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TECHNOLOGICAL DISRUPTIONS: The Interplay of Subjective Flaws and Virtual Space

Link to The Manual Project

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1. A year ago I was forced to confront... ...my ideas about technological disruptions in a form that was more direct than I could have expected. For my final project in the 400-level English course Hybrid Forms taught by Prof. Shayla Lawson, I had decided to create an interactive online experience using Twine that would explore the materiality of virtual spaces. I thought that the project would result in a dynamic and overwhelming mixed-media website, but I thought that there would be an underlying cohesion to it all. On a conceptual level I knew that the internet and virtual environments are volatile, ever-changing. Even at this point I had written significantly about technological disruptions, so I was familiar with thinking about failure in these spaces. Still, this intellectual understanding of the cracks in virtual environments could not prepare me for how all of my attempts at presenting the internet fractured. If my prose became too abstract, the meaning behind my work was rendered incomprehensible to a general audience. They would not have the conceptual framework to delineate between fine details and the overarching points I was making about the texture and weight of online spaces. Yet how else can you represent such a topic? Digital worlds do not simplify themselves. All of the sleek GUIs that fill up the modern era's screens are right-clicks away from spilling hundreds of lines of code. You tweak a variable, delete an array, and you might just make it crumble. Digital media is compressed between intricate layers of instructions that all must be in constant balance, and in constant communication. It does not lend itself to the simplification I wanted. So I stopped trying to force comprehensibility.
2. I found that breaking the images I'd taken... ... and breaking my site as a whole, felt more "virtual" than anything else I had tried. Of course, using virtual as this vague descriptor does not do much to define what I felt. The best way I can explain this is glitch art reveals a particular strain of decay. The flaws that appear when I corrupt the bits of a JPEG or delete frames from a video follow a logic that can only exist in the realm of binary. Collapse dictated by the right-angles of misinterpreted color channels. Visual omission through algorithms that were made blunt by shaving off strings of code. Glitches bring decay, and with decay comes ends. They are softwares' epilogues, and they are wholly unique to the medium.
3. I shifted the focus of The Manual... ...aiming it at the creative process of the project itself. It became a meta-narrative looking at what happens when you break virtual objects. It became about the act of cracking itself open. The noise and disconnect that arises from glitch art spoke much more about the textures of virtual spaces than trying to smooth it all out and aiming for consistency. If the environments I tried to represent were patchwork, then why should my work not be the same? The self-referential nature of the project also hinted at something that I also consider to be at the heart of this thesis.
4. A lot of glitch art tends to be overwhelming... ...When its not a multi-layered web of bleeding colors or a series of jagged breaks, there is still that feeling of entropy--no matter how inauthentic that entropy might actually be. The immediacy of the art might be part of why it feels so taut with chaotic potential. In many other mediums, the process of creation takes time. Outside of specific experiments into autonomous creation, such as the projects of the Dadaists, Situationists, and Surrealists of the 20th century, creative work is a process. It is drawn out across stages. Preparation, execution, revision, and so on. What glitch art tends to do, like many other aspects of virtual activities, is condense stages of the creative process. Preparation is all the work of the artist. You set your software up to fail in a spectacular way and the rest is letting it all cascade into ruin. The work takes seconds to become unwhole.
5. The immediacy of glitch art and virtual spaces in general... ...seems to be an important part of the new culture around how people operate online. Cyberpunk attempted to grapple with the repercussions of it before the internet could even flourish, and we are constantly in the middle of a techno-cultural arms race to see who will master the new forms of information transfer that have arisen over the past few decades. These new forms of interaction will only become more important over time. The previous two chapters of this thesis outlined some of the many ways in which we are already seeing the effects of technological disruptions in contemporary society. I want to understand to the best of my ability how the overloaded and broken information pathways of the post-Internet era will continue to impact our perceptions of reality. This thesis is part of that exploration, but so is The Manual. As a necessary step in the academic trajectory of this work, I want to include The Manual. It approaches the concept of virtual failure using a drastically different creative toolkit than what I used for this thesis, but this does not severe it from the conversation. If anything, the disconnect only strengthens its adjacency to my main work here. I write this in the most optimistic way possible, but virtual space would be nothing without the flaws that ground it.