One of the most interesting phenomenon emerging from within the new aesthetics is glitch art, an art based on destructive actions, fascination with defect, failure, and unsuccessful representation.

While surrounded by pieces of art, we can be sure they convey a number of colorful and recognizable depictions or classical values, such as beauty or truth. The image then constitutes a strictly dependent, if not enslaved thing. Therefore, it is always artificial. It has to refer to something, it can be nothing else than a copy of its original.

The 20th century starts the period of rebellion, during which the more avant-garde images become more and more independent, and try to free themselves from their humble role (i.e. the compulsion to depict.) This is the reason why art became abstract, non-figurative, and thus independent. From now, on the emancipated art will not want to reflect anything, nor will it have to exemplify, show, depict, or make present. This negative shift in the history of culture, which consciously gives up bringing its participants to the better, more true and beautiful worlds, gets to be called a crisis of representation.

Images stop being reflections, representations and copies, and finally freed from the duties imposed by them, start to live their own authentic life — free from the compulsion to depict.

The ideal of the digital world was a constant striving for perfection, maximal speed of transmission, immediate availability, high quality data, durability of information and cleanness of the transfer (i.e., eliminating any interference and the creation of perfect communication.)
Today, we know this utopic dream cannot be fulfilled. The exchange of information never takes place directly.

This is why we are constantly doomed to face distortions generated by the media. Information is not something existing beyond time and space, but is a living thing, transforming and deforming as it is passed around. The comeback of analog culture could be perceived as the revival of the materiality so hated in the digital era: DIY culture, and the conscious resignation of perfection.

The new hybrid aesthetics stemming from the experience of mingling analog and digital traditions, is interested in the defeat, defect, damage and the failure of the project of digitalization. It is born from the digital ashes and it’s from there that it generates its inspiration.

The digital era offered a quick and easy access to information, but it was also permeated with the danger of radical and immediate loss of data— everyone is aware of the difference between a book flooded with the morning coffee and a laptop or smartphone.

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Excerpted from Postdigital Aesthetics — An Art of Imperfection, Disturbances, And Disintegration,  by Andrzej Marzec

This text was translated from Polish, originally published in:
TEKSTUALIA. PALIMPSESTY LITERACKIE ARTYSTYCZNE NAUKOWE

Glitch text and art by Pedro Inoue and Antoine Geiger