An Ass’s Shadow Masquerading as a Horse

Part of this year’s UND Arts & Culture conference includes a piece of “glitch art” by Mark Amerika. In glitch art, the artist manipulates some part or parts of the digital and mechanical process of capture and production to augment the work. In Mark Amerika’s case, he corrupted the code of a digital photograph and printed the resulting image. I’ve been intrigued by the piece since I saw it come out of the print shop because it seems like a prima facie “binary invention.” It’s pixelated and bright and angular. It does not conceal its digital foundations in the way some of the more organic and figural pieces in the exhibit do. It is unmistakably a binary creation. However, glitch art, with its interest in making the digital part of a digital photograph manifest, presents some challenges to understanding it as a mode of invention.

To get a sense of what goes into the process of creating a piece like Amerika’s, I started glitching my own photographs. You can do this, too, by opening an image with a text editor and then going to town. It takes some experimentation to figure out which code you can augment without so wholly corrupting the file that it doesn’t open as an image.  The image here is my result. I began by taking out lines and symbols randomly. Then I cut large sections out of the code and pasted them back in somewhere else. But all this randomness seemed decidedly undisciplined—there was no method to the process. To correct this, I began devising a systematicity to the process: deleting every tenth line or putting a “d” after every “p.” But some of those changes rendered the file unreadable. In fact, without any literacy for the code I was altering the process of glitching seemed to actively resist a method that I could explain or reproduce.

Certainly, Amerika invented something. There’s a print hanging in the gallery. I invented the image above. It’s there. And since Amerika understands himself as trafficking in the aesthetic mode of art instead of the practical mode, it might be unfair to ask glitch art to answer to the interrogations of rhetorical invention. But I think there’s something to learn about rhetorical invention in a digital age by way of glitch art. We can consider that lesson as a question of invention as wholly original or repurposed, as a set of consistent strategies across variable events or a process where strategies and events are radically contingent, and finally as a process for producing discourse or a process for understanding discourse. When the conference wraps, I’ll come back to glitch art and consider those questions of invention in greater detail. For now, I want to consider the invention of glitch art as a performance of a peculiar digital agency.

In my case of glitch art, I started with a photograph of a tractor. I did not invent the tractor; I did invent the photograph of the tractor.  But how much agency did I have in its invention? I took a digital camera and let it do the work. I decided framing (but even then the autofocus indicators gave me advice), and the camera handled all the other details of aperture and stop and color saturation and on and on. To the extent the digital interface determines so much about the final photo, glitching the code represents a novel way for me to reassert agency in the process of image capture and reproduction.

But what kind of agency is that? I’m left with an image that is decidedly not a tractor. It exists in the file (one of the fascinating parts of the glitching process is that removing one line can render the image as a series of colors and lines, while removing a second line will revert those seemingly random shapes and colors back into the form of the tractor), the tractor is always there in the code (as trace or stain?) but I couldn’t control how it showed up or disappeared. And so, while the glitch art demonstrates my agency in interfering with the digital interface’s control over the image, I’m not sure how much control over my interference I truly have. That is, I cannot glitch the tractor to make a comment on the nature of tractors or agriculture or bucolic life or whatever a tractor might signify in a modern world. I can only glitch the tractor to signify that my inventional authority in a digital age is largely a corrupt one: I can only indicate my ability to corrupt the file.

This form of corruption indicates a kind of rhetorical invention predicated on disclosing the artifice behind digital images, but in that way it functions less as its own kind of rhetorical exercise and more as a disclosing of the rhetorical artifice of digital photography. It reveals that the original image was a dishonest one, but even then the consequences of that deceit are relative. In the Phaedrus, Plato’s Socrates talks about the deceptions of rhetoric as the potential to persuade a city “to do evil in the place of good.” A far lesser offense was its potential to sing “the praises of an ass’s shadow masquerading as a horse.” I wonder how much of glitch art, of the control involved in corrupting a file and then hanging the results in a gallery, functions as that kind of praise, that kind of shadow.

Of course, the image I include here and the image Amerika provided for the conference represent carefully selected images. I glitched four separate photographs dozens of times each before I found one that suited my purposes here. And so, I have invented an image that assists in making a comment about the nature of agency and invention in digital life. Given the radical constraints of both those concepts, glitch art insists that we consider how digital technologies create a restrictive interiority to rhetorical agency, a space for inventing where the contingencies are illegible and our processes of invention incomprehensible or wholly obscured in the resultant output.