The Pencil of Error: Glitch Aesthetics and Post-Liquid Intelligence

Abstract

There is a strange inheritance between analog photography and digital images in regards to the confused agencies of their making. Both forms of visual technologies employ black box production methods, whether in the chemicals of the dark room or the obscure physical and graphical casements of computer operations. While these technologies significantly complicate the nature of artistic claims to authorship, they also engender new forms of technological and ecological relations. Reading one medium against the other, this paper examines the divide between the analog and the digital through Jeff Wall’s writing. It argues that much of the liquid intelligence of photographic chemicals persists in the material contingencies of digital image networks and their propensities for error. Focusing on glitch art, this paper argues that artists and theorists may need to relinquish a defense of the role of the artist in order to better recognize the material agency of the technology at hand. These unseen agential relations of codecs, silica, and electrons – that which I call post-liquid intelligence – stand to provide a deeper understanding of media formats, material flows, and ecological ethics.