GLITCHED

GLITCHED GLITCHED GLITCHED

Since the early ‘90s, cyberfeminist artists and activists have been concerned with the ways that gender and technology interact, how identity construction was complicated by the birth and rise of the Internet. However, as the Internet expanded, new issues surrounding cyber culture came to the surface, such as the limitations to visually represent race online, identity tourism, and algorithmic discrimintation. In the new millennium, cyberfeminism as it was no longer served Black, brown, and queer individuals left at the margins of technology.

Enter Glitch Feminism. In her 2020 book Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, artist and curator Legacy Russell describes this socio-techno concept as a creative and political exploration of how the Internet can expand—or ‘glitch’—the construct of the binary body. At the crossroads of social deviance theories and disability studies’ rejection of mind/body dualism, Glitch is a uniquely Black, queer, and feminist tool for understanding the ways historically ‘othered’ bodies disrupt and transform norms on and offline.1 In a social system corrupted by racial, sexual, and economic oppression, the ‘glitched’ body—one that is cosmic rather than corporeal, one that hacks the code of gender—is not an error at all, but instead a much needed departure.

Glitch Feminism most notably argues against “digital dualism,” or the idea that life online can be considered separate or less authentic from life offline, and instead, celebrates the very real possibilities that digital spaces create for marginalized individuals. Through the material of the Internet, Russell was able to stretch the limits of her Blackness, queerness, and femmeness in ways that were not possible AFK—or “away from keyboard.”1 Embodying the logic of error means viewing malfunction as an invitation for new possibilities, and doing so makes it possible to experience the multiplicity of self, to reclaim what has previously been defined as faulty by dominant society.

Several artists online and AFK have explored the ways their own glitched bodies inhabit and challenge their spaces. Drag artist Victoria Sin utilizes performance, film, and speculative fiction to deconstruct the limits of the body. In their stylized and exaggerated presentation of self, Sin becomes their avatar through, what Russell describes as, the “gloss of digital drag,” celebrating the dilemma of their queer body as “necessarily visible, fantastically femme, larger than life, and

impossible to ignore.”1 Sin’s seductive performance art is a work of science fiction fantasy, and through it, they hope to “combat and abolish the biological essentialism that plagues our understandings of gender, nature, pornography and desire.”2

Another artist creating new relationships between the body and the machine is Sondra Perry. In her work, Perry employs digital material to challenge gender, race, and their entangled presences in digital spaces and tech construction. Her 2016 installation piece Graft and Ash for a Three-Monitor Workstation combines these concerns with her own anxieties around the racialized and gendered violence enabled through CCTV surveillance and other computer vision technologies.3 Graft and Ash… situates its audience in front of Perry’s own digital avatar displayed across three screens. In creating her avatar, Perry noted the software’s inability to adjust several aspects of the simulated face, including increasing the amount of fat present, changing the shape of its teeth, and personalizing other small details that would be necessary for anyone to make it a fully realized image of the self. This project then addresses what it means to be visible—how one is read, ignored, and categorized and what consequences visibility may present.

The Internet is not the post-gender, post-racial, “colorblind” utopia that many people hoped it would be at its conception. While embracing the potential that digital technology presents for marginalized individuals, Glitch Feminism emphasizes the presence of racism and sexism in the language and architecture of technology and the dangerous side of being seen. Biases that are coded into technologies have real implications on the lives of non-white and queer individuals who are misidentifed and targeted by computer vision systems and predictive algorithms. Whether they are unrecognizable by facial recognition technologies4 or racially profiled by surveillance systems or criminal recidivism models,5 these discriminatory behaviors of technology do not occur in a vacuum; they are linked to a larger history of surveillance, anti-Blackness, and the othering of nonnormative bodies. The violence we are currently witnessing on and offline against Black, trans, and Asian bodies connects to this same notion of who does and does not fit and who is and is not defined as human. Oppressive systems operating AFK reinforce oppressive behaviors online, and vice versa. This makes it all the more important

for creators like Russell, Sin, and Perry to be involved in the use, critical analysis, and transformation of digital technologies, for their glitched bodies to be truly seen and not misseen.

We have always been a part of social systems, witnessing the give and take, the exchange of power between us and the norms that attempt to control us. When we accept the machine as an extension of the body, the digital sphere as a space for conceptualizing the multiplicity and fluidity of self, we take the steps toward true liberation—one unencumbered by a fear of fault and empowered by error.

WRITER

LAUREN CHAMPLIN

GRAPHIC DESIGNER

HELEN LEE

1 Russell, Legacy. Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto. London: Verso, 2020. 2 Olufemi, Lola. “Victoria Sin: ‘I’m Trying to Break down the Binary of Thinking and Feeling.’” Sleek Magazine, March 11, 2020. https:// www.sleek-mag.com/article/victoria-sin-multimedia-performace-art-gender/. 3 Parker, Rianna Jade. “How Sondra Perry Turned Tech Glitches Into Art About a Broken World at the Serpentine.” Artnet News, May 18, 2018. https://news.artnet.com/exhibitions/sondra-perry-at-serpentine-1288877. 4Buolamwini, Joy. “Artificial Intelligence Has a Racial and Gender Bias Problem.” Time. Time, February 7, 2019. https://time.com/5520558/ artificial-intelligence-racial-gender-bias/. 5O’Neil, Cathy. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. Great Britain: Penguin Books, 2017.

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