Book2-High-Tech

Kane, Carolyn L., High-Tech Trash: Glitch, Noise, and Aesthetic Failure (external link, opens in new window)  (University of California Press, 2019).

Summary

High-Tech Trash analyzes creative strategies in glitch, noise, and error to chart the development of an aesthetic paradigm rooted in failure. Carolyn L. Kane explores how technologically influenced creative practices, primarily from the second half of the twentieth and first quarter of the twenty-first centuries, critically offset a broader culture of pervasive risk and discontent. In so doing, she questions how we continue onward, striving to do better and acquire more, despite inevitable disappointment. High-Tech Trash speaks to a paradox in contemporary society in which failure is disavowed yet generates technological innovation.

“Leonard Cohen sang ‘There’s a crack in everything … that’s how the light gets in.’ Here, Carolyn Kane teaches us how to see that light, one crack at a time.” –Fred Turner, Stanford University and author of The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties

“Kane profiles art practices and media discourses that exploit and celebrate, rather than filter or suppress, all kinds of errors and noises. A welcome intervention in a number of discursive fields.” –Peter Krapp, University of California, Irvine and author of Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture

“An original work of scholarship that addresses some of the most pervasive phenomena and foundational questions in the contemporary media environment.” –Robert Hariman, Northwestern University and coauthor of The Public Image: Photography and Civic Spectatorship