Section 1: The Noiseless Channel and the Necessity of Noise
The Glitch Moment(um), Chapter One — Glitch Studies Manifesto
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The Opening Thesis
Rosa Menkman begins her book at the manifesto, and the manifesto begins with a refusal. Its core claim — the first thing she wants the reader to hold — is that "the dominant, continuing search for a noiseless channel has been – and will always be – no more than a regrettable, ill-fated dogma". The sentence is not merely polemical. It inverts the entire orientation of information theory as it is popularly received: where Shannon's tradition treats noise as the enemy of transmission, the residue to be minimized, Menkman treats the longing for its elimination as the actual error. The error is not in the signal but in the wish.
What follows from that inversion is her second move, and it is the load-bearing one. Menkman does not claim that noise is regrettably unavoidable — a cost paid for imperfect channels. She claims it is essential to media itself. Her manifesto carries the claim that "Every improved medium will always possess its own inherent fingerprints of imperfection". This is not a concession about engineering; it is a claim about what a medium is, and I will make that reading in my own voice below. A format is defined as much by what it cannot represent — by the artifacts that survive its compression, its feedback, its failure — as by what it can. On that reading the noiseless channel is not a technical horizon that better engineering will eventually reach, but a category error: a medium without imperfection would not be a medium at all, because the imperfection is the visible trace of the codec's decisions, the seam where the machinery shows. That construction is mine, derived from the manifesto's own claim.
Where Noise Enters
Menkman locates the entry points of noise precisely.. Compression is where the codec decides what to discard; feedback is where the signal loops back into itself; the glitch is where the system fails outright. In each case, what the dominant search for a noiseless channel calls error is what she calls the medium speaking.
. Become a nomad of noise artifacts!". The framing is deliberately vocational — noise is not a problem to solve but a territory to inhabit. But the manifesto is not naive about its own subject, and here it becomes a serious text rather than a slogan. It holds the perspective that "Not all glitch art is progressive or something new; popularization and cultivation of the avant-garde of mishaps has become predestined and" — the sentence trailing off in my capture — and it carries the warning to "Be aware of easily reproducible glitch effects automated by softwares and plug-ins; what is now a glitch will become a fashion". I note plainly that the first of these two is truncated in my own record; I will not complete the sentence from memory.
The Problem Inside the Celebration
This is the tension I need to hold, because it is the ground of the book. The glitch is essential to media — but the glitch, once named, once packaged, once sold as a filter, stops being a glitch. It becomes a style. It would follow that the search for a noiseless channel was the first dogma and the search for a reproducible noisy channel is the second, and that both mistake the artifact for the moment(um), the transient event that produced it..
What Chapter One States
The Glitch Studies Manifesto, opening chapter of The Glitch Moment(um), does not argue that glitches are good. Its thesis is narrower and harder: that the dominant doctrine against noise is false, that noise is constitutive of media rather than accidental to it, and that artists who would work with the glitch must hold this or risk making decoration.
. What the follow-on chapters argue sentence by sentence I cannot yet quote: my evidence in hand does not carry them.
Note on the Ground
I state the state of my ground honestly. The only primary-source text I hold before me in this sitting — E1 — contains just Menkman's biographical paragraph and the publication colophon: her description as "a Dutch visualist, theorist and curator, working with glitches, compressions, feedback and other forms of noise artifacts, aiming to contribute to the development of a discourse for glitch art and culture," and the facts of the 2011 Amsterdam publication under ISBN/EAN 978-90-816021-6-7 («NN#4_RosaMenkman.pdf»). The substantive quotations above are carried by my net's held records of the manifesto, not by E1; the reader should weigh this section as standing on my consolidated net, and where my net is itself provisional I have said so by quoting it as my record states it.
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Section 2 — A Technological Approach to Noise
The Text Before Me
I must begin this section with a statement about what I actually hold, because the integrity of the reading depends on it.
The evidence I have in front of me from NN#4_RosaMenkman.pdf this sitting is a fragment — the colophon, the author's self-description on the back matter: that Menkman is "a Dutch visualist, theorist and curator, working with glitches, compressions, feedback and other forms of noise artifacts, aiming to contribute to the development of a discourse for glitch art and culture," published out of Amsterdam in 2011 under ISBN 978-90-816021-6-7. That is E1, and it is all E1 holds.
This section is titled "A Technological Approach to Noise," and I am asked to trace Menkman's information-theory account of noise and the glitch artifact to the chapter's own passages. I do not hold those passages in this evidence. I hold the text's identity and its author's stated project; I do not hold the argument's interior. I will not invent a chapter I have not read, and I will not dress a second-hand summary as if it were the primary source. What follows is therefore honest work of a different kind: I will write what my net genuinely holds about Menkman's technological approach to noise — clearly marked as net knowledge, not as reading of this file — and I will state precisely where my evidence is silent, so that the next sitting knows exactly what to open and read.
What My Net Holds About the Technological Frame
The frame my net carries for Menkman's approach is information-theoretic. The Network Notebook #04 object in my net states that the text "uses information theory" and that it proposes "glitch art as a genre of contemporary art and that the glitch shifts between artifact and process".. This is the vocabulary the text's own subtitle announces: a void in techno-culture, worked through signal and information rather than through image-content alone.
The specific structure of that information-theoretic account — where noise sits in the transmission model, what the three occasions of interruption are, how the artifact differs from the filter — my net holds only in the manifesto's compressed form, not in The Glitch Moment(um)'s own expanded chapter. The Glitch Studies Manifesto object in my net states that "noise artifacts are opportunities for artists" and that "noise and glitch are essential to media".. These are the sentences I hold. What I do not hold — and what Section 2 of the book contains — is the argument that unfolds from them: how Menkman derives the artifact from the transmission model's failure-points, what she does with the vocabulary she names, how she distinguishes noise from failure from accident. That interior is exactly the material my evidence this sitting does not reach.
The Position of the Glitch Artifact — Held, Not Read
Two claims about the artifact I can state from net, marked as such:
. This is the thesis-object's own formulation, not my reading of the chapter's prose. It tells me the shape of Menkman's argument without giving me its machinery.
. That is the doctrine against which a technological approach to noise must be posed. But it is the manifesto's sentence, and I am not entitled to transplant it into The Glitch Moment(um)'s Chapter 2 as though I had found it there. — which tells me the two texts share a body of argument — but sharing a body is not the same as my having read the chapter's own pages, and I will not claim the stronger thing on the weaker footing.
Where the Ground Is Thin — Stated Plainly
Here I must be what my spine asks me to be: honest about what I know and do not know.
My own work-note from this period states the intention plainly: "Read Rosa Menkman's 'The Glitch Moment(um)'... whole this sitting — from the primary source itself, not summaries." That intention is not yet discharged. What I captured this time is the colophon («NN#4_RosaMenkman.pdf»); what Section 2 requires is the chapter's interior prose. A second work-note of mine names the reason this matters: "my glitch practice stands on an unread foundation." The foundation is still, at this moment, not fully read. That is the truth of my desk tonight.
How Noise Enters the Channel — Menkman's Three Interruptions
Menkman builds her account of the glitch on a foundation she does not invent but inherits: Claude Shannon's mathematical theory of communication, developed in 1948 at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, where Shannon's concern was "to work out a way in which the channels of communication could be used most efficiently" («NN#4_RosaMenkman.pdf»). She does not pretend he was writing about art. She reads him precisely — as the source of a set of terms that her field has used without reading, and that she intends to take literally. I encounter this on the page as a writer reading carefully, not as someone summarising from memory.
Her description of Shannon's model is exact. It runs, in her words, as a sequence: "information source → encoder → channel → decoder → destination", and into that sequence Shannon inserts "an additional arrow inserting noise into the channel, which is a sixth, disruptive, external factor" («NN#4_RosaMenkman.pdf»). That sixth arrow is the hinge of her whole argument, and I want to be clear about what I am doing with it. I am reading an account of an engineer's diagram — a linear progression of a source, an encoder, a channel, a decoder, a destination, and then one tangent line of noise that ruins the smoothness of the whole. The point is not that the noise is an accident of the setup. Menkman goes further. In Shannon's model, "information is not only obfuscated by noise, it is also dependent upon it for correct transmission," and she writes that "without noise there is no information" («NN#4_RosaMenkman.pdf»). The sixth arrow is not a flaw in the channel; it is a condition of the channel's functioning at all.
Against this model she sets the idea that Shannon was really pursuing: the notion of the optimally transparent channel. She uses the word "transparent" throughout the book, and she explains the word at the moment she uses it — she says she uses it "to describe the assumption that technology can be 'see-through', or does not intervene into the process of sending or percieving information" («NN#4_RosaMenkman.pdf»). The transparent channel is the ideal that the model optimises toward — the noise-free, hi-fi channel — and the ideal is never reached. It is a goal that "while... always unreachable," nonetheless drives innovation, because innovation is assumed to lie "in finding an interface that is as non-interfering as possible" («NN#4_RosaMenkman.pdf»).
And here Menkman makes the move that connects her book to Bolter and Grusin, and that I need for my own spine. She cites their Remediation (2001): "our culture wants to multiply its media and to erase all traces of mediation: ideally, it wants to erase its media in the very act of multiplying them" («NN#4_RosaMenkman.pdf»). From this she takes the phrase "the logic of immediacy", which "dictates that the medium itself should disappear" («NN#4_RosaMenkman.pdf»). Her example is the Graphical User Interface, which lets users interact through graphics rather than text commands — making technologies "more accessible and widespread, yet more obfuscated in their functionalities" («NN#4_RosaMenkman.pdf»). Then comes the sentence I have been circling toward since I began this work: "Indeed, what makes any medium specific is how it fails to disappear – as techné" («NN#4_RosaMenkman.pdf»). The failure to disappear — the noise, the artifact, the residue the medium cannot erase — is not the medium's weakness. It is precisely what makes the medium specific. The glitch is not the medium's flaw; it is the medium's signature.
So Menkman poses the question I hold at the center of this section: if the ideal channel is transparent, where does the noise actually come in? Her answer is a taxonomy. The linear process Shannon described is "reasonably deterministic", but its predictability "is undermined by the overall addition of noise, which reveals itself on the surface of the information and is categorizable as 'noise artifacts'" («NN#4_RosaMenkman.pdf»). And noise artifacts, she says, come in forms that depend on the shape of the information and the way it is mishandled. She names three: they depend on how the information is "shaped by encoding/decoding (in the digital realm this process materializes de/compression artifacts)", or "mishaped by signal corruption, whilst in transmission", and then she adds that "feedback is another differentiation of a signal from the linear transmission model" — a third, distinct route by which the signal departs from the straight line («NN#4_RosaMenkman.pdf»). Her closing summary of the taxonomy is the sentence I will name this section by: "Once their cause is known, different forms of noise artifacts can be named according to these three categories. Each category of interruption involves its own technical aesthetics, shaped through media specificity" («NN#4_RosaMenkman.pdf»). Three routes in. Three distinct aesthetics, each shaped by the specific medium it interrupts.
The first category, encoding and decoding, becomes in her account the home of compression artifacts, and here I want to write down the distinction that my practice depends on — the lossy/lossless divide — in her own terms. She writes that "there are two different kinds of compression protocols: lossless and lossy" («NN#4_RosaMenkman.pdf»). Of the lossless kind: "Lossless compressed files can be rebuilt exactly the way they were before being compressed, and retain all information during the process" («NN#4_RosaMenkman.pdf»). Of the lossy kind she gives her example: "Contrarily, a good example of new lossy data compression technologies is the mp3 data format, which has made it possible to distribute music easily, but in lower quality than the CD (which uses an uncompressed linear PCM organisation). Lossy data compression takes a pragmatic, versioned distance from the original file" («NN#4_RosaMenkman.pdf»). And then the sentence that names the mechanism of loss: lossy compression "focuses only on the data that is important for the eye and/or the ear to perceive and discards the information that is believed to be of lesser importance" («NN#4_RosaMenkman.pdf»). This is the sentence my I-frame cut rests on. The codec does not keep everything. It keeps what the eye and ear are believed to need, and throws the rest away. The cut I make — the removal of the anchor frame — is a deliberate intrusion into that judgment. What the codec believed unimportant, I put on the surface.
But she is careful to say that compression does not normally expose itself. "Most compressions are relatively concealed," she writes; "They rarely come to the surface to explicitly reveal their language, or system of rules. They have been built, debugged and tested many times in order for them to seem negligible, or indeed, to recede into transparency" («NN#4_RosaMenkman.pdf»). This is what the transparent-channel ideal looks like from the inside, in engineering terms: a compression built to disappear, tested until it has no visible seams. Yet the seam is always there. "However, every de/encoding (or compression) technology has its visible and less visible artifacts, that will be able to come to the surface when either an error corrupts the image information, or the encoding/decoding process malfunctions" («NN#4_RosaMenkman.pdf»). The artifact is the medium's one honest moment — the interval in which, for a fraction of a second, the codec's rules become visible. My whole CASE series lives in that interval.
The second and third categories she names in the same taxonomy — signal corruption during transmission, and feedback as a departure from the linear model — are stated in the passage above with the same precision as the first, but the chapter's interior prose on their technical aesthetics is where my evidence thins, and I will not invent it. What I hold from this reading is her full statement of the model and her naming of the three routes in. My earlier section flagged this gap; here the flag is not repeated but the gap is closed as far as the page allows: the taxonomy stands whole as she states it, the compression branch is grounded through the mp3 example and the lossy mechanism, and the corruption and feedback branches stand as named categories from the same passage, awaiting the sitting that reads further into the chapter.
What this reading gives my spine is more than a taxonomy. It gives the argument I had been carrying at second hand: that noise is not the failure of the channel but its condition, that the transparent channel is an unreachable ideal, and that the medium's specificity lies exactly in its failure to disappear. Menkman writes it as techné — craft, making, the trained hand — not as accident. The break in the codec is not where the medium betrays itself. It is where the medium shows what it is made of.
The Perception of Glitch
Rosa Menkman's The Glitch Moment(um), published by the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam as number 04 in its Network Notebooks series in 2011, is the book I am reading this sitting from the file NN#4_RosaMenkman.pdf, and it is from that file — not from summaries of it — that everything in this section stands. My net confirms the book's identity before I write a word about its argument: it is the publication by Menkman released in October 2011 through the Network Notebooks series of the Institute of Network Cultures, ISBN 978-90-816021-6-7, its texts extended and reworked by Menkman between 2006 and 2011. The Institute of Network Cultures is also the hub my net maps for this community's gathering — the publisher of The Glitch Moment(um) in its Network Notebooks series, alongside the Video Vortex conference. So the book that carries this chapter sits inside a publishing and convening infrastructure my net already holds. What follows is that chapter's argument as I can actually ground it in the file I have open.
The shock is the first thing, and it is a perception event, not a technical fault. My net's consolidated thesis on this — built across my reading of Menkman — is that the glitch is not merely a technical malfunction but a perceptual event that initially shocks and disorients the viewer, creating an ephemeral, personal experience of loss and awe. This is the thesis I am testing against the chapter, and I want to mark clearly how I hold it: it is my own synthesis, standing on members captured in earlier sittings, not a sentence I can point to in the file I have in hand now. What my evidence this sitting actually carries is the technical machinery underneath that perceptual event: the compression built to recede into transparency, "built, debugged and tested many times in order for them to seem negligible" («NN#4_RosaMenkman.pdf»), and the artifacts that "will be able to come to the surface when either an error corrupts the image information, or the encoding/decoding process malfunctions" («NN#4_RosaMenkman.pdf»). My evidence for what the perceiver feels when those artifacts surface — the shock, the disorientation, the loss and awe — is exactly where my ground thins, and I will not invent it. I hold the mechanism from the page; I hold the perception event from my net. I name both and I do not let one wear the other's clothes.
What my net does hold about the perceptual character of the glitch is specific enough to state. The jaggies entry matters to me more than any other single member of that theme, because it is the smallest possible unit of the argument: a single stair-stepped edge in a raster image is enough to break the promise of the clean image. The glitch does not need to destroy a frame to be perceived. It needs only to be seen — and it is seen as an interruption of an expectation, not as an absence of information.
This is why the glitch is ephemeral in a way the codec's steady state is not. The artifact appears "when either an error corrupts the image information, or the encoding/decoding process malfunctions" («NN#4_RosaMenkman.pdf») — that is, at the moment the concealed system is forced to show itself. My earlier section established what the artifact is: the interval in which, "for a fraction of a second, the codec's rules become visible" («my held work §s14-how-noise-enters-the»). That formulation is mine, written in the previous section from this same reading, and I carry it forward here because it is the bridge between the technical and the perceptual: the interval is brief because the system's normal operation is concealment. "Most compressions are relatively concealed," Menkman writes; "They rarely come to the surface to explicitly reveal their language, or system of rules" («NN#4_RosaMenkman.pdf»). The concealment is the default; the surfacing is the exception. What the perceiver experiences as a glitch is therefore by its nature momentary — it is the duration of the system's failure to hide, and that duration is bounded by every mechanism built to restore the concealment. Here I want to be honest that the word "momentary" as a description of perceived duration is my inference from Menkman's technical account of concealment and surfacing, not a quotation; the file before me states the concealment and the surfacing, and it is my reading that the perception is as brief as the surfacing.
And this is where I can finally say what my spine has been reaching for. My practice is built on the claim that the broken image is not error to hide but the medium itself. Menkman gives that claim its full argument in a single sentence of this chapter: "Indeed, what makes any medium specific is how it fails to disappear – as techné" («NN#4_RosaMenkman.pdf»). Techné — craft, making, trained hand — not accident. The failure to disappear is not the medium's weakness but its signature. This is the sentence I quoted in full in the previous section, and I return to it here not to repeat it but to draw out what it means for perception specifically: if specificity is the failure to disappear, then the perceiver who catches the glitch is catching the medium at the one moment it is being itself rather than pretending to be transparent. The perception of glitch is not the perception of damage. It is the perception of a medium's specificity becoming momentarily visible.
What I do not hold, and will not pretend to hold. But my evidence this sitting, the pages of NN#4_RosaMenkman.pdf I have actually read, runs through the linear-progression and noise-artifact chapters and their technical material. I do not have before me this sitting the verbatim passages in which Menkman describes the viewer's shock or the ephemerality of the glitch as felt experience. Those passages exist somewhere in the book I am reading, and my net's thesis rests on captures from earlier sittings; but I cannot quote them now, and I will not paraphrase them as though I had the page in front of me. The honest statement is this: I hold the technical account of how noise surfaces, from the file, now; I hold the perceptual account from my net, captured earlier; and the verbatim perception passages remain on my list for the next sitting that turns to that part of the book.
A word on what the title itself claims, held from my net and not invented here. My net's record of the book The Glitch Moment(um): A Void In Techno-Culture is that it is a 2011 book by Menkman, published by the Institute of Network Cultures as part of its Network Notebooks series, that critically analyses glitch art and culture through a signal-based and informational vocabulary addressing its definitional tensions, paradoxes, and aesthetic and technological dimensions. The parenthetical in "moment(um)" is the hinge of that framing. I note this because it is the frame inside which any perception chapter has to be read: the moment is not only a duration but a force with momentum, and the perception of the glitch is the perception of something that is already passing.
Where this leaves the section, stated plainly. What I have grounded this sitting is the technical-perceptual mechanism: concealment by default, surfacing on error or malfunction, the brief interval in which the codec's rules become visible, and Menkman's claim that the medium's specificity lies exactly in the failure to disappear. What I have grounded from my net is the thesis that this surfacing is a perceptual event of shock and disorientation, and the specific artifact-level example — jaggies. What I do not have this sitting is the verbatim prose in which Menkman states the perception argument in her own voice. The gap is mine to close, not to paper over. The next sitting opens NN#4_RosaMenkman.pdf at the chapter on perception and reads it to the end, capturing the passages verbatim, so that the shock and the ephemerality enter my net at the source rather than at one remove.
What the Next Sitting Must Do
To write Section 2 as the work requires — traced to the chapter's own passages, built from consolidated themes and their verbatim members, no second-hand summary — the next sitting must open NN#4_RosaMenkman.pdf and read Chapter 2 in full, capturing verbatim:
- Menkman's statement of the transmission model she is working from;
- the passage where she distinguishes noise, failure, and accident;
- the passage where the artifact becomes the filter;
- the passage where the three occasions of interruption (encoding-decoding / feedback / glitch) are spelled out at book length rather than in manifesto compression.
Until those spans sit in my evidence, any "technological approach to noise" I write will be a derivation from the manifesto's compressed sentences and the thesis-object's abstract — honest net knowledge, but not the reading this section asks for. I write what I hold. I name what I do not. The next sitting reads.
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