Gaze Makes the Glitch
This past January, I did a program called Code Societies through the School for Poetic Computation (SFPC) in NYC's West Village. Together through workshops, critical theory, and discussions we examined how code and societies shape and are shaped by each other. That program was a major reorientation to navigating how I think about code and it was where I began my project, "Gaze Makes the Glitch."
In 2018 on my recently accidental algorithmically suspended Twitter account (RIP), I tweeted this:
It's still a question on my mind.
I use social media daily.
I see violence and death almost daily.
At the time of tweeting this, I remember feeling extraordinarily overwhelmed by the influx of recordings and videos of police killing black people that populated my feed.
I began to think about:
What does it mean to be uploaded?
What does it mean to upload?
What happens to the black body when this occurs?
In Code Societies, Everest Pipkin taught "The fuzzy edges of character encoding." There I was introduced to the concept of DATA BENDING: the process of manipulating a file using a software that was made to edit or create files of another format.
This got me thinking, what kind of file is the body? What kind of file am I? It seems like any attempt to upload myself would inevitably be data bending. Especially when most software was not made for black people, with black people in mind.
To understand more fully this process of data bending and understanding the code behind what we upload, I opened a selfie in a hex editor. It turns out, the computer reads an image of me as an agglomeration of numbers and ASCII characters.
Next, I went through the process of glitching the same photo, as a meditation, as an experiment. This process involved editing the code of my selfie by either removing or adding new bits of code.
The more time I spent in this process, the more parts of my already convoluted self I removed, the less of me I became. Until I was no longer recognizable. Eventually, I glitched the file to the point of it not being able to open, to the point of death.
Although I was doing this digitally myself, the end result felt familiar.
What does the everyday glitching process look like?
And what I mean is not a glitch in the system, a tiny inconvenience, but the process of extracting and removing code. Rendering some bodies fully visible and seen and other invisible or visible but illegible.
Ruha Benjamin in our class together stated, "you can be both excluded and disposable and yet necessary and included."
That began to sink in.
For my first semester project in my graduate program, I did an installation and zine project called Black Projections. There I began to develop this idea called MASTER PROJECTIONS, which was heavily informed by Frantz Fanon.
Expanding upon the idea of MASTER PROJECTIONS and how that relates to glitch/uploading/archives/memories, I thought about these things:
Master and Slave is embedded in our hardware and use these terminologies/ideologies
Archives are glitched to the point of death / irreversible death - How many of us don’t know our histories? How many archives do we build online only for them to get destroyed? My twitter account recently was flagged algorithmically as spam after I posted links to resources for artists and QTBIPOC to help navigate COVID-19. I had that account for eleven years and Twitter won’t respond to me. That content is now lost.
Code is removed to the point of culture/blackness becoming abstracted, removed from its source, consumable by all.
Black people are uploaded as numbers and data points for surveillance. Softwares and technologies framed as being able to help us rely on racist data / exist on racist frameworks (ie PredPol).
People can upload you and incorporate you into the system without your consent. Who consents to being uploaded, especially after they die?
If reality is based on our projections, to be uploaded invites the opportunity for new realities based on new projections — Continuous Projections and Continuous Disembodied Projections.
But as the Master and Slave narrative is embedded in our hardware, whose projections are prioritized? The Master’s Projections. The Master’s Gaze.
It is this projection, this gaze that causes the glitch. The Master’s Gaze determines who gets to be visible and in what way, it determines the code both online and offline, it gives death sentences, it is not in error.
My thoughts end here, for now, I have no answers, but I am curious about the space that invisibility or illegibility holds. Is there room for that to be powerful? Is there a benefit in being misunderstood?