Mediality is Noise, PhD Thesis

My PhD thesis examines the noisy aesthetics of ‘glitch art’, ‘glitch electronica’ music, and recent practices that revisit ‘obsolete’, old-media technologies such as the typewriter, record player, ‘Super 8’ cine-camera and cassette-recorder. Counter to their usual reading in terms of disruption and nostalgia respectively, ‘glitch’ and old-media approaches are understood here as twin manifestations of the same desire: chiefly, to engage with the materiality and processes involved in mediation. These practices emerge at a time when media are more complex, ubiquitous and powerful than ever before. Concepts such as materiality and processuality are thus problematised in the context of intangible digital information or computer networks, and the impenetrability of graphical user interfaces (GUI). There, the ontic character of ‘form’ and epistemic ‘content’ are kept apart by increasingly complex consumer electronics, in which the processes at work are hidden by in-accessible operating systems and sealed ‘no user serviceable parts’ design.