Kristen Lillvis  is associate professor of English and director of digital humanities at Marshall University. She is the author of Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination (University of Georgia Press, 2017) and the coeditor of Community Boundaries and Border Crossings: Critical Essays on Ethnic Women Writers (Lexington, 2016). Her work has appeared in MELUS, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, and the edited collections Approaches to Teaching the Works of Octavia E. Butler, Feminist and Critical Perspectives on Caribbean Mothering, and Practicing Science Fiction. Her research and teaching examine diverse identities across a range of media, including works of electronic literature.

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Introduction

Glitches, or technological performance problems caused by coding errors, software malfunctions, hardware limitations, and comparable issues, transform users’ experiences in time. Disruptions in my digital activity leave me paused in the present, but glitch symbology also moves me back to the past and forward to the future. The hourglass wait cursor frozen on the screen makes me feel frustration while highlighting my desire for—and expectation of—near-instant gratification. The broken link icon inspires irritation but also reveals my belief in reliability. These skeuomorphs, or nonfunctional design features that reference previously functional tools, claim to offer me and other users the comfort of a familiar past as we navigate the new world of the glitch.

Skeuomorphs that appear in glitch art—including codework that intertwines natural and programming languages and glitch literature (or, to use Rob Myers’s term, “glitcherature”) that applies glitch aesthetics to texts—similarly provide reminders of the past but not for the purpose of soothing users. Instead, glitch art exploits users’ expectations for their technologies by highlighting the beauty of broken code. In glitcherature, skeuomorphs become additional artifacts to deconstruct, symbols that indicate the collapse of binary systems (including code as a means of production) and the formation of new modes of reading.

In Whitney Anne Trettien’s glitcherature web text Gaffe/Stutter (2013), skeuomorphic references to print elements evidence the creative potential of collapse, particularly the disruption of temporal boundaries. Published as both a print chapbook and website, Gaffe/Stutter is, according to Trettien, a “series of diagrams, sketches, code, and fragments of HTML that, together, comprise the remnants of an uncompleted diagrammatic digital ‘edition’” of Logic of Sense (1969) by Gilles Deleuze (“Explanatory”). Gaffe/Stutter serves as a useful case study of glitcherature’s liminality because it somewhat uniquely includes distinct sections of codework and narrative content, both of which incorporate glitches. Additionally, Trettien’s assertion that the text is “incomplet[e]” positions the work in its entirety as an error or glitch (“Explanatory”). Skeuomorphs in the Gaffe/Stutter web text make material the tension between familiar artifacts—including the book—and new media. However, rather than suggesting a linear transition from one technology to another, skeuomorphs and the traditions they represent transform because of the work’s digital environment. I argue that glitcherature shifts the skeuomorph from ornamental feature to functional tool, thus framing the new not in the context of a stagnant history but a liminal temporality. In this alternative temporal structure, traditional and new media texts transform one another as well as practices of reading.

Tracking Time with Skeuomorphs

Whether decorative logs in a gas fireplace or the ornamental grille on an electric vehicle, skeuomorphs are designed to ease consumers into adopting new technologies. N. Katherine Hayles argues that the skeuomorph “calls into play a psychodynamic that finds the new more acceptable when it recalls the old that it is in the process of displacing and finds the traditional more comfortable when it is presented in a context that reminds us we can escape from it into the new” (How We Became Posthuman, 17). Though skeuomorphs encompass multiple time periods, much of the existing scholarship on skeuomorphs explores whether they are fundamentally conservative or progressive—are they rooted in the past or focused on the future? Jeremy Wade Morris argues that although skeuomorphs “are crucial for innovation” (50), they must ultimately be viewed as “conservative” because they “perpetuate old patterns, practices, and conceptual frameworks” (58-59). Morris relies on physical metaphors to explain skeuomorphs’ indebtedness to history, noting that they “are vestiges that represent the material weight of the past on the present (and the future)” (Morris 50). As “material metaphors” (Gessler 230), skeuomorphs embody the relationship between past and future in their physical, visual, and/or auditory presence. If they materially represent no-longer-necessary design features, skeuomorphs do in some ways seem to be inherently conservative. 

Yet skeuomorphs push those who interact with them forward into the future and, more accurately, into a liminal temporality. Nicholas Gessler asserts that skeuomorphs function as “informational attributes of artifacts which help us find a path through unfamiliar territory” and “map the new onto an existing cognitive structure” (Gessler 230). This move into “unfamiliar territory” or “the new” shows that while the past is ever present, skeuomorphs do not belong to a single time period. Instead, skeuomorphs bring the past, present, and future together into a liminal understanding of time. According to Hayles, skeuomorphs’ liminality extends beyond the simultaneous occupation of multiple, seemingly stable temporalities and into the complex “enfolding” of past and future into the present (How We Think, 89). Hayles describes the enfolding of a skeuomorph as a type of multi-layered cocoon: “past nestling inside present, present carrying the embryo of the future” (How We Think, 89). Such images suggest that skeuomorphs’ materiality moves beyond the past to include alternative temporal structures.

While Hayles uses skeuomorphs to explain technological and cultural change, studying skeuomorphs in electronic literature (or e-lit) reveals how skeuomorphs themselves transform. Skeuomorphs may recall the past, but when embedded in electronic contexts they alter rather than conserve history by disrupting the system of relations on which they are founded. Much like system failures, according to Jenny Sundén, announce the possibility of alternative, transformative structures, glitches in e-lit offer opportunities for the past to become present. More than enfolding multiple time periods together, skeuomorphs transform the very categories of past, present, and future.

Gaffe/Stutter/Glitch

In Trettien’s Gaffe/Stutter, glitches disrupt temporal boundaries and make skeuomorphs within the text newly functional. The homepage of Gaffe/Stutter looks like an open book. The left side features the heading “GAFFE” and an uncredited excerpt from George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), and on the right side appears the heading “STUTTER” and a selection from Deleuze’s Logic of Sense index (see Figure 1).

On the opening page and each subsequent page, a dashed vertical line separates—or, thinking in the print tradition, binds together—two texts, which change as the user interacts with the site. When users select either text, they enter a page with graph-paper drawings and unattributed quotes. Interacting with the page by selecting and sliding the words “GAFFE” or “STUTTER” left or right reveals fragments of code and broken code, as well as textual meditations on code and the speaker’s participation in a Logic of Sense reading group. The skeuomorphs of the book’s woven binding and inner margins (or gutter) remain consistent, although the color of the digital thread switches from red to black when the user navigates away from the start page. Similarly, the words “GAFFE” and “STUTTER,” to the left and right, respectively, of the gutter (as well as the slash in Trettien’s title) appear on each page, though Trettien animates them only on the homepage, and the user shifts their placement in relation to the binding on subsequent pages.

Trettien’s play with static and dynamic elements in relation to the gutter contorts the given psychodynamics of the skeuomorph, particularly the reliance on nonfunctional design features to ease the transition from past and present to future. In Gaffe/Stutter, the digital gutter evokes the boundary of the print tradition, but Trettien’s gutter refuses to immerse the user in a stagnant history. The user must alter the placement of text in relation to the gutter in order to explore Gaffe/Stutter, which takes the gutter from an ornamental design feature to the primary navigational tool. Rather than following the tradition of skeuomorphs that “borrow from the past to make the future possible in the present” (Morris 50), the binding and gutter skeuomorphs in Gaffe/Stutter bring e-lit interactivity into the print tradition, disrupting notions of what is past-, present-, and future-oriented as electronic and print literature coexist in a liminal temporality.

Gaffe/Stutter’s blending of analog and digital elements situates the work in the tradition of e-lit as well as in the field of glitch art more broadly. Hayles argues that readers approach electronic literature “with expectations formed by print,” and thus e-lit “must build on these expectations even as it modifies and transforms them” (“Electronic Literature” 198-99). She asserts that features from the print tradition join with elements from contemporary digital culture to produce a “hybrid” literary object “in which different vocabularies, expertises and expectations come together to see what might come from their intercourse” (Hayles, “Electronic Literature” 199). Glitch artists and theorists likewise play with the analog-digital binary in order to explore the other boundaries the glitch transgresses and the new opportunities it makes possible. Glitch theory positions difference as fundamental to artistic creation and interpretation. Andrew Brooks notes that the glitch reveals that “disruption, deviation and disorder are productive in systems” (40). He states that the parasite—a “minor malfunction or error” and, thus, “akin to the concept of the glitch”—“is the relation of relations in systems theory: a figure that has the potential to produce newness through difference, deviation and interference” (Brooks 38). Legacy Russell similarly relies on biological comparisons to present the glitch as productive, though she rejects the notion of the glitch as an “error.” Instead, she argues that the glitch operates as “the catalyst,” “the happy accident,” or “the digital orgasm” that produces in the user an affective response. Whether “anticipation” (Russell), “tension” (Goriunova and Shulgin), “anxiety” (Sundén), or “catharsis” (Menkman 11), the glitch generates a reaction in the user and, as such, extends beyond the digital realm, operating as “an intersection of analog and digital modes of (re)production” (Manon and Temkin).

Glitch artists rely on errors and the affective responses they evoke to explore alternative ways of seeing and being. In his artist book Glitch Ontology, net artist Mark Amerika engages with multiple Web 2.0 platforms, including Google Earth and Google Street View, as well as older technology such as QuickTime VR, to disturb the “illusion of seamlessness” created by panoramas or 3D representations of stitched images (Amerika; Amerika and Downes-Le Guin 82). Amerika focuses in Glitch Ontology on capturing glitches that map media technologies onto contemporary views of the world rather than obscuring the technologies as tools or devices that represent an unmediated reality. Glitches, Amerika argues, produce “an aesthetic effect or even affect” tied to understandings of not only representation but also the self. “There is this idea of constructing an identity,” he states, “or constructing an image of yourself that relates to what we have been referring to as the seamlessness of faux reality being created by these virtual engines that train everyone to conduct specific information behaviors” (Amerika and Downes-Le Guin 88). The moment of existing simultaneously inside and outside of a tunnel in Lake Como—one of his captured glitches—reveals the presence of the machine in the construction of the map but also in the construction of the self.

Like Amerika, Trettien disrupts the “illusion of seamlessness” in her glitch art. Through the presence of the digital seam in Gaffe/Stutter, Trettien amplifies the boundaries that distinguish electronic and print literature but also asks the user to question how new media and traditional literature transform or destroy one another to create something new, what Hayles calls a “hybrid” literary object but what perhaps might be better understood as a liminal assemblage. The prominence of the binding and gutter throughout Gaffe/Stutter emphasizes the “destructive generativity” of the glitch (Menkman 35). According to Sundén, “Glitch as art is about an amplification of already existing flaws, defects or errors. Instead of covering up the seams, it presents them proudly.” As a type of seam, the digital binding in Trettien’s work amplifies the relationships between the elements that flank it, including narratives, codework, and sketches.

Trettien acknowledges that boundary breaches in Gaffe/Stutter create meanings that challenge conventional codes (“Explanatory”). She ties the production of meaning that occurs “as words twist and leap across gaps and the gutter of the book” to Johanna Drucker’s meditation on limitlessness Diagrammatic Writing. Drucker states that "the associative field within the text creates endless opportunities for branching or breaking the line to follow lines of thought / breaching the code of compositional conduct" (11). Drucker asserts that violations to the gutter in a text create an “energy leak, seepage, a drain away from the space of attention” (23). Even etymologically the glitch fits this fluid paradigm, as Legacy Russell points out: “‘Glitch’ is conjectured as finding its etymological roots in the Yiddish glitch (‘slippery area’) or perhaps German glitschen (‘to slip, slide’); it is this slip and slide that the glitch makes plausible, a swim in the liminal, a trans-formation, across selfdoms.” The fluid, liminal space of the gutter in Gaffe/Stutter both develops out of and generates glitches, amplifying the power of creation in the text, particularly as it relates to reading.

In addition to the binding/gutter, other skeuomorphs in Gaffe/Stutter transform reading practices by asking users to reimagine—and make new—familiar objects. As C. T. Funkhouser asserts of digital poetry, each work “steadily imparts content alternative to what initially appears; each screen stages different information, perhaps uniquely--and every change, each mediated shift, holds potential consequence” (Funkhouser 22). In Gaffe/Stutter, two skeuomorphs of large, green, pixilated magnifying glasses (one with a plus sign and one with a minus sign in the lens) signal a glitch in Trettien’s text and disrupt expected ways of reading (see Figure 2).

In her recollection of her failed plans for a “diagrammatic digital ‘edition’” of Logic of Sense, Trettien recalls, “At its center (I imagined) would be high-resolution scans of the diagrams I had been producing; these, then, would be zoomable and annotatable in both text and image, such that any online visitor could respond to my diagram with one of their own” (“Explanatory”). Trettien includes in her web text a page featuring what she desired to incorporate: the code for shiftzoom.js, a JavaScript library for zoom and pan functionality. However, the green skeuomorphs in Gaffe/Stutter mark Trettien’s design and coding failures: they represent glitches, since the user cannot use them to zoom in or out of the text. The glitched magnifying glass skeuomorphs fulfill an alternative function by revealing “the ghostly conventionality of the forms by which digital spaces are organized” (Goriunova and Sulgin 114). In Gaffe/Stutter, the non-functional magnifying glass skeuomorphs defy their coded structure, serving as ornaments in the present rather than as vestiges of a no-longer-necessary past. Nathan Jones argues that text-based glitch artists “force and accentuate errors in language to extend what language can say into the formerly unspeakable territory of its own production” (5). The glitched skeuomorphs in Trettien’s work similarly extend meaning, locating the “material weight” of metaphors in the present first (Morris 50), which shapes how users understand the metaphors’ relationship to the past and future as well.

Liminal temporalities and new practices of reading pervade Trettien’s project. She admits that originally the site was to function as “an anti-book: a visual reading schematic that eschewed the line of text in favor of regimented grids, the ink-soaked grain of the remediated pen over the laser-burned face of print; playful reaction rather than academic protraction” (Gaffe/Stutter). However, as she engaged with code, she discovered she had “turned to one of the most strictly sequential media structures ever devised.” “Though our daily experience of web browsing is increasingly dynamic,” she states, “the compilation of markup and scripts that engineer this experience is text-based and rigidly hierarchical” (Gaffe/Stutter). Her narration of this “elaborately impossible” project speaks to the creative potential of glitches, error, and failure: while the “anti-book” for Logic of Sense failed to come into being, Trettien produced glitcherature from the “dead-end corner of the web” that remains (Gaffe/Stutter).

What’s more, users are able to participate in the creation of Trettien’s glitcherature by producing their own skeuomorphs from what remains of the text. On a white noise-animated page with the file title “demo-ajax.html,” Trettien includes HTML (see Figure 3).

When I copied, pasted, and saved the code as an HTML file and opened it in a browser, a skeuomorph of a broken image icon and the words “Trafalgar Square” appeared. While I could not see the image of Trafalgar Square Trettien had chosen, the name of the location was there, and in the explosion of code I created the public square through my memory and imagination. As is typical of skeuomorphs, the broken image icon immersed me in the world of the familiar (memory or imagination) to aid in the navigation of the new (the broken code). However, Gaffe/Stutter glitches this skeuomorph. Codework in Gaffe/Stutter departs from the “strictly sequential” and “rigidly hierarchical” nature of HTML (Trettien, “Explanatory), functioning instead as a marker of the text’s—and the user’s—freedom. As Stuart Moulthrop argues, “In the culture of networked, computational systems, there is never a single path of expression or encounter, but always a large or indefinite domain of possibilities” (254). The codework in Gaffe/Stutter—including that which produces the “demo-ajax.html” skeuomorph—exceeds the boundaries of HTML. Generated by the user rather than discovered in the text, the “demo-ajax.html” skeuomorph blurs the boundaries between user and creator as well as past, present, and future. By creating the skeuomorph, I exceeded the text’s borders, including the notion of completion signaled by the publication of the work.

Trettien plays with production of meaning in the human or natural language prose of Gaffe/Stutter as well. Selecting either text on the homepage leads the user into a narrative about a Logic of Sense reading group. The speaker recalls being one of four regular attendees and listening with fondness to a “Recent Graduate” talk about the text (Gaffe/Stutter). The speaker writes, “Listening to the Recent Graduate [. . .] was more like watching crystals become and grow out of the edges” (Gaffe/Stutter). Users can interact with the italicized text, watching it, like the crystals the speaker mentions, grow out of (or to) the edges of the page (see Figure 4).

Trettien’s animated text explodes by design, while her broken code explodes by failed design. In both cases, however, explosion connects to the creation of meaning and transformation of reading strategies.

The animated text emphasizes not only the idea that the crystals grow but also that they “become,” the first word in the exploding passage and a central concept in Deleuze’s theory (Trettien, Gaffe/Stutter). Deleuze and Guattari explain becoming as a process that occurs within “assemblages,” or the interconnection of distinct entities, “including all the attractions and repulsions, sympathies and antipathies, alterations, amalgamations, penetrations, and expansions that affect bodies of all kinds in their relations to one another” (Deleuze and Guattari 90). Deleuze and Guattari’s term “assemblage” derives from the French word agencement, “a term that means design, layout, organization, arrangement, and relations—the focus being not on content but on relations, relations of patterns” (Puar 57). Becoming occurs through the relation of distinct entities, and understanding becoming requires an understanding of difference (May 144).

Trettien suggests the importance of difference to making meaning on Gaffe/Stutter’s start screen, where references to glitches and alternative ways of seeing hide in plain sight. When I first visited Gaffe/Stutter, my focus shifted from the dashed red binding to the animated headings and then to the index on the right, primarily the dozen or so references to “Penis” in the middle of the page. Beneath this nod to traditional, masculine themes and reading practices appears the index entry for “Perception,” including the “presence of Others and [perception]” and “Other as structure of [perception]” (Gaffe/Stutter). These entries became my point of focus, especially when paired with the excerpt from George Eliot’s novel that states, “No formulas for thinking will save us mortals from mistake in our imperfect apprehension of the matter to be thought about” (qtd. in Gaffe/Stutter). In Gaffe/Stutter, mistakes instigate the questioning of conventions, including conventions of reading skeuomorphs and (electronic) literature more broadly.

Conclusion

Trettien’s Gaffe/Stutter highlights the ability of electronic literature to transform time and make skeuomorphs new. The web text’s most prominent skeuomorphs—the binding and gutter—situate the user in a liminal environment that continues throughout the navigation of the work. Trettien’s speaker recalls reading from Deleuze, “The real difference is not between the inside and the outside, [. . .] for the crack is neither internal nor external, but rather at the frontier” (Gaffe/Stutter). Trettien’s skeuomorphs, like Deleuze’s crack or the slash between “Gaffe” and “Stutter” in the title, concretize difference, marking both the frontier where distinct entities join together as well as the frontier where new knowledge comes into being. In The Care and Feeding of Books Old and New, Margot Rosenberg and Bern Marcowitz state that “the gutter can hold a tremendous amount of dirt, especially deep, where the pages meet” (33). In Trettien’s digital text, the gutter holds the debris of broken code, the detritus of skeuomorphs. Rather than presenting dirt that should be disposed of, the gutter in Gaffe/Stutter accentuates the glitch and, in doing so, offers new strategies for interpreting literature.

Works Cited

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Rosenberg, Margot, and Bern Marcowitz. The Care and Feeding of Books Old and New: A Simple Repair Manual for Book Lovers. Thomas Dunne-St. Martin’s, 2002.

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