ABSTRACT
Each time we encounter a digital artifact-either glitched or not, whatever its type-it is new, created specifi cally for the moment of encounter. Digital media is inherently a product of a generative technical system, the computer, producing the moment of encounter instantly. The mystifi cation of the digital depends on precisely this immanence of creation. The immediate generation of works “on demand” has particular effects on how we engage with digital technology: it creates an illusion that the digital work is simply and only information, and what is rendered and produced in a tangible form at this point of encounter is thus insignifi cant, contingent, refl ecting the fragmentary nature of the digital itself: everything “inside” the computer exists as binary data. The organized information replayed for a human audience appears continuous since its discrete units (commonly called “samples”) are transmitted, reproduced and reassembled to become the encountered form of any digital media. This apparently prefect reproduction originates with the fact that the media encountered is not a copy so much as a new example made by the immaterial production of the digital technology specifi cally for the moment of encounter; the human-readable form is always immediate, new, an “original.”
