In this blog
post I would like to expand upon my practicum exercise from week 9. In playing
with all three of the course tools for digital deformance I was struck by the
layers that they added to artifacts in the process of deforming them. The
GIFmelter and Image Glitcher felt as if they were applying filters (Lisa
suggested as much in her practicum). While these are certainly new ways of
looking at these texts, they don't seem quite aligned with Bogost's model of
carpentry discussed in notes towards a deformed humanities.
What I
didn’t note in My practicum but which bothered me about these tools was the
degree to which I was unsure if what I was seeing was an accident, an aberration
in the coded structure of the texts being glitched or if they were simply
processes crafted to give the appearance of a technical mishap. This recalls
the 5th point raised by Rosa Menkman in “The Glitch Manifesto,”
“Realize that the gospel of glitch art also tells about new standards
implemented by corruption. Not all glitch art is progressive or something new.
The popularization and cultivation of the avant-garde of mishaps has become
predestined and unavoidable. Be aware of easily reproducible glitch effects
automated by softwares and plug-ins. What is now a glitch will become a
fashion.” (11) These tools were aesthetically and maybe formally glitchy but
they didn't seem to be a function of noise introduced in their transmission but
rather were applied after the fact. I suppose this is a matter of identifying
where in the Sender->Reciever chain noise is introduced. But these
technologies seemed more in line with the Databendign Menkman experiments with
around file formats than a glitch produced in a signal during transmission.
These might
all be the same kind of glitches in the sense of the “Glitch Manifesto’s” 7th
point that we ought to “rejoice in the critical trans-media aesthetics of
glitch artifacts. Utilize glitches to bring any medium into a critical state of
hypertrophy, to (subsequently) criticize its inherent politics.” (11) This
seems to welcome an expanded sense of the glitch. Certainly the data-bending
that Menkman does depends on the introduction of noise, but I wonder what the
ontological difference between this glitch and a photo filter is then? Is it
the unexpected or random nature of it? Is it still random if you've written a
program with the intention of making it random? The databent images in
Menkman’s work look very much like the images produced by the Image Glitcher
software, but Menkman’s operate by sending the user into the code where the
Image Glitcher simply puts a new black-box in the mix. Menkman explains at length
the processes by which she achieved particular glitches, by copying code, by introducing
random code, etc. Each of these produces a different effect, and these
differences reveal different operations at work in making image data readable
to a user. This brings us back to the questions of Bogost’s carpentry in Mark
Sample’s “Notes Towards a Deformed Humanities.” The quote that Sample has cited
(and which I’ll borrow) defines carpentry as “making things that explain how
things make their world.” (Bogost, 93)
Certainly
the products of Glitchers, Databending, Melters, and Meaning-Eaters are new
texts, but they don’t all necessarily point us what is going on in the machine,
at least not in the same ways. The glitched image may recall it; I had a text
message image download improperly on my phone once and the image glitcher
resembles that, just like it resembles the databent images from Menkman’s work.
However, I don’t understand the glitched image produced by the Image Glitcher
and there doesn’t seem to be much cause for me to direct my attention towards
the internal processes that have produced it. It’s the intended result of the
tool - where my phone corrupting image data is cause of confusion or Menkman’s
databending is cause for experimentation, the tool produces a planned outcome.
The tool is disruptive to the images formal coherence - I can think think about
the image and what (in a humanistic sense) is the code of an image, of its ineligibility,
of its form. But with these black boxes I’m not necessarily thinking of the
machine and of noise in the same ways. So, in a wider view of defeomance all
these technologies might cause us to think about the cognitive mechanisms we've
developed for receiving images, gifs or online articles. However, the process seems
to matter for the critical capabilities of these tools. The objective of
Bogost’s carpentry is to turn our attention to technical process, to
world-making. Likewise the Glitch Manifesto’s first point poses glitch as a critique
of a fetishization of coherence, or noiseless transmission. It seems to me that
these projects take a critical edge when we are encouraged by this
deformance/transformation to think about the process, in addition to the aesthetic
effects.
At any rate,
all of this reminded me of my object from my practicum in week 8, the shoe-box
of NES games on my coffee table. Below are two videos of one of these
games glitching. Where the deformance tools seem to layer code onto their
objects producing a new text in the process, this seems to function through the
loss of some information. What is going on on my TV screen is a hardware
glitch, somewhere in the machine (in this case the pins that connect the
game cartridge to the game console) information is lost or corrupted. My
Nintendo is trying to make sense of the games program despite some information
not getting passed to the machine. The result is a visually baffling but still
playable version Ducktales 2.
After
digging this out of my bedroom a few weeks ago and moving it to my apartment
I've encountered a number of these glitches. Sometimes the game won’t start, or
often static runs through the screen. In a particularly interesting case, I
encountered a level in Super Mario 3 that was missing part of a hillside that
caused Mario to hover as if he were permanently mid-jump. In considering the
implications of the hardware glitch, it’s not simply the textual object and our
relationship to it that is changed, but in the process the underlying
technological processes that produce the text which are made apparent. In order
to rectify the glitches that appear on my NES I’m forced to break with the
game’s play interfaces, the TV screen and the controller. I turn my attention
to the hardware interface. I try the reset button and the power button, but
these don't solve the problem. The signal is disrupted somewhere deeper in my
machine. I could jiggle the cartridge inside the machine to try to establish a
better connection. Or, I could take the game cartridge out and blow on the connector
pins on the game-board protruding from the bottom of the cartridge, to remove
any dust. In either case this interface isn’t made for me, the pins form an
analogue connection that allow the NES to read the information on the game
cartridge. By blowing on the pins I recognize this point of technical interfacing
as the site at which the noise is introduced, I’m forced to think through the
operations inside my NES and intervene in the process of transmission. I become
aware of the world making of my NES rather than simply taking pleasure in the
aesthetic of garbled information on my TV.
The NES Cleaning Kit, Licensed Nintendo product for cleaning game connectors. |
What is
especially interesting about this version of deformance is that the reading
technologies necessary to produce the view of Ducktales2 that has
appeared on my screen are only really available on the original hardware. The
glitch is integral to the process of reading done by the NES’s original
hardware, it’s a pattern that relies on an analogue disruption of the NES’s
internal system. This means that there isn't a way to accurately emulate this
kind of deformance/glitch with layers of new code. It’s here that I feel like
we are seeing an ontological difference between active tools deformance and the
intervention of noise more organically.
Thinking
about this distinction between the two is best illustrated by NO-CARRIER's
NESglitch tool. This
program tries to reproduce familiar NES glitches by writing an executable NES
ROM File that approximates the aesthetic of fuzzy connection inside a Nintendo.
The NES glitch is so integral to the console and the experience of playing that
it takes on a kind of nostalgic cache and an aesthetic of its own. The Angry
Nerd videogame, a tribute to a popular YouTube channel that reviews classic
games, features a level that centers on the glitch such that the word Glitch appears onscreen. The letters are
jumbled to look as if they were produced accidentally on an old NES. NO-CARRIER’s
tool aims at a similar effect. Without the analogue disconnect between metal
connecting pins inside the NES, NO-CARRIER’s game scripts patterns that look
like these glitches. Using the button inputs on a controller the user can cycle
through a combination of patterns that approximate the look of a hardware glitch.
However, a comparison between NO-CARRIER’s tool and a glitched NES game reveals
important dissimilarities.
The first
image below is Produced by NO-CARRIER's ROM file, loaded into an emulator (at
least that's how I used it, you could also load it onto an emulator cartridge
and play it on an NES) while the second is a hardware glitch produced in Snakes
Revenge. They have similar elements, but some of the game world in Snakes
Revenge remains visible below the garbled pixels. The Image produced by NO-CARRIER’s
tool contains some of the same formal properties, but without the background as
a point of reference. We see pixelated and scrambled cells but there isn’t a
guiding pattern behind them. They are spread across the screen in a too-random
checkerboard pattern. This dissimilarity results because they are produced in
very different ways. This, I would like to argue is an ontological difference
and produces a difference in what they allow us to read. The glitched NES image
reminds us that there is a coherent text somewhere behind the illegible flurry
of stay letters and pixels. We know that something responsible for bringing
this coherent text to us has failed and the result is a game that causes its
reader to reflect on the technical process that makes an NES cartridge playable.
NO-CARRIER’s tool can’t point us to that internal operation. Playing with
patterns produced intentionally is an interesting experimental practice in
glitch aesthetics, but the process that it recalls does less to foreground
technology, putting stock in the nostalgic aesthetic instead.
NO-CARRIER GlitchNES |
Snake's Revenge |
Bogost, Ian.
Alien Phenomenology, or, What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2012. Print.
Menkman, Rosa. The Glitch Moment(um). Amsterdam: Network Notebooks, 2011
Sample, Mark, "Notes Towards a Deformed Humanities," Sample Reality, 2012