Glitch Poetics by Nathan Allen Jones (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Glitch Poetics by Nathan Allen Jones
• Will Luers (bio)

glitch poetics
Nathan Allen Jones
Open Humanities Press
http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/glitch-poetics/
284 pages; Print, $25.00

In Glitch Poetics, Nathan Allen Jones extends the already extended meaning of the term "glitch," at once a technical error and a ubiquitous expressive art technique that in many ways has come to define a digital aesthetic. Jones presents glitch as a contemporary literary strategy that seeks to model and critique what it is like to live inside a global 24/7 technical infrastructure. The term was first used in 1962 by astronaut John Glenn in reference to an electrical surge on a space expedition and has since come to mean the result or outcome of a breakdown in any technical system. Glitch as a digital art aesthetic is an appreciation and celebration of such outcomes, when a computer's deterministic system gives way to something spontaneous, beautiful, and outside human intention. Glitch art's startling bursts of colored pixel blocks, often accompanied by glitched sound in commercials and popular movies, have become signifiers for our technical future—whether it is utopian or dystopian. But Jones is not interested in telling a history of expressive glitch. Such a task would be too complex to cover. When did intentional error in art or literature begin? In the eighteenth century, with Sterne's artful inability to tell a proper story? In the nineteenth, with Mallarmé tossing words around the poetic page? In the early twentieth, with Picasso's broken perspective? From 1970s experimental filmmakers scratching and burning film strips to 1980s avant-garde video artists bending and interrupting video signals, each new machine for artistic expression seems eventually to find cultural value in that machine's dysfunction. The frustrating glitchiness of the early web—plug-ins not working, pages failing to load, code interrupting flows of text [End Page 134] and image—was embraced by net artists such as the collective JODI and Olia Lialina. Jones does touch on these and many of the important visual glitch artists—Nick Briz, Rosa Menkman, Jon Satrom—but only to provide a context for exploring the mostly untold history of glitch in literary expression.

While visual and sound glitch artists seek out "wrongness" by manipulating code or disrupting hardware or software functionality, the "wrongness" in language arts has a different creative methodology. Literary glitch aims for what Jones calls "media realism." The performance artists, poets, and novelists explored in Glitch Poetics do sometimes play with devices, signals, and data, but with an intention to expose human/machine systems where incongruous, complex, and unpredictable patterns emerge. Literary glitch makes visible the postdigital condition in which daily life succumbs to

trolls, spambots, and other malicious actors online, the grotesquely enticing word-salad of SEO-optimized headlines, the way that corporate decisions filter through into our textual environment and social sphere, the startling data on climate and social change …

The artist/writers Jones explores cast glitchiness as harmful cognitive and physical forces coming from technical systems that govern our internal and external lives. The human counter-force to the machine is a poetics that adopts glitch techniques and effects, mostly borrowed from the visual arts, to reveal a postdigital experience of "hindrance, aimlessness, [and] lostness."

In literary readings of performance artists Erica Scourti and Carline Bergvall, Jones explores how devices and software that are intended as supportive to language expression and reception—voice recording, speed reader apps, auto translation, and predictive text—are used to create "glitchfrastructures," odd zones where machine and human logics breakdown. Scourti's Negative Docs uses a speed reader app to perform a rereading of the artist's diary of depression. The inability to keep up with the "accelerating semiotic extraction" of the app reveals the misaligned intentions of human and machine: the app wants to fulfill its purpose of speedy retention, while the human reader is slowed down by the emotions in the text's meaning. Bergvall's "About Face" layers three levels of glitchiness: a poem is auto-transcribed from a recording of a reading by the poet after a painful tooth extraction. The result is a printed poem of...