Errors, Glitches, Blurs: The Art of Failure
Across the histories of photography, film, and media art, moments of failure—whether mechanical, optical, chemical, or digital—have played a generative role in shaping aesthetic experimentation and critical inquiry. Blurred exposures, light leaks, scratched film stock, corrupted files, or distorted video signals often reveal the unruly materialities and contingent operations of visual technologies. Rather than dismissing these moments as technical mistakes, this panel explores how failure becomes a site of creative agency and theoretical provocation.
Foregrounding practices that embrace accident, misalignment, and breakdown, this panel asks how artists and media-makers have historically responded to—or deliberately invited—moments of technological disruption. What happens when photographic or cinematic images falter in their claims to clarity, fidelity, or indexical truth? How do glitches and misfires expose the limits of control and the latent aesthetics embedded in machine processes? And how might attending to visual “failures” reframe dominant narratives of progress, innovation, or authorship in the histories of art and media? Rather than treating error as an aberration to be overcome, this panel considers how failures and glitches can serve as generative forces that unsettle fixed meanings, challenge dominant visual paradigms, or invite new modes of engagement with technologically produced images and media.
Drawing on art historical approaches alongside media theory and the history of technology, the panel invites contributions that consider failure not only as an aesthetic strategy but as a methodological lens. In doing so, it seeks to examine how artists working with photography, film, video, and digital technologies have mobilized error—whether analog or digital—to question visual norms, resist technical mastery, and highlight the entangled relationship between human intention and technological operation.
Submit your Paper via this form. Please download, complete and send it directly to the Session Convenor(s) below by Sunday 2 November 2025:
Sophie Lynch, University of Chicago, sophielynch@uchicago.edu