary technical issue or a short-lived fault in a system that eventually corrects itself, glitch is derived from a Yiddish word for that which slides, slithers, or causes one to slip or skid, which is interesting; might one refer to a patch of black ice as a glitch in the road?

  

Commonly used within the computing and electronics industries - and still a favourite with the engineers at NASA - the term glitch is also found in the world of art ...

 

 

II.

 

Glitch art is the contemporary practice of using errors for aesthetic purposes, either by corrupting digital data or physically manipulating electronic devices. As well as glitch imagery and film, there is also glitch music, a genre of experimental electronic sound that many people simply call noise.

 

Of course, whilst such 'errors' can be random effects, they are more often the result of deliberate manipulation and so not really errors at all. Numerous artists have posted online tutorials explaining the techniques they use to make their work and produce (pseudo) glitches on demand. 

 

Personally, I prefer real errors and genuine glitches to those distortions and deviations that are the result of intention. But, either way, you can end up with some amusing results, which is why glitch art is increasingly common in the world of design. And of course, there's even an app allowing those who like to edit their pics on social media to produce an instant glitch effect.  

 

Let's not pretend, however, that there's anything remotely subversive (or even all that original) about this phenomenon [2]. Artists have played with light, sound, and colour and been aware that beauty often lies in small imperfections - that failure is often more instructive than benign success - long before the digital age or anyone was using the term glitch.

 

 

III. 

 

Consider the case, for example, of the Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, whose controversial images were lambasted by the critics [3] and jeered at by her contemporaries for being smudged, smeared, or out of focus, but which are now regarded as brilliantly ahead of their time.

Error, we might say, was the hallmark of her style; Cameron deliberately left the flaws that others would have attempted to disguise or eliminate, affirming an art of imperfection and happy accident and rejecting the idea of photography as a scientific practice via which one aimed at a perfect representation of the world, or an accurate and precisely detailed rendering of the human subject. 

 

Using an extremely messy - and slippery [4] - process that involves coating glass with an even layer of collodion, sensitising it with a bath of silver nitrate, and then exposing and developing the plate whilst still wet, Cameron was, arguably, the Cindy Sherman of her day and elements in her work are not only postmodern as some commentators claim, but distinctly glitchy.  

 

 

Notes

[1] The photograph used here illustrates Cameron's unorthodox style; undefined edges, out-of-focus figures, etc.

 

[2] We might, in fact, best understand glitch art as a form of nostalgia on the behalf of those who remember (or wish to retrospectively experience) the days of cassettes, video tapes, home movies, and polaroid instant cameras, etc. In other words, it's an attempt to resurrect a bygone techno-aesthetic. 

 

[3] In 1865, The Photographic Journal reviewed an exhibition of Cameron's portraits, commenting: 

      

"We must give this lady credit for daring originality, but at the expense of all other photographic qualities. [...] In these pictures, all that is good in photography has been neglected and the shortcomings of the art are prominently exhibited. We are sorry to have to speak thus severely on the works of a lady, but we feel compelled to do so in the interest of the art."

 

Meanwhile, a reviewer at The Photographic News wrote: 

 

"What in the name of all the nitrate of silver that ever turned white into black have these pictures in common with good photography? Smudged, torn, dirty, undefined, and in some cases almost unreadable, there is hardly one of them that ought not to have been washed off the plate as soon as its image had appeared."

 

[4] I remind readers of the etymology of the term glitch discussed in the first section of this post.