In the vein of my ongoing interest in social media and the digital humanities, I decided to use the glitch tool to transform the following photo of myself that I have now made my profile picture into this:

What I love about glitch today is that it has such an amorphous ability to make social commentary while simultaneously creating social clout. I think an image like this one of myself has much the same practical effect as instagram, in that young people online are constantly drawn to novel representations of themselves. Within minutes of posting this, I got a comment that said, "this looks like the cover of a teen novel series." Like the show "Selfie" or the movie, LOL, digital materiality through glitch seems to signify something that is particularly salient about the current pop cultural moment. But beyond the narcissism, what I like about the glitched self is the many other valences it has as a work of art. For instance, this photo could signify the deformation of the self through self-presentation on social media; the doubly quantified self through a) the pixelation and b) the "likes" that effectively value the photo's representation of me via Facebook; the meaning of presence particularly when it comes to tourism (thinking about that ghostly flattening effect of the glitch); and the more material techno color aesthetics of the digital age.

This kind of use for glitch actually reminds me of a really powerful image I once saw in a museum exhibition on "The Life and Death of Buildings." It was a giant blown up image of a photo taken during 9/11. I've attempted to recreate my own version here:

The use of glitch in this instance relies on the unintelligibility of the photo to lend a new layer of meaning a well-known photo. The original piece, titled jpeg co0s, 2004, uses pixelation incurred by jpeg compression to signify a particular time period. The artist tells a story about the the way in which news about tragedy gets disseminated across the country through the digital sphere, while also relying on distortion to highlight a visual match between falling people and falling debris—enhancing the emotional poignancy of the image. If Benjamin speaks of photographs liberating an "optical unconscious," I think one of the most powerful aspects of glitch is its ability to illuminate a historical unconscious. Photographs rendered on a monumental scale or broken through an app convert material signifiers like pixels into the true subject of these images. And, far from removing the human experience, the very absence of narrative encourages each individual viewer to insert their own stories and meanings into to the image.