Have you ever taken a photo of your television screen? Has the screen ever ‘glitched’ while watching your favourite show? I began a series of glitch photos almost twenty years by documenting the ‘stuck’ images that occasionally occurred as a result of scratched DVDs. Over time, I observed that my television signal was also susceptible to interruptions of digital noise. These photos were taken with slide film, which lent a strange, other-worldly aspect to these images. I don’t remember the names of the actual movies or shows that I was photographing. Only the glitch photos remain.
I rebooted this series about ten years later after getting a digital antenna for my television and mounting it to the roof. I calibrated the antenna to stations in Toronto, Buffalo, and points west, which enabled me to watch CBC and PBS without a cable subscription. But on rainy or windy days, the channels that normally came in fine had a pixelated appearance. The usual flow of television images was punched out by glitches that were wildly unpredictable both in timing and content. Sometimes the entire image was virtually indecipherable while at other times the distortion was localized, creating bands, lines or split images.
With the advent of digital – as opposed to analog – media and technology, we’ve become accustomed to higher production values and seldom need to tolerate distorted sound and images. I wonder though if that means the quality of contemporary sound and images has similarly increased. For instance, has there been a corresponding increase in quality with the things we are actually seeing? I’m sceptical, but I’ve come to believe that glitches in the glossy veneer of contemporary media may actually provide useful opportunities for engagement.
It’s no accident that the glitch photos on my website transform the original commercial broadcast signal enough to legitimately relieve them of their source content. Can a television network copyright a distorted image? At what point does the glitch remove their claim to the content of the image? We’re not always quite sure what we’re seeing. The glitch and the distortion eliminate the original image and replace it with something else entirely.
At the time I concluded the glitches which I observed and recorded in the relative privacy of my own home had afforded me with an uncanny sense of agency. The evidence that brought this home was the discovery last year that the Pinakothek der Moderne museum was hosting a ‘Glitch’ exhibition in Munich. Aside from a case of ‘great minds,’ this coincidence also affirms the idea that glitch images normalize digital distortion. Glitches are not a deviation from or interruption of the perfect signal. Rather, glitch photos arrest the flow of digital noise.