Glitch/Post-digital – Sound Arts 21

The term ‘post-digital’ was introduced by Kim Cascone in 2000 in the essay The Aesthetics of Failure: “Post-Digital” Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music. [2]

The article links the origins of glitch music to the italian Futurists and later composers such as John Cage and Stravinsky.

Arseny Avraamov – Symphony of Sirens – uses city sounds in his composition

‘transforms an entire city into an orchestra’

kinect? – body tracking? movement

Tidal?

Once the edge-boundaries of audio software were fortified a critique of digital culture became difficult –glitch and failure became fashionable plugin effects and presets signifying technological mystification or dystopian edginess.

techno-mystification?

post-truth and fake news, deepfake

‘in silico’

‘computer fans whirring, laser printers churning out documents, the sonification of user interfaces, and the muffled noise of hard drives. But more specifically it is from the ‘failure’ of digital technology that this new work has emerged: glitches, bugs, application errors, system crashes, clipping, aliasing, distortion, quantization noise, and even the noise floor of computer sound cards are the raw materials composers seek to incorporate into their music.’ [2]

“failure” has become a prominent aesthetic in many of the arts in the late 20th century, reminding us that our control of technology is an illusion, and revealing digital tools to be only as perfect, precise, and efficient as the humans who build them. [2]

futurists – brought background noise to the foreground – intonarumori – inspired composers such as Stravinski [2]

-John Cage- 4’33”

expanding the ideas first explored by the Futurists and Cage. An emergent genre that consciously builds on these ideas is that which I have termed “post-digital,” but it shares many names, as noted in the introduction, and I will refer to it from here on out as glitch. The glitch genre arrived on the back of the electronica movement, an umbrella term for alternative, largely dance-based electronic music (including house, techno, electro, drum’n’bass, ambient) that has come into vogue in the past five years. [2]

Time-stretching vocals and reducing drum loops to eight bits or less were some of the first techniques used in creating artifacts and exposing them as timbral content. [2]

Mika Vainio (Pan Sonic), Ryoji Ikeda

The “atomic” parts, or samples, used in composing electronica from small modular
pieces had become the whole. This is a clear indication that contemporary computer music has become fragmented, it is composed of stratified layers that intermingle and defer meaning until the listener takes an active role in the production of meaning. [2]

The disruption of representation in glitch practices disrupts the experience of listening (as a reproduction of a live event) by highlighting and foregrounding the imperfection and error of reproduction technologies. Kelly writes: “The cultural practice of listening to these media objects explicitly requires that the listener ignore or block out those elements of media that would return him or her to the actualities of the mediated experience. That is, the listener is required to buy the myth of transparency” [23] [4]

https://direct.mit.edu/leon/article/50/1/5/46261/Exhaustion-Aesthetics?searchresult=1

rhythms, speeds and formats of accelerated and intensified consumption reshape
experience and perception

‘The condition was described by Gilles Deleuze in 1991 as the “society of control,” characterized by an evisceration of private space, individual or personal psychic life,
or any ability to step outside of the increasingly pervasive algorithmic regimes of command and control that structure and orchestrate our existence. Glitch art, I submit, is one set of responses to these ubiquitous and insidious conditions.’