Abstract

Within the last decade, a growing number of artists, media activists and theorists have been engaged with the potential of the glitch – with processes and aesthetics that arise from visual errors in digital technologies. But glitches also offer clues to understanding normative knowledge and power systems, and to challenge these. This is relevant in critical approaches to photography and its historical role in forming, controlling and colonizing systems as well as conventional understandings of the medium as a transparent window onto the world/reality. In this introduction we outline our approach to the glitch in the artistic and curatorial research project ‘Photography and the Glitch’, to which the contributors to this issue have contributed in various ways.