This article aims to analyse how a photographic interaction, complicated by technical and bodily disruption, entails a productive glitch in the form of systemic friction. The analysis is grounded in artist Lisa Tan’s exhibition Dodge and/or Burn in Stockholm (2023–24), with a focus on a central video work. The exhibition’s theme of crisis and transformation guides the analysis within a qualitative framework informed by an art historical methodology of semiotics and phenomenology combined with media and disability studies. This interdisciplinary perspective organizes an account anchored in the artwork’s initial capture and exhibition display. As the glitch is redefined, from a technical error to an embodied experience of systemic friction, the article offers an innovative take on how both photography and glitch can be conceptualized and deployed. As a result, the glitch emerges as a tool to address today’s dominant sociotechnical systems and their visual underpinnings.

This chapter presents a study of how metadata shapes the conditions of cultural heritage representation, focusing on Sami images in the online archive of the Swedish National Heritage Board. Datasets from the in-house database Kulturmiljöbild and the social media platform Flickr Commons are gathered and interpreted using cross-disciplinary methods within a framework of critical data studies where participation and performativity are key. The study uncovers how different metadata structures and practices facilitate different narratives that both hide and highlight Sami markers. Four workaround strategies in relation to diversity are identified, i.e., means to resolve or bypass limitations to the spectrum of perspectives expressed in image descriptions: omission, abstraction, translation, and hyperbole. This typology demonstrates how metadata affects diversity by governing image searches online textually and visually, thus contributing important insights into the rhetorical dynamic between interface and infrastructure in archives where dominant narratives are limiting commitments to diversity.

In recent years, photographs by persons with visual impairments are increasingly shifting into new arenas: from sociological contexts of therapeutic pedagogies to aesthetic contexts of art on public display. In this shift, discursive tropes about vision, disability and artistic practice emerge. Moreover, these tropes emerge around images—but a much-needed attention to the images is habitually bypassed in curatorial as well as artistic statements in favor of an emphasis on the troubling details of the artist’s life. As a consequence, the emancipatory agency of the images is undermined when it is unmoored from its visual source. This article adds nuance to a biographical approach by tending to the image with a rare combination of art history, critical media theory and disability studies on functional normality and variation. The focal point is a photograph by Kurt Weston, who relates his work to experiences of otherness that follow an identification with homosexuality, AIDS and blindness—an otherness whose inclusive quality plays out in the image yet remains unaccounted for by the surrounding discourse without in-depth image analysis. Here, otherness is addressed in dialogue with the notions of tactics and catharsis to unfold the performative operation taking place within and around the image. Visual and verbal statements reveal narratives that overlap yet also diverge, holding implications beyond the singular image for a society where ableist notions of normality are taken for granted.

This thesis aims to analyze how interfacing affects viewer experiences and viewer positions, and how glitch art online makes that effect visible. Glitch art is concerned with disruptions in the systems that govern how for instance photography is produced, circulated and displayed in a digital image flow. The system’s usually undisrupted operation emerges through the friction created between the key components of the study: the viewer, the photo-based mediation, and the inter­face where the two meet. These components are encircled by the relation between individual and system, whose increased integration with one another requires a sharper eye: a tactical spectatorship in response to how the interface of the image flow can turn the individual into a part of the system. The unfolding of such a spectatorship is in­vestigated through three questions: What can a viewer see and do by interfacing with the web­site, and with what means? How is the photo-based material on the web­site produced, dis­played and concept­ualized? How does the website and its photo-based material – glitched and not glitched – position the viewer haptically and epistemologically?

With a cross disciplinary approach, three media phenomenological case studies present glitch artworks­ in an online environment. The case study on Phillip Stearns’s project Year of the Glitch concerns the web­site’s index and archive pages as well as still images with a focus on camera reconstruction, verbal con­cept­ualization, and image materiality. The case study on Rosa Menkman’s website Sunshine in My Throat includes index and artwork pages, two art­works with still and moving images as well as a thema­ti­za­tion of the entire online environ­ment being glitched. The case study on Evan Meaney’s project Ceibas Cycle focuses on the index page and an interface-based artwork, two video works as well as a portfolio of photo­graphs that are not glitched. The timeliness of the case study materials – created between 2004 and 2012 – is anchored in systems aesthetics, in which technical problems are explored as a cultural critique since the 1960s. The quali­tative analysis both emphasizes and problem­atizes experience, as a complement to quantitative studies about images in relation to a digital flow.

The study analyzes how glitch art shapes experiences both by follow­ing the interface and by disrupting it. The effect of the underlying system thus appears in a material that has not yet been given an in-depth art historical analysis with a particular focus on the individual viewer. With such a focus, glitch is conceptualized as systemic friction in this study, which clarifies how the artworks online produce knowledge about the interface by providing the individual with a possibility of creating tactical breaks into the image flow. The results of the study consist of the ways of seeing that develop such a possibility – and they gain relevance as they make visible how the flow usually operates in invisible ways. These results point out that the experience of the artworks – and by ex­ten­sion, other experiences of images online – can alert viewers to their own activity within the image flow. If the system sets boundaries for experiences of and through the interface, a tactical spectatorship becomes possible when a glitch gives the individual an opportunity to try different positions towards these boundaries.

Chapter Abstract: Photography made, spread and viewed through a digital interface is conditioned by protocols that determine its possibilities and limitations. Yet, the inconsistencies of photography keep these conditions under negotiation. This inconsistency is brought out through glitches: a phenomenon defined as error, flaw, malfunction, or here: systemic friction. As glitches are generated, harnessed and aesthetically articulated, they crack open a space for individuals to work with and around systemic frames. This article explores haptic disruption as a form of negotiation that sharpens attention towards photography experienced through a screen. The site of this sharpening is a website: Dutch artist Rosa Menkman’s Sunshine in my throat. Here, a pervasive digital architecture is precariously co-present with an intimate viewing experience. Contingency exploited in the digital material thus becomes embodied in photographic as well as human materials. Connected to an ungraspable network while alone in the aesthetic encounter, the viewer navigates minimal yet strikingly sensorial circumstances that yield intentional as well as random haptic disruption. Menkman’s work merges viewer, photographic instance and shared interface – and rubs them against each other in a way that generates a certain kind of time: moving across the site, gazing at images still and stilled, interfacing with machinic and human. In this process, the individual is incited to test a tactical position towards the system.