Glitch as an expressive trope for memory loss, in my work, see
http://paulhertz.net/works/glitchez.html: "glitch as a metaphor for the
processes by which we record, forget, mythologize, discard, recast,
contradict and reconstruct our collective experiences in order to make some
kind of sense of the world."

While it's true that digital media don't undergo the same generational loss
that analog media do, the networked image and networked media in general
undergo transformations within the systems themselves (i.e. with no direct
human agency) in resolution, dimensions, and (critically) accessibility.
Servers compress media, resize it, archive it, go offline. New technologies
no longer support old content. The loss of web page content is notorious
for anyone looking for early net.art, for example.

When we couple the issues of archiving and obsolescence with the continual
repurposing of media in social networks, the potential for "generational"
loss returns in full force. Edmond Couchot's concept of "immedia" (cf.
http://www.olats.org/livresetudes/etudes/couchot1984.php,
http://www.multimedialab.be/doc/citations/edmond_couchot_medias.pdf, in
French) reimagines Claude Shannon's model for information theory as
bidirectional, with the message assuming a degree of agency both as an
element of an autonomous system (the network) and as a result of the sheer
speed with which it is exchanged and modded (the social network). The
networked immedia image becomes inherently unstable. Its instability
promulgates a different species of time from that of analog media. Where
analog media lost quality through linear temporal processes, digital media
lose quality all-at-once, uchronically (to cite Couchot again), in multiple
spaces and nodes. Sequential-access tape is emblematic of analog temporal
processes, as random-access storage is of (networked) digital processes.

-- Paul




On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 6:45 PM, Randall Packer <[email protected]> wrote:

> @Gregory: Stunning piece. I wonder how analog degradation and generational
> loss provides context for current glitch processes and “breakages” that are
> digital engineered. Whereas the latter do not involve generational loss,
> only ways to undermine and rupture the code (which could be done
> sequentially), the early analog pieces really do melt into obscurity and
> forgetfulness as you poetically describe. Whereas glitch has grown out of
> these kinds of analog manipulations, digital mechanisms involve an entirely
> different approach, sensibility, strategy, and I am very interested if any
> of the "glitch artists" on the list might be able to elaborate. Nick?
> Joseph? Paul?
>
> Randall.
>
>
>
> On 0p3nr3p0.net -- Cable Vision Generations
> by Gregory Gutenko
>
> In 1974 J. J. Murphy created the minimalist/structuralist film-work Print
> Generation. Cable Vision Generations applies a similar structural process
> to the medium of analog videotape. The original version of Cable Vision
> Generations is composed of 100 generational steps (dubs) and runs for 67
> minutes. This edited version has 24 steps which are representative of the
> original's structure. The first step (of cable channel 'surfings') is a
> 95th generation dub. In the middle of the program is the first generation
> of the channel sequence. The last step/sequence is a 100th generation dub.
> Every dubbed sequence was copied through a time base corrector, otherwise
> the video signal would simply have lost sync and been unrecordable. The
> cable channels were selected at random and looped to make one sequence that
> is copied and recopied a generation at a time. Cable Vision Generations
> begins highly degraded, loops towards its original generation, and then
> continues on towards re-degeneration. As with Murphy's Print Generation,
> the viewer gets to experience the loss of memory of the original
> generation's images and sounds, even though they have been witnessed
> repeatedly. The ultimate victor is noise. Video noise. Audio noise. The
> noise of forgetting.
>
> http://0p3nr3p0.net/piece/6c02cd45bf8ae235950b234137058b7f
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