Abstract
This essay analyses how an ambiguous experience of art online enables a tactical user position. It does so with a rare combination of media theory on technological dependence and disruption with art historical image readings informed by semiotics and phenomenology, applied in a qualitative case study on Evan Meaney’s video installation To Hold a Future Body so Close to One’s Own (2008). The artwork consists of glitched recordings presented on the artist’s website, analysed together to articulate the positioning of the user. Both empirical and methodological considerations thus engage a multidisciplinary perspective on error, ambiguity and creativity. The essay homes in on materiality, representation and interaction to argue for ambiguity as key to developing user tactics, i.e. a critical stance towards the pervasive socio-digital condition.
This essay is a rewritten and expanded version of a case study in the author’s doctoral thesis, defended in May 2016 and published in September 2016 as a revised edition entitled Flow and Friction: On the Tactical Potential of Interfacing with Glitch Art—see References.
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Grundell Gachoud, V. (2020). Tactical Ambiguity: Materiality, Representation and Interaction in Evan Meaney’s Glitched Portraits. In: Popat, S., Whatley, S. (eds) Error, Ambiguity, and Creativity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39755-5_3
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