DIGITAL IMAGE AND DIGITAL AESTHETICS

What is specific about digital image and how can digital aesthetics be described through a reference to glitch?



What is specific about digital image and how can digital aesthetics be described through a reference to glitch?

Introduction

As digital represents correct order and specific control of virtual realities through arithmetical dualities by using machine language and symbolized in binary code, The "glitch" in digital art is an example of disorder in array, or the moment of marvel which can be expressed by space, time, & mind in the image. Glitch is being symbolic of web art or net art of first generation, the artistic appearance of the global undercover community in the era of the early internet and its expansion (Kidd, 1985, 121).

The term “Glitch” is usually identified as jargon in electronic industries by gamers, media artists, circuit-bending practitioners and designers. A glitch is a short-lived error in a system or machine in electrical systems and it appears as a defect. Opportunity for genuine individuality or subjectivity of the post-modern digital artist develops by the breakdown and error of systems. The individual self-expression is reduced to an ironic defect within the greater matrix of social programming and control, but is experienced heroically as overcoming by the person through creative self-identity. The glitch is the unplanned ecstasy and spark of life referenced by the myths and fairy tales of Artificial Intelligence in field of fiction science. The artist is seeking the reflection of singularity through artistic expression, yet to go beyond limits, the software imposed tautology must be transcended by the chaos of the glitch (Umbaugh, 2005, 89). 

Discussion and analysis

Glitch is experienced as the irrationality of the unforeseen manifesting in the features of the programmer and engineer's vision of total control through system design. It is the software expression of the most fundamental characteristic of modern humanity as an error. As a symbol in artistic practice, the glitch represents the synchronicity of a moment irreproducible and inconceivable other than how it appears, randomly, unexpected, captured as a nano-second flash and still-life photograph of quantum mind with all its uncertainty in post-modern awareness. The glitch is just like a link which joins the human and technological into a greater or extended body-mind entity and unity.

There is instead a fracturing into greater anonymity and obscurity of identity, specialization of selfhood through disappearance characterized by a web of anonymous accounts, nicknames, and passwords masking and cloaking the identity through various veils of online mediated social networking. Hyper-individuality as represented by space-time and scale is marginal, obscure, nano-individuality. The fabulous fame and victory of traditional heroes and commercial artists does not reflect the experience of the post-modern artist as glitch, nor do they reflect the ideology of the cyber existentially. Where the classical and commercial modern artists climbed to the highest rungs of fame, becoming constellations, like even the great Greek mythological heroes in their contemporary renown, the post-modern artist-as-glitch appears and disappears instantly, forgotten, ignored, unseen, buried or obscured by ...