“…there are the raised arms of Desire, and there are the wide-open arms of Need. I oscillate, I vacillate between the phallic image of the raised arms, and the babyish image of the wide-open arms (Bathes, p.17). Roland Barthes speaks of love and abandonment in A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1977), in this particular fragment.
The thin arm that juts out from this blue machine buffs the surface’s pooling edges. It is a minor actor to its much larger crackled puddling to the right. Indeed, this arm acquiesces to the ice that appears both to beam upward, and to push against the black forms that want to frame its composition and breaking. The black line on the bottom edges left, mirrors the machine’s decorative black line top left; and the wheels are breaking against the black boxes to their right and left.
In this vortex, there is also red earth that floats. Here and now the blue machine offers a spindly arm without musculature, barely holding on enough not to be sucked down into the ice and underneath it where other skies hold waters. In their Manifesto for Glitch Pedagogy, Peña & James (2016, p.123) declare:
Glitch is non-conformity
... glitch pedagogy “can be used to interrogate that relationship between served and server, between used and user, dialogically and creatively.” (p.122)
What if we decided to be sucked down into that ice? There’s a suggestive fecundity in there, I think, that is not just dirty concrete.
glitch6, dec 31, 2021
text, march 18, 2022