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.

Technological Fallacies

One of the things I'm fascinated with is the way technologies allow folks to abdicate a position of accountability in public discourse. This week offered another example of what we might call the technological fallacy (pretentiously, a fallacy ad mediatio?), wherein a speaker introduces a flaw in the mechanics of mediation as a justification for a breakdown in communication. An interview with Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo abruptly ended after two questions, due to a "phone malfunction."

Introduction to Binary Invention

This blog takes its name from the 2012 UND Arts &Culture Conference. Folks in the Department of Art & Design and I developed the theme “Binary Inventions” as an umbrella for thinking about the ways digital technologies alter the relationship between the fine arts and public life. But beyond that relationship, I’m increasingly interested in locating my own rhetorical research and teaching in the language of the binary invention.