Hi Curt-
I might respond in a bit more detail in the following days but:
On Oct 14, 2010, at 12:11 PM, Curt Cloninger wrote:
> Kim Cascone actually contacted me out of the blue yesterday to say he liked the essay (for what it's worth).
I had sent him the link on the 12th, but still, out of the blue!
> Shannon and Cascone came up several times at the conference
I was referring to Claude E. Shannon, who published "The Mathematical Theory of Communication" in the _Bell System Technical Journal_ in 1948.
My understanding of a glitch, echoed by your Glenn quote, is an event which actually "takes down" a system: a voltage spike that either fries the power supply, or shuts off the machine for a short time. Hence "The Aesthetics of Failure."
On the other hand, many machine systems are quite tolerant of noise. If there's a relation between glitch and noise, one might say that a glitch is the "black swan event" in the world of noise.
But I think you'd want to keep a distinction between the two terms as there's been no shortage of art discourse, in glitch's case since the late 1990s, and in the case of noise, since Russolo, if not Schönberg.
> I don't mean to assert that they merely/vaguely/impressionistically do, and then stop there forever.
Again, my reference was to Impressionism with a Capital "I" and Jameson's wonderful essays on Conrad that appear in _Political Unconscious_ which I didn't have at hand this morning.
From Lord Jim:
"There was, as I walked along, the clear sunshine, a brilliance too passionate to be consoling, the streets full of jumbled bits of color like a damaged kaleidoscope: yellow, green, blue, dazzling white, the brown nudity of an undraped shoulder, a bullock cart with a red canopy, a company of native infantry in a drab body with dark heads marching in dusty laced boots, a native policeman in a sombre uniform of scanty cut and belted patent leather." [p.96]
And Jameson:
"The very activity of sense perception has no where to go in a world in which science deals with ideal quantities, and comes to have little enough exchange value in a money economy dominated by considerations of calculation, measurement, profit, and the like. This unused surplus capacity of sense perception can only reorganize itself into a new and semi-autonomous activity, one which produces its own specific objects, new objects that are themselves the result of process of abstraction and reification, such that older concrete unities are now sundered into measurable dimensions on one side, say, and pure color (or the experience of purely abstract color) on the other." [p. 229]
Best wishes, Charles
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