digital_grain — gggglitch?

Intro_2_Glitch as “Digital Grain”

“In laptop music the point-of-origin was the circuitry and code working in tandem to generate musical sound. With traditional instruments the point-of-origin was bone, flesh, breath, and physical vibration working in tandem. Roland Barthes (1978) called this ephemeral quality the ‘grain’...The ‘grain’ needs to be brought back into art and the creative process. I’ll go further and say the spiritual needs to be brought back into art...By spiritual I mean metaphysical, or perceiving and engaging with the material world through developing suprasensory organs of perception.” –Kim Cascone

In 1972, Roland Barthes proposed the “grain of the voice” as a way of conceptualizing a unique quality of vocal performance. More specifically, he presents the “grain” as, “the cantor's body, brought to your ears in one and the same movement from deep down in the cavities, the muscles, the membranes, the cartilages…as though a single skin lined the inner flesh of the performer and the music he sings.” While Barthes’ scholarship focuses almost solely on grain in terms of the vocal body, he indicates that grain can be extended to instrumental music as well. In this sense, “the grain of the voice” remains applicable to electronic music in terms of synthetic instrumentation and creation through digital audio workstations, coding, live manipulation in DJ performance, or other electronic production techniques.

I argue that the “glitch” signifies a similar emphasis to the materiality of the digital platform. If “the ‘grain’ is the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs,” then glitch is the digital system as it functions, whether with the intent to make sound or as a byproduct of computerized functions. In other words, glitch in electronic music can be understood as the “digital grain,” or the sounding of the digital form.

“glitches [are] indicative of the materially of the digital technology—elements that are rapidly discarded as extraneous; thus glitch elements are “background”—as the elided part of the encounter and interpretation.”

“Similar to those who spend time with recorded media, the practitioner of the digital environment is soon forced to deal with the failure of the medium…the material support for these technologies is foregrounded and exposed, and as such the dream of transparency is deemed undesirable. The weaknesses of these structures are exposed as the technologies are pushed and pulled into creating unintended sounds.”

In this sense, “digital grain” bears a resemblance to Paul DeMarinis’s “shadow of technology,” which refers to the “scratching and rumbling of the machine itself, inextricably registered along with the sound it was supposed to faithfully preserve.” While both terms function to bring the sonic markers of technology to the fore, I hope that conceptualizing glitch as “digital grain” particularly emphasizes the markings of various soundings of digital materiality in electronic music.

“you can’t ignore the medium. You can’t ignore that you are listening to a recording. There is a confusion between what is intentionally recorded and what is damage to the surface of the disc. There’s a push-and-pull between reality and the illusion. You have to stay alert.”

Barthes’ conception of the vocal “grain” is inextricably linked to language, which has led various scholars to criticize the extension of its concept to purely material emphasis. However, just as “the ‘grain’ is that: the materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue,” “digital grain” is similarly founded in the language of computation, binary code. In this sense, “digital grain” reveals the materiality of digital systems beyond the simple configuration of binary code. To hear the “digital grain” is to listen to the animation of digital material beyond its expected process of communication, the friction between binary transcription and translation, significance beyond code.

“Continuity with the material world has been systematically obscured by the fantasy that digital production is fundamentally and categorically different from the historical physical production of industrial capitalism. The shift from human to digital labor is the historical result of industrial capitalism’s attempts to replace the variable costs of labor with the fixed costs of machinery.”

The implications of understanding glitch as “digital grain” are numerous, however, the most significant contribution of the “digital grain” comes in highlighting the materiality of the digital space. Commonly, the digital is conceptualized as the opposite of material, the term “virtual” even denoting its antonym. When digital platforms are considered immaterial, their organizing structures are obscured from legibility, and therefore access, by users.

“Techno-mystification has always been a part of electronic music… But in all cases, the underlying electronic circuits, algorithms/computer code remains hidden from the audience. This separation of the effect (sound) from their underlying causes (computational math) causes mystification.”

This obscurity is characteristic of capitalism, which encourages object fetishism, rendering the origin of particular commodities invisible to consumers. Ultimately, techno-obscurity keeps users from understanding the ills of technological systems, whether that be unethical production processes, surveillance features, or other systems of oppression. The “digital grain” is to understand glitch as a rupture of techno-obscurity, returning materiality to digital technologies, and furthermore, empowering users with material agency.

“The transition to digital capitalism is a dissolution of concerns with physicality and a denial of material basis. The glitch can act as a stoppage of this autonomous production, a transitory failure whose critical potential depends on violating this aura of the digital. Glitch, in this interruptive role, suggests the materiality of media, offering the potential for a transition into a critique of digital capitalism, requiring a refusal of mystification.”

“These techniques strip the products of recording of their alienating qualities, bringing the labor and the product of labor back together and clearly challenging the simple one-way production-consumption model.”

The return of materiality to the digital sphere is particularly important as it combats the willful obscurity of oppressive forces that technology works to enforce. In particular, the return to materiality benefits those oppressed by those wielding technological power made invisible. While in various ways the prevalence of various technologies have negatively affected nearly every member of the population, individuals and communities that have been traditionally marginalized in society have the most to gain from an acknowledgement of glitch as “digital grain.”

“In creating music from the sounds of the dysfunctions of that technology, they focus our attention on the fallibility of the systems that we have constructed and in which we believe, breaking their transcendent possibilities and ensuring the creation instead of a direct affective aesthetic.”

“An institution is like a glass room. You may not realize the walls are there until you crash into them.”

“...the computer is the prized toy of our essentially male culture. To use technologies which are really intended for a clean slick commercial boy’s world, to make personal, bodily, feminine work, and to reinscribe this work into mainstream culture, into art discourse and into society, is a political act.” –Linda Dement