Error: Glitch, Noise, and Jam in New Media Cultures

Divided into three sections, Error brings together established critics and emerging voices to offer a significant contribution to the field of new media studies. In the first section, "Hack," contributors explore the ways in which errors, glitches, and failure provide opportunities for critical and aesthetic intervention within new media practices. In the second section, "Game," they examine how errors allow for intentional and accidental co-opting of rules and protocols toward unintended ends. The final section, "Jam," considers the role of error as both an inherent "counterstrategy" and a mode of tactical resistance within a network society. By offering a timely and novel exploration into the ways in which error and noise "slip through" in systems dominated by principles of efficiency and control, this collection provides a unique take on the ways in which information theory and new media technologies inform cultural practice.

Table of Contents:
INTRODUCTION Error, Noise and Potential: The Outside of Purpose Mark Nunes, Southern Polytechnic State University HACK 1. Revealing Errors Benjamin Mako Hill, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2. Aesthetics of the Error: Media Art, the Machine, the Unforeseen and the Errant Tim Barker, University of New South Wales 3. Information, Noise, et al. Susan Ballard, Dunedin School of Art 4. Add-Art and Your Neighbors' Biz: A Tactical Manipulation of Noise xtine burrough, California State University, Fullerton 5. Stock Images, Filler Content, Semantic Ambiguity Christopher Grant Ward GAME 6. Gaming the Glitch: Room for Error Peter Krapp, University of California, Irvine 7. The Seven Million Dollar PowerPoint and Its Aftermath: What Happens When the House Intelligence Committee Sees "Terrorist Use of the Internet" in a Battlefield 2 Fan Film Elizabeth Losh, University of California, Irvine 8. Disrupting the Public Sphere: Mediated Noise and Oppositional Politics Ted Gournelos, Rollins College 9. Wikipedia, Error, and Fear of the Bad Actor Mark Nunes, Southern Polytechnic State University JAM 10. Contingent Operations: Reticular Aesthetics, Transduction, and the EKMRZ Trilogy Michael Dieter, University of Melbourne 11. Queer/Error: Gay Media Systems and Processes of Abjection Chad Parkhill, University of Queensland Jessica Rodgers, Queensland University of Technology 12. Error-Contagion: Network Hypnosis and Collective Culpability Tony D. Sampson, University of East London 13. Error 1337 Stuart Moulthrop, University of Baltimore ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

About the Author :
Mark Nunes is Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Appalachian State University, USA. He is author of Cyberspaces of Everyday Life (2006) and editor of a collection of essays entitled Error: Glitch, Noise, and Jam in New Media Cultures (Bloomsbury, 2012). He has written extensively at the intersection of cultural studies and new media studies, with recent work exploring the co-constitution of human and algorithmic agencies.

Review :
If you have had enough of the logic of maximum performance, organized by process management and promoting maximum predictability and minimum error, this brilliant collection of essays is the book for you. Doubling the history of control through a genealogy of error, this collection maps the possibility of asystematic resistance in cybernetic networks, challenging the reader to imagine the liberating potential of going astray. Giving in to the pull of the unintended and the unforeseen, the glitch aesthetic of jams and hacks, errors and noise outlined in this book provides a possible model of flight from the terror of efficiency that haunts network societies. -- Tiziana Terranova, associate professor in the Sociology of Communications at the Dipartimento di Studi Americani, Culturali e Linguistici, Università degli Studi di Napoli 'L'Orientale' Author quoted in article on designing failure in Computer Arts.