Avant-Garde Glitch: Red Noise, Purple Haze, Black Box

Chapter 2 complements chapter 1 with an archaeology of glitch and noise in the twentieth-century avant-gardes, from the Futurist Art of Noises through junk art and distortion-based net art in the 1990s. Drawing on pre-existent theories, texts, and archival sources, the chapter illustrates how the advent of technical reproducibility in sound and image led to an aesthetic shift towards non-unified forms of abstraction, disorientation, and noise. In reference to Walter Benjamin’s 1917 analysis of “the mark,” Judith Butler recently referred to the aesthetic concept of the “unalloyed.” In distinction to the relatively closed hermeneutic of the symbol, the unalloyed invokes a state of incompossibility in bringing two distinct pictorial elements together.