Glitch is a work of digital language art created for the Cave Writing workshop at Brown University, an immersive, interactive 3D-stereo audiovisual environment. The artists write: "Glitch grew out of several different ideas coming from three minds, and ranging from the play of familiarity and jarring de-familiarity, movement through space, user agency, minimalism, to computer errors or 'glitches.' The piece is divided into four segments, opening with a pre-programmed machine 'speech.' It then goes through three similar iterations of a hallway sequence where the assumptions in the introductory segment are interrogated. Calculated 'glitches' reveal a machine acting unexpectedly, and throwing the viewer off. On a deeper level, the machine creates glitch-like effects, and this is not the same as encounters with actual computer error. Glitches occur when the computer doesn't do 'what it's supposed to do.' But whatever a machine is 'supposed to do' is only in relation to a user's desires. If the user is removed, is there any sense to the machine's processes? When two hard-coded processes interact, they create something new, an error or a crash or some sort of 'defect.' This glitch is a new product, to some extent a creative or imaginative act of the machine."
