The politics of the interficial (or, when is a picture essay not a picture essay?)

Here's a little scrap of a project I had in the top drawer:

What does digital rhetoric look like?

Is it a digital rendering of a representative image of rhetoric, like this?

Is it a refiguring of classical rhetoric via digital devices
(understood as the digitial devices represented in the image
and the digital devices implied by the image's presence, i.e. Photoshop)?

Is it a rhetoric that performs in (and not just through) binary code, a rhetoric of the code?

If it is a rhetoric of the code, can you find it in this image (the first image opened as a text file)?

How does representing digital rhetoric change when we measure human agency as the introduction of contingency in a system aimed at eliminating the contingent? What if intruding on the perfect operations of code is a way to call attention to the rhetorical force of the otherwise concealed and sealed interfaces of digital life?

Consider the following statements:

Now, what if we interrogated the code in the fourth image (itself a digital representation of sorts of our first image) with these conceptual and textual interventions in the visual representation rendered textual code? What happens when you digitally embed digital theory in a digital file?

Is this glitching of a digital rhetoric a practice of digital rhetoric? What are its rhetorical effects? Have we rendered this too meta-rhetorical? Too meta-digital? 

In the more nuanced sketch of this project, I have a bunch of arguments about invention, perfection, and contingency (using Cicero and Quintilian to read the first image, then troubling that image with Muckelbauer and media, digital, and glitch theories). But as a simple exercise in scrutinizing digital rhetorical production this works because at its simplest, the visual essay indicates that the final image is not an intentional product, but it remains a rhetorical product nonetheless.

Which is to say:

You might also like: 

Peter Krapp's book.

Rosa Menkman's Glitch Studies Manifesto.

and other works on glitch and digital studies:

Error: Glitch, Noise, and Jam in New Media Cultures, edited  by Mark Nunes, New York: Continuum, 2011

• “Error, Noise, and Potential: The Outside of Purpose” Mark Nunes, 3-23.
• Benjamin Mako Hill “Revealing Errors” 27-41.
• Tim Barker “Aesthetics of the Error: Media Art, the Machine, the Unforeseen, and the Errant” 42-58.
• Susan Ballard “Information, Noise, et al.” 57-79.
• Peter Krapp, “Gaming the Glitch: Room for Error” 113-132.
• Tony D. Sampson, “Error-Contagion: Network Hypnosis and Collective Culpability”, 232-253.

Christopher Washburne and Maiken Derno (eds.) Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate, New York: Routledge, 2004.

• Angela Rodel “Extreme Noise Terror: Punk Rock and the Aesthetics of Badness” 235-256.
• Torben Sanglid “Glitch—The Beauty of Malfunction” 257-274.
• Eliot Bates “Glitches, Bugs, and Hisses: The Degeneration of Musical Recordings and the Contemporary Musical Work” 275-293.

Glenn Stillar, "Loops as Genre Resources."

Anne Frances Wysocki and Dennis A. Lynch Compose, Design, Advocate: a rhetoric for integrating written, visual, and oral communication New York: Pearson Longman, 2007.

Anne Frances Wysocki, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Cynthia L. Selfe, and Geoffrey Sirc, eds. Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition Logan UT: Utah State University Press, 2004.

• “Opening New Media to Writing: openings & justifications” 1-41.

Peter-Paul Verbeek, What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design, translated by Robert P. Crease, University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005.