The Queer Identity and Glitch: Deconstructing Transparency

[…] Sterne aptly states, “the MP3 plays its listener” (Sterne 835).  Likewise, it can be said that gender, as a cultural method, plays the gendered individual.

pretty rad essay by Kevin Benisvy draws parallels between glitch + compression && identity + the performance of gender…

[…]Individuals are trained to believe that gender is itself physical and purely physical, to think that the expression of gender is naturally bound by certain biological criteria. Under this assumption, loss of the details of identity may go unnoticed. It is at the point where thoughts and expectations are translated into performance that the opportunity exists to interrupt the signal of gender coding complicity within our cultural imagination.

There is a strong analogy in this act to the phenomenon of signal disruption, or glitch, in digital media. In contemporary day-to-day life we are almost constantly exposed to media which has been edited and altered. One of the most common processes imposed on media is compression. When media is compressed, it is stripped of specific bits of data and reformatted to serve a specific purpose. In this way it is also transitory as the process takes bits of media and transitions them into other forms by using compression and formatting.

read the whole essay here.

../n!ck.bot 

Posted 1 year ago — 9 notes