What is the glitch?
What is The Glitch?
Welcome to Season of the Glitch. I’m your host Kelley, and I’m glad that you’re here, and hoping the simulation has been treating you well today. Season of the Glitch is a culture and cinema podcast that seeks to lift some of the most interesting creative artifacts out of our swirling hyperreality so that we can process them together, and maybe understand our culture and society better. Or, at least have a distraction as we hurtle toward climate collapse, our cubicle on Mars, or the singularity, wherever we arrive first.
The Glitch is a pandemic baby. I created it during mid 2020, peak lockdown, when we agreed to focus our collective fears on Carole Baskins xxx, xxx, before the less telegenic concerns of our present like nuclear engagement with Russia, xxx, or martian serfdom in a Muskian technocracy. Such a perversely innocent time. This was when we thought our monstrous, mythic, and now figurehead, yet immortal, Queen Pandemic would only last a few weeks, but in low information mode, people were sterilizing our groceries, banging on pots and pans each night, and the luckier among us were spending stimulus checks on tarot decks and weighted blankets while dissociating from the precarious supply chain and spreading fissures in the social contract. Until the summertime, when average people seemed capable of at least imagining abolishing policing or electing a democratic socialist, at least for an inspiring moment, before resigning to the status quo.
3At the time, I didn’t think I was having too much trouble, but in hindsight, I had gelato for brains as I grappled with our new, or just newly exposed, geopolitical and geo-biological reality, and the demented hyper-discourse and conspiratorial mass fantasies that followed. And the pervasively corrupt election that followed that, when people, raw and invigorated by a new uncertainty ordered humanity and systematic change during the primary, only to have it sent back to the kitchen. Instead we were served a reheated plate of embalmed gerontocracy. Our new administration was sold as a promise of coherence after chaos. But Biden’s attempts to embody his purported role as the nation’s level headed soother were delivered in a patchwork of less than coherent anecdotes wistful of a slice of 20th century life that only a few had tasted in the first place. And I began to find it so hard to watch politics without an uncanny detachment. The only way to make watching Biden tolerable, as I watched him green-screened in from his covid-proof bunker basement, was to imagine him as a character in the Black Lodge, an undead, mystical figure, who may be borrowing a shape, speaking in a whimsical folk-cryptoid dialect for Agent Cooper to decypher. Look, it’s all over, so we may as well watch the state of the union address from the arthouse cinema while on mushrooms. It’s an odd trick for the world to burn and at the same time stink of rot and negligence, and as meaning slipped, the Glitch felt inconsequential and rife for overthinking, and I didn’t know exactly what it was, or what I wanted it to become, or why anyone should listen to me, so it became a parcel of disappointment to carry around, another project that failed to properly hatch. An albatross of procrastination. An unhatched albatross depression-chilling in her egg, doomscrolling, unshowered, and still waiting for that zoom therapy session she booked three months out.
4But then, the pandemic stretched on and on, and all the while the incubator light still glowed in the corner of the room, and the albatross egg sighed from its repose. I, along with other spoiled people who aren’t actually responsible for physically building things or feeding people, abused my brain with extremely online behaviors, until I shared the same new neural pathways as my peers, and felt fully, and sorrowfully, integrated into our new floating world. As we sat at home, we watched a lot of media. We built our conversations around a lot of fictional narratives and cultural larks. We filtered a collective trauma, and it probably was trauma, through the tv in some ways, and I’m still interested in that. Now I’ve accepted that I am a self-imprisoned degenerate who doesn’t know what’s real, but I want to kite some ideas out of this prison, or just embrace the nihilism I’m feeling as a new boldness, that nothing matters, at least art doesn’t, so why not dip my toe into the spectacle and indulge myself? And make some friends? Can we talk about art and creativity and not overly worry about its relevance, while acknowledging its possibly unprecedented relevance?
5So I’m going to try this again, and the project is wide open. I’m going to respond to the parts of culture that I’m attracted to or curious about as they emerge, and I hope you engage.
6So what is a Glitch? Without reaching for the dictionary, I’d say a Glitch is colloquially understood as an unintended interruption in a technical process that then corrects itself. It’s a temporary breakdown that reminds you you’re viewing or hearing something unnatural, technological, followed by an uncanny reassertion of self by the artificial reality. And things just carry on. And we suspend our belief.
7Actually, let's look at a dictionary. Ok. It says a glitch is a minor malfunction, unexpected defect, fault, flaw, or imperfection. A minor problem that causes a temporary setback. OK. In poststructural theory, if you’re into that, we are living in Baudrillard’s hyperreality, a heightened synthetic reality that we inhabit so long that we mistake it for physical reality, until our consciousness becomes incapable of distinguishing the two. Baudrillard started talking about hyperreality in his book Simulacra and Simulation in 1981. Society had a digital dimension then, but barely, and his prediction that the Information age would rob us of our distinction between nature and culture and that we would live our lives in a confused ether, reacting to contrived events in real ways and real events as an audience watching fiction. After his central role in Postmodern theory in the 80s, Baudrillard reemerged in academic conversation in the early 2000s, I actually remember this, when he talked about the 911 attacks as a real consequence of the hyperreal abstraction of capitalism and how wall street's theoretical financial products for the ruined peoples’ lives globally. Always ahead of his time, he was swiftly canceled before we even had the vernacular to discuss canceling people for mistakes of public relations or unpopular opinions. And so the information age grew up unfettered, shapeshifting from an emo kid ruthlessly ranking his top 9 on Myspace into a girlboss green juice influencer making instagram posts with paid partnership labels. Arguably, hyperreality reached completion during the pandemic of 2020. The extremely online behavior of the incels or e-girls who lived in the margins of the internet at the start of the decade saturated the majority population by the end. We normalized living in the ether. We normalized living in the ether. Now, ruptures in our digital life, when the physical realities of viruses or violence leak in, feel like the glitches. Glitches remind us that we are living in a hyperreality. They reveal our Truman Show. Then we seal them over with memes and TikTok trends and continue 0n.
8You could say that the social constructions we live in are a type of simulated reality, and arguably, once any two people are trying to unite their subjective perspectives in conversation, we automatically enter a hyperreality born of the need to reconcile our different realities. We survive by ignoring our dissonances to preserve our continuity with each other so we can solve our basic problems and take the next step. And we don’t even realize it. We agree to suspend our differences and settle on some kind of shared reality. We weave our own fabric of reality. And a Glitch is a wrinkle in this fabric that allows two points in space to touch that typically wouldn’t. A glitch is a break in continuity, yet a convergence. It’s a joint that lets us access the uncanny nature of all of our experiences. It’s an acknowledgement that we live in a construction, a floating world created by the information age and our migration from the industrial to the information age, a reality check that there isn’t a reality. So it can be a skip that throws us out of sync. At the same time, it can be an odd synchronicity. It can be when things line up too much, like a deja vu, or when you leave the store and turn on your car and the same song is still playing. Or, it can be when you play a record backwards and hear a satanic message. Meaning deepens or transforms when you experience the same thing from a different direction.
9There can be technology glitches, obviously, but also political glitches, economic glitches, glitches in our senses, glitches in our dreams. The pandemic is a glitch, a war is a glitch, at least in a very long term scheme, a trend or piece of propaganda that really takes off might even be a glitch. A masterpiece can be a glitch, if you believe in such a thing, a creation that stops people. The possibilities are endless. But when we talk about a glitch, something is not going as planned. Something has transcended what was planned.
10Who am I to host a podcast from within the existential condition of Glitch? I am no one. I am a professional artist and writer who has been thinking about these things for a long time. But I consider myself not so much a competent guide through all this glitchiness, but something more like a brand ambassador of the Glitch in a dystopian world full of distracted customers. I’m getting minimum wage to spray you with Glitch Essence without your permission from a kiosk inside a dying supermall with half the stores boarded shut in some overdeveloped suburban expanse with half the model homes boarded shut. I am like a temp worker in a mall with tumbleweeds stuck in my hair who aspires to be a court jester, offering diversions at my own expense, but just possibly absorbing some insight into the palace intrigue. Or at least, the breakroom workplace gossip. Honestly, I am more daunted by the prospect of entertaining than understanding, but I believe in the Glitch.
Ok, so content note: there arere content note. I’m going to include the content I want, and different content can make people feel different ways, so please take care of yourselves and consume the content that makes you feel good. And if that’s this, great. We’re going to talk about a lot of art, and artists take risks and explore challengnning things, and we are pro-art here, we are adults, and isn’t it nice to have the wide open in front of us, to not know what’s coming, to not be prescriptive, to be in discovery mode? That said, please give me feedback, create discourse, leave comments, tell me how you feel, you can do that on instagram at @seasonoftheglitch, twitter, @seasonofglith, or email at seasonoftheglitch@gmail.com. Let’s create a Glitch community. Let’s thrive in the wrinkle of reality.