SESSION: 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 also 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.

Session Convenors:

Sophie Lynch, University of Chicago

Session Speakers:

Jennifer Marine, University of Virginia / Menil Drawing Institute

Failed “X-periments”: James Wimshurst and the Properties of X-rays

In 1901, scientist James Wimshurst submitted his paper “Experiments on some of the Properties of the Rays emitted by the Rontgen X Ray Tube” for consideration to the Royal Society, a premier scientific society of London. Looking to understand the nature of shadows in X-rays, these experiments took the form of a series of photoprints fromradiographs that featured blurred text with reversed letters, black and grey boxes, and abstruse descriptions. In May of the same year, Wimshurst’s colleague updated him: hispaper had been rejected. The Royal Society recommended that the paper be withdrawn as the experiments failed to justify the conclusions. Now forgotten in histories of photography and radiography, Wimshurst’s “failed” experiments emphasize the contested nature of visible and non-visible light at the turn of the century and the quest to understand it.

In this paper, I describe the processes Wimshurst used to conduct these experiments, focusing on how the image itself is the experiment. Rather than just a record of scientific activity, these works function in different temporal registers as records, representations, and agents of experimentation. I argue that the “failure” of Wimshurst’s paper is a misunderstanding of the inherent multitemporal and dimensional operations. Attending to the shadowy, blurry, smoky, and shallow aesthetics foregrounded by these objects unsettles narratives of photography’s accuracy, clarity, and objectivity as a medium. They collapse distinctions between image/text, artefact/experiment, and clarity/opacity, thereby unlocking new narratives of X-rays and the history of light from a missed, overlooked, and “failed” project.

Brittany Rosemary Jones, University of St Andrews

Surrealist Automatism and the Politics of Error in Penelope Rosemont’s Alchemigrams (1967–1969)

From Man Ray to Raoul Ubac, many Surrealists photographers valued accidents in the darkroom as generative sites of creative experimentation. Through their total evasion of conscious control, mistakes and defects in the film development process were viewed not as setbacks but as strategies to unlock the latent potential of the photographic medium. This paper considers one example of the significant role that technical faults played in Surrealist visual production: a series of camera-less photographs produced by the American activist and artist Penelope Rosemont in the late 1960s. As a co-founder of the Chicago Surrealist Group (1966–), Rosemont turned to her surroundings to explore the possibilities of Surrealist automatism and chance in a challenge to the rationalised, alienated modes of modern life. While working in the darkroom of the revolutionary organisation Students for a Democratic Society, Rosemont and her peers’ lack of experience and temperature control led to reams of wasted negatives. She began salvaging these degraded, discarded sheets of documentary film originally intended foranti-Vietnam War underground pamphlets and transformed these instances of failure into abstract photograms which she would later call ‘Alchemigrams’. I argue that these works enacted an absolute negation of the representational image which might be understood in relation to the fraught category of the ‘documentary’. Considering this body of work in light of her anti-war activities, I suggest that darkroom errors provided Rosemont with a means of short-circuiting the indexicality of photography and refusing the visual codes of violence that dominated 1960s activist aesthetics.

Arushi Vats, University of Cambridge

Glitch as Opacity, Illegibility, and Refusal: Navjot Altaf’s Lacuna in Testimony (2003)

My paper queries the artistic mediations of images and sound relating to the mass killings of Muslim persons in 2002 in Gujarat, India, through attunement to “glitchy” emergences within survivor testimonies. The Gujarat pogrom generated a live stream of atrocity images on television channels, contributing to the normalisation of the figure of the brutalised Muslim body. I aim to explore artistic strategies that attempt to craft possibilities of opacity, illegibility, and refusal of such necropolitical visuality by analysing Navjot Altaf’s three-channel video installation Lacuna in Testimony (2003). The installation keys into the background sounds of recorded testimonies and presents the audio track with a multi-screen projection, producing disorientation through techniques of fragmentation, splitting and/or doubling, and blur. Lacuna in Testimony (2003) uses artistic strategies of “counterforensic listening” or attention to “inaudibilities to confront the depleted and uncertain material conditions of testimony and the imperfect sensing of the witness in contexts of mass violence. “Counterforensic” tactics of listening magnify our attention to clicks, static, errata, glitches, scratches, stops, the traces of media and mediated surroundings—listening to that which is rendered inaudible in regimes of meaning such as law and sociality (Pooja Rangan, 2020). The work further uses the fracturing of vision and sound to resist readability or the comfort of coherence in the context of a pogrom. I will discuss these artistic strategies as producing a complex countervisuality that unsettles visual regimes of
erasure and subjection, drawing from scholarship by Glissant (1997), Russell (2020), Rangan (2020), and Demos (2023).

Nickolas Lambrianou

Generation and Degeneration: Ed Atkins and Impoverishment as Process

Ed Atkins is a British multimedia artist and writer best known for his CGI videos featuring appropriated avatars and constructed worlds. His work exploits the disjunctions between digital representation and messy human experience. Glitches, errors, slapstick violence and jarring discontinuities recur, the result of a process which Atkin’s described as ‘de-editing’.

Atkins approach builds upon Leo Bersani’s notion of impoverishment, or strategies of wilful aesthetic failure (of language, narrative or representation itself) which for Bersani are ‘acts of resistance. They refuse to serve the complacency of a culture that expects art

to reinforce its moral and epistemological authority.’In this paper I will consider two of Atkins’ works which were installed next to each other at his recent Tate retrospective. In The Worm (2021) a real dialogue with his mother isrelayed via an avatar linked to Atkins’ body with motion sensors. Voilà La Vérité (2022) is a digitally manipulated short clip from a 1926 film, pulled. I want to argue that Atkins is evoking modes of the generational – intergenerational anxiety (‘the feeling of wanting to speak but not knowing what to say’), and the degeneration of media, or what we might call anxieties of technological regeneration (‘sacrilegious, this forensic, compensatory, fake restoration’). In each case it is the failures of technology which reveal the fundamental impoverishment of representation and memory itself.