The "Glitched" World

The organicity that animates the digital image in Jacques Perconte’s Impressions, in Jean-Michel Rolland’s Upside-Down, or in Gare Paris-Saint-Lazare, 10 avril 2017, 12h03-12h07, and that refers to a certain peacefulness to which nature can lay claim, differs radically from the irruption of the glitch that manifests itself in Disnovation.org’s The Pirate Cinema and – by means of electric “flashes” – in Sky Semantics. From these disruptive effects emanates a form of the sublime like that of cataclysms, and one senses a signal that, in seeking to tear its support, only tears itself, for matter ends up imposing its conditions. Let us recall once again these words of Henri Bergson, which act as a beacon:

If I want to prepare a glass of sugar water, do what I may, I must wait until the sugar melts […] the time I have to wait is no longer that mathematical time which would apply equally well along the entire history of the material world […]. It coincides with my impatience, that is to say, with a certain portion of my own duration, which cannot be lengthened or shortened at will. […]¹.

The disruptive behavior of the digital image here echoes the irregular dynamic of the economic and social system as it presents itself today, whose apparent fluidity is abruptly disrupted by the bursting of bubbles – as during the subprime crisis of 2008 –, by the occurrence of flash crashes², by glitches linked to digital speculation³ and by the fluctuations of cryptocurrencies⁴, in a process that has been interpreted, as we have seen⁵, as glitch capitalism.

The connivance between the dynamic that animates the digital image and the one that sets the world in motion stems from the fact that the same hypermaterial⁶ support that offers itself to the artistic gesture is also within reach of hyper-fast economic computation, while acting as a receptacle for traces that seek to model the human in order to better control them. Such a situation justifies the darkest forecasts should this hypermaterial support remain deregulated.

1. Henri Bergson, L’évolution créatrice, op. cit., p. 10.↩︎

2. These flash crashes are intimately associated with hyper-fast stock market operations carried out by means of algorithms.↩︎

3. As when, in 2021, investors bet heavily on a fall in the shares of the company GameStop – a stratagem that triggered the collapse of the stock – and a Reddit community (r/WallStreetBets) reacted swiftly by carrying out a massive, collective purchase of the company’s shares, causing heavy losses for the speculators who had believed they could make economic margins by putting the health of the company at risk.↩︎

4. Including the case of $LIBRA, a “garbage” cryptocurrency promoted by the Argentine president Javier Milei, bought internationally by thousands of investors who quickly saw the price of $LIBRA collapse, in what has been interpreted as theft on a global scale and which is the subject of legal proceedings under way before New York State courts (2025).↩︎

5. For this we relied on the work of Disnovation.org, whose accompanying reflection mobilizes the notion coined by Malcolm Harris, in Malcolm Harris, Glitch Capitalism: How Cheating AIs Explain Our Stagnant Present, op. cit.↩︎

6. We considered this support on the basis of Bernard Stiegler’s theory, in chapter 4.↩︎