ABSTRACT
Glitch is not necessarily a new or specifi cally digital form. Whether in audible or visible media, technical failures have been employed for decades. 1 Engagement with mechanical, automated processes and the (mal)function of machines is a recurring theme of avant-garde art in the twentieth century. However, digital artists are not engaged in such basic issues of engineering that they are developing their own custom chips in a fashion equivalent to historical artists such as Thomas Wilfred or Mary Hallock-Greenewalt who invented, then patented novel hardware designs; more like the artist who codes their own software, glitch artists engage the material of digital code through practices that modify existing systems; thus they are idiosyncratic adaptations of current, existing technologies. This history of adaptation describes a range of practices starting before World War II, from Marcel Duchamp’s generative music compositions to Jean Tinguely’s machine sculptures, and continues with post-war groups such as Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) and Survival Research Labs in the 1960s and 70s. Digital artists such as Jodi (the artist duo Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans), Cory Archangel, Brody Condon, or Heath Bunting, as well as all those artists working with video game technology, continue this engagement into the present.
