[Air-L] Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture

[Peter Krapp]

Published last December and already in its second printing:

http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/noise-channels

Noise Channels
Glitch and Error in Digital Culture
2011 * Author: Peter Krapp
ToC:
Introduction
1. Hypertext and Its Anachronisms
2. Terror and Play, or What Was Hacktivism?
3. Noise Floor: Between Tinnitus and Raw Data
4. Gaming the Glitch: Room for Error
5. Machinima and the Suspensions of Animation

To err is human; to err in digital culture is design. In the 
glitches, inefficiencies, and errors that ergonomics and usability 
engineering strive to surmount, Peter Krapp identifies creative 
reservoirs of computer-mediated interaction. Throughout new media 
cultures, he traces a resistance to the heritage of motion studies, 
ergonomics, and efficiency; in doing so, he shows how creativity is 
stirred within the networks of digital culture.

Noise Channels offers a fresh look at hypertext and tactical media, 
tunes into laptop music, and situates the emergent forms of computer 
gaming and machinima in media history. Krapp analyzes text, image, 
sound, virtual spaces, and gestures in noisy channels of 
computer-mediated communication that seek to embrace-rather than 
overcome-the limitations and misfires of computing. Equally at home 
with online literature, the visual tactics of hacktivism, the 
recuperation of glitches in sound art, electronica, and videogames, 
or machinima as an emerging media practice, he explores distinctions 
between noise and information, and how games pivot on errors at the 
human-computer interface.

Grounding the digital humanities in the conditions of possibility of 
computing culture, Krapp puts forth his insight on the critical role 
of information in the creative process.

With a jam-packed intellectual bandwidth, Noise Channels reconfigures 
how we think about digital culture. Distortion reveals system 
characteristics: Peter Krapp uses this classic insight to illuminate 
the vibrant aesthetic and practical offspring of the computer. Marx 
knew it, Freud knew it, and so do Krapp's fractious gang of 
characters. Rarely have the secret affinities among continental high 
theorists, engineering visionaries, and avant-garde artists been 
revealed so freshly.
- John Durham Peters, University of Iowa

Noise Channels offers an intriguing and insightful analysis of 
'creative writing' under the conditions of networked computing. 
Ranging from hypertext to machinima, it argues that cultural 
creativity operates by embracing, rather than overcoming or 
eliminating, limitations (noise). Noise Channels is, beyond doubt, an 
important contribution to the field of new media studies.
- Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Brown University

With Noise Channels, Krapp brings a welcome volume to an increasingly 
clamorous field of study.
- Roy Christopher
-- 

Peter Krapp
Professor, Film & Media/Visual Studies, English, Informatics
2321 Humanities Gateway, ZOT 2435
University of California, Irvine, CA  92697-2435
http://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=5102

new book: http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/noise-channels