My normally reliable Macbook Pro has been acting up this weekend, sputtering, whirring and churning, so I’ve been thinking a lot about OS crashes and kernal panics. This semester, in my new graduate course, Arcade Theory (CCTP-628), we’ll spend some time on glitches, gaffes, bugs, and breakpoints. The digital glitch is, to my mind, the computational equivalent of Barthe’s punctum, from Camera Lucida, which denotes “the wounding, personally touching detail which establishes a direct relationship with the object or person within it.” (Wikipedia)

A propos of this, Robert Overweg, whose “Glitches Turn Video Games Into Sublime Art”:

Most people throw their controllers when a glitch ruins a perfectly good game of Half Life or Grand Theft Auto. Robert Overweg loves it; he turns it into art.

Overweg is a self-proclaimed “photographer in the virtual world.” In his “Glitches” series, he captures whacked-out characters and snafued buildings in screenshots that look like what René Magritte might’ve produced had he been a big ol’ gaming nerd. These are absurd apocalyptic landscapes rendered even more absurd by shooters suspended in mid-air, as if leaping off a trampoline, while a skyscraper burns ominously in the distance, or, our favorite, by two characters fleeing the zombies of Left 4 Dead 2 and pausing for a homoerotic embrace