My Grandmother Glitches the Machine

“The glitch is a wonderful experience of an interruption that shifts an object away from its ordinary form and discourse… But once I named it, the momentum—the glitch—is no more…” For Menkman, the glitch cannot be described or it ceases to be what it claims; it is a lack, a break in the pattern of meaning that forces its own opening.

A glitch is similar in that it is a failure in a minor key, a moment of slippage when the code or the machine blunders and produces an unintended, random output.

It’s a bit like dreaming, which is always a bit like remembering.

I’ve developed a certain tenderness for the glitch: the riddled, dysfunctional thing that evades the conditions of what might be expected and what might be known, rupturing unfamiliar territories, or maybe a glimpse into a second reality that has been there all along

The problem with the machine as a metaphor is that it is claustrophobic; all that passes through and out of it is accounted for by a precise and unrelenting algebra