Peter Krapp: Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture (2011)

Brings to light the critical role of noise and error in the creative potential of digital culture.

To err is human; to err in digital culture is design. In the glitches, inefficiencies, and errors that ergonomics and usability engineering strive to surmount, Peter Krapp identifies creative reservoirs of computer-mediated interaction. Throughout new media cultures, he traces a resistance to the heritage of motion studies, ergonomics, and efficiency, showing how creativity is stirred within the networks of digital culture.

Noise Channels offers a fresh look at hypertext and tactical media, tunes into laptop music, and situates the emergent forms of computer gaming and machinima in media history. Krapp analyzes text, image, sound, virtual spaces, and gestures in noisy channels of computer-mediated communication that seek to embrace—rather than overcome—the limitations and misfires of computing. Equally at home with online literature, the visual tactics of hacktivism, the recuperation of glitches in sound art, electronica, and videogames, or machinima as an emerging media practice, he explores distinctions between noise and information, and how games pivot on errors at the human–computer interface.

Grounding the digital humanities in the conditions of possibility of computing culture, Krapp puts forth his insight on the critical role of information in the creative process.

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2011
Volume 37 van Electronic Mediations
ISBN 0816676240, 9780816676248
216 pages

publisher
google books

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Mark Nunes (ed.): Error: Glitch, Noise, and Jam in New Media Cultures (2010)

Divided into three sections, Error brings together established critics and emerging voices to offer a significant contribution to the field of new media studies. In the first section, “Hack,” contributors explore the ways in which errors, glitches, and failure provide opportunities for critical and aesthetic intervention within new media practices. In the second section, “Game,” they examine how errors allow for intentional and accidental co-opting of rules and protocols toward unintended ends. The final section, “Jam,” considers the role of error as both an inherent “counterstrategy” and a mode of tactical resistance within a network society. By offering a timely and novel exploration into the ways in which error and noise “slip through” in systems dominated by principles of efficiency and control, this collection provides a unique take on the ways in which information theory and new media technologies inform cultural practice.

Publisher Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010
ISBN 144112120X, 9781441121202
288 pages

publisher
google books

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