What is specific about digital image and how can digital aesthetics be Essay

What is specific about digital image and how can digital aesthetics be described through a reference to glitch Give examples - Essay Example term is usually identified as jargon, used in electronic industries and services, circuit-bending practitioners, gamers, media artists, and designers. In electrical systems, a glitch is a short-lived error in a system or machine. A glitch appears as a defect..." (Goriunova & Shulgin, 2008) It is the breakdown and error of systems that produces the opportunity for genuine individuality or subjectivity of the post-modern digital artist. The individual self-expression is reduced to an ironic defect within the greater matrix of social programming and control, but is experienced heroically as overcoming by the person through creative self-identity. The glitch is the spontaneous ecstasy and spark of life referenced by the mythology and fairy tales of Artificial Intelligence in science fiction: the ghost-soul in the machine vs. man as god. The artist is seeking the reflection of singularity through artistic expression, yet to go beyond limits, the software imposed tautology must be transcen ded by the chaos of the glitch. The glitch is the software expression of the human in software through the most fundamental characteristic of modern humanity, human error. This is experienced as the irrationality of the unforseen manifesting in the face of the programmer and engineer’s vision of total control through system design. Yet, as both a symbol and in artistic practice, the glitch represents the synchronicity of a moment irreproducible and inconceivable other than how it appears, randomly, unexpected, captured as a nano-second flash and still-life photograph of quantum mind with all its uncertainty in post-modern awareness. Goriunova & Shulgin chart the meme of the modern Prometheus from Shelley’s Frankenstein as an example of Victorian conceptions of disfunctionality vs. utilitarianism: people, objects, and ideas "sooner or later becoming evil as they stop functioning correctly." (Ibid., p.115) If Frankenstein is the early modernist â€Å"glitch-as-hero,† then the