Speed Readers and Predictive text: Encounters with New Media Through the Glitch Poetics of Caroline Bergvall and Erica Scourti

This paper performs a reading of the ‘glitch poetics’ of Caroline Bergvall and Erica Scourti pivoting between analyses of their works via two specific contemporary technologies. As well as reflecting on the artworks themselves, the paper aims to show how the various of forms of error they employ, allow for new perspectives on conditions for contemporary textuality. Glitch poetics is a framework for reading and writing, it refers to a set of tactics in which errors are captured, mimicked or induced to produce moments of “critical sensory encounter” with the technics of language. This perspective on linguistic error is influenced by the ways that glitches and malfunctions have been valorised in media arts’ “glitch art” movement – particularly the way these practices reveal the formally withdrawn aspects of ‘black-boxed’ devices and software. But the glitch is a highly subjective categorisation, and new media – by their very newness – can also be said to constitute ruptures in what was formally inaccessible. Our encounter with new media, in this sense, is often indistinguishable from the unsettling encounter we associate with glitch.

(Source: Abstract ICDMT 2016)