The Queer Potentiality of the Glitch

At some point you realise: the things that were supposed to work do not. You were told how it works, when you were young, and you believed what you were told. You look around and see people who have gone on believing it. Maybe, for some of them, it is true.

The feeling catches you, sometimes - the weight of it all, the sheer unreality. You spend a lot of time ignoring it, running from it, beating it out of your mind. Today, though, it is here. It is in the room. I feel it too. Take my hand, and together we will listen to what it has to say.

I am talking about glitches.

Not real ones - at least not just the real ones - but what the glitches represent. I am talking about the glitch as symbol, as aesthetic, as something collectively imagined, and how that image, in my reckoning, speaks to a common queer experience.

The landscape here is thorny and full of winding paths. I have done my best to map them, but there is no clear way through. Still, we have to start somewhere, so we might as well start with music.

Sam Keeper of Storming the Ivory Tower has written about a tendency towards dissonance and noise in the work of transfemme musicians such as Black Dresses, backXwash, Ada Rook, and Laura Les [1]. She identifies vocal distortion as a heightened performance of gender, augmented by technology - noting that cis people do the same thing, performing hypermasculinity with ludicrously large trucks. Keeper is drawn to this music because it echoes ‘the dissonances and tensions within [her] own lived trans experience’ [ibid]. Notice how frequently these artists use glitch imagery in their album covers and music videos. I see that as the same impulse, manifested visually.

For these artists, the glitch is a marker of emotional intensity: compression artefacts and blown-out static as signs of a feeling too large for the hardware that holds it. A glitch like that grabs our attention. It feels like the start of something - but it isn’t, not really.

In her essay An Affinity of Hammers, Sara Ahmed writes:

‘…people witness a reaction as the beginning of something because they do not notice what people are reacting to. Think of a twig that snaps under pressure. A snap sounds loud, and it seems like a sudden movement. But the snap would only seem the start of something, or as the beginning of violence, if you did not notice the pressure on the twig. […] A system can put some bodies under pressure without that pressure being experienced, let alone witnessed by others who are not under that pressure.’ [2, p28]

We experience the glitch as a breaking, but it is not - it is the result of a breaking, somewhere deep in the underlying code, the architecture underpinning our little technological worlds. This goes double for the glitch-as-aesthetic - the bright colours and striking imagery that so rarely resembles the actual glitches we encounter on a day-to-day basis. The glitch didn’t come out of nowhere - but the glitch is the scapegoat, the thing we associate with the error, the sound of a snapping twig.

If you meet the glitch with curiosity, if you follow where it leads, you will find the code beneath.

Realising your own queerness tends to bring you into contact with the structures of heteropatriarchy. You cannot understand your own deviance without understanding, at least in part, how the world is set up to prevent it. In the early days, when those surrounding structures of straightness felt inescapable, my queerness was a yearning for another world - somewhere beneath or outside of the one I lived in. Everest Pipkin’s interactive poem, ‘Soft Corruptor’, expresses a similar urge: [3]

see me: 9 years old, inviting myself for a playdate, insisting we play spyro, and then, over and over again, trying to bump my way out into the blue. recently, i found a video of someone doing exactly this; making a sort of hopskip into the atmosphere one-sided, the geometry of the world turns transparent as the dragon spirals down, gliding under the level you can see the architecture unstitch itself at the seams one purple dragon soaring through glitch city

It can feel like queerness is a beautiful anomaly, something unaccounted for - but the truth is harder to swallow. Heteropatriarchy has always known our number. I think often of Nora Hikari’s materialist theory of a gender ternery, consisting of Power, Not-Power, and the Faggot-Subaltern [4]. The Faggot-Subaltern is the failure-state of gender, the class whose purpose is to receive violence, whom Not-Power are roped into policing under threat of being faggotised themselves [ibid]. The good ones, the respectable white middle-class gays who are more able to assimilate, may be admitted into the class of Not-Power, but such admittance must always be conditional [ibid]. The system knows queerness like it knows the floor-plans and guard rotas of its prisons.

In his book ‘Glitch Poetics’, Nathan Allen Jones recounts the experience of encountering sinister, unexplained photos on his phone [5, p9-10]. As it turns out, the photos were automatically downloaded from WhatsApp; the supposed ‘glitch’ was, in fact, the system working as intended [ibid]. But we feel it like a glitch, receive it like a glitch - and there is knowledge in that feeling. In the book ‘Glitch Feminism’, Legacy Russell quotes Fred Moten: ‘The normative is the after-effect, it is a response to the irregular’ [6, p13].

That’s the thing about code: somebody had to write it in the first place. I think of ‘The Matrix’ - a film written and directed by two trans women, a film that is so obviously about transness that it is comical to suggest otherwise. ‘The Matrix’ posits that the choice to transition necessarily reveals the fakeness of the world - its construction by hostile agents, and the unwitting complicity of all who remain within it. Morpheus tells Neo that the system is made up of the people they are trying to save - but that most of them are not ready to leave it, and as long as they remain inside, they are capable of becoming the enemy [7].

So many fascists see themselves in the heroes of that film. This is another kind of glitch. Is it so surprising, when that road can be traveled both ways?

How many of us first find ourselves through the screen of a computer or television? Legacy Russell writes about the digital realm as a space for experimentation and self-making - ‘the Internet still remains a vessel through which a “becoming” can realize itself. The glitch is a passage through which the body traverses toward liberation, a tear in the fabric of the digital’ [8, p13].

I received my earliest queer visions through ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’, a show that is in many ways deeply regressive. This is why I cannot make it through five minutes of ‘I Saw the TV Glow’ without sobbing. ‘I Saw the TV Glow’ is another film made by a trans woman about the fakeness of the world we live in, and a vivid reality glimpsed on the other side of a screen - this time, a TV show. Protagonist [Owen/Isabel]’s closeted reality slowly fails as the film goes on, as the lie cannot sustain itself, cannot stave off collapse. And yet, the film extorts, there is still time.

How often have we heard queerness framed as a phase to be grown out of? That is the intended logic of heteropatriarchy - the error caught by debug, the rupture sewn up, the deviance corrected. Queerness is legible as long as it is punished, policed, beaten into a more respectable shape. We can exist, as long as we’re normal about it. As long as we pose no threat to the fabric of this world.

But some of us choose otherwise. Some of us never grow up and out of it. Some of us do not seek inclusion within their rotten castle, but to tear it to the ground, brick by brick by brick. A glitch is a prophet of ruin - it reveals a weak-point, a place to work at.

Alternatively, in the words of Sara Ahmed: ‘it is through hammering that these walls become tangible. We can direct our attention toward those institutions that chip away us. […] We chip away at those walls by trying to exist or trying to transform an existence’ [9, p32].

Alternatively, in the words of Legacy Russell: ‘The glitch is an activist prayer, a call to action, as we work toward fantastic failure, breaking free of an understanding of gender as something stationary’ [10, p9].

Alternatively, in the words of Revolutionary Girl Utena: ‘If it cannot break out of its shell, the chick will die without being born. We are the chick, the world is our egg. If we don’t crack the world’s shell, we will die without being born. Smash the world’s shell, for the revolution of the world!’

And so I say, in the words of nobody but myself: Long live rupture. Long live the failure-states. Long live glitch.

On Winning the New Media Writing Prize

While it’s slightly old news by now, I am delighted to report that I Dreamt of Something Lost won Best Demo at the MediaFutures Annual Meeting 2023. I was not remotely expecting to win; my mind was primarily on the talk I was giving the next day. And yet, evidently, people liked it. Neat!

It’s a very odd experience standing next to people while they consume the art you made - maintaining a delicate balance between ‘giving them space to experience it’ and ‘being on hand to answer any questions’. This is kind of the eternal dilemma when it comes to authorship, in my opinion. I’ve read Barthes; I know how this works. Once my work is out there in the world, it is no longer solely mine.

At the same time, though, being its creator gives me insights into it no one else will have, because that is a relationship to the work that no one else will have. This is doubly true for IF/electronic literature, because there are specific technical concerns that I am meaningfully an expert on.

Besides which, I don’t want to live in a world where authors never comment on their work. I like author interviews and DVD commentaries, I think they’re fascinating. I do wish we could give such things a little less authority. Genius auteurs are great and all but my personal feeling is that art is located and contextual and - in many mediums - fundamentally collaborative. Isn’t that the beauty of it?

Seeing [With/Like] the Machine: Blink and Hana’s Light

When I walk my city, I am guided by my phone. I enter a cafe, find a QR code beneath the grease-flecked sheen of laminated paper, lift my phone’s lens to its surface, wait for the shape to resolve into a menu for my hungry hands. Over and over and over I do this, easy as breathing. Where would I be, without these circuit-eyes? How might I see this world? What could I un-know?

–

Hana’s Light (2025, Indiepocalypse Issue #67) is a short hidden object game by Bluzo and Goblincat, with music and sound effects by Peter Landry and Alexander Morgan1. It’s a subtle, heartfelt, haunting piece that follows its recently-bereaved protagonist, Margot, through processing her grief. Justcamh’s Blink (2022, Indiepocalypse Issue #69), meanwhile, is part of a tradition known variously as information games, knowledge node puzzles, or (controversially) metroidbrainias, where the only limit to your progress is what you know2. In Blink’s case, this means your ability to navigate the Curse: if you close your eyes, you teleport to a random location as soon as you open them again. In ways obvious and not, both games are fundamentally concerned with vision – more specifically, the ways in which we outsource our view of the world to technological devices, and how that shapes our thinking in turn.

Take, for example, the QR codes strewn across Blink’s landscape. When scanned, these glyphs output raw text, giving the player information about the game’s mechanics and world. Sometimes, these messages resemble neutral – if flavourful – tooltips: ‘Stimulation dampens the curse. Standing in water will keep you in place’. Others carry an obvious bias: ‘The venerable king stands leader of all good. He need not strain himself; it is our purpose to strain for him’. It is not clear who left these messages, nor how long they have been there – but a reasonable assumption would be that these were the former inhabitants of these ruins.

While it is possible to read QR codes manually (this tutorial by Piko and blinry springs to mind), it’s a time-consuming process that, realistically, most of the time, you’re not going to bother with3. Especially not in a game where you can’t look at anything for longer than twenty seconds. A smartphone equipped with the right app, though, can parse a QR code near-instantly – so I played with my phone within reach, repeatedly lifting it to my computer screen.

This action is mirrored in Hana’s Light – although here it is fully diegetic. Our call to action comes in the form of a spirit-like presence that manifests through Margot’s Tamagotchi. It claims to be Margot’s lost loved one, Hana, and offers to help4. It asks that Margot go into the forest behind her school and collect a selection of items. The player must use the Tamagotchi as a torch, casting its light into the darkness, searching for the items that give off a characteristic orange glow. This effect – the titular Hana’s light – is used throughout the game to signal what the player needs to click on to progress. In the comic-like cutscenes that open and close the story, the orange glow appears most often on the Tamagotchi and the spirit inhabiting it. That said, we first see it on Hana’s funeral portrait, and then on a grief-stricken Margot. When the player’s mouse hovers over items with the glow effect, its colour grows darker and more vivid – suggesting an increase in emotional intensity. This light, then, is bound up not just with the possessed Tamagotchi but the ourobouros of Hana’s absence, Margot’s grief.

In the forest segments, a simple gameplay loop emerges: the Tamagotchi’s light reveals an item; you collect the item by clicking on it; you open the Tamagotchi’s interface and feed it the item; the spirit comments on the item in question, offering opinions, information, and/or flavour text. This process is essentially the same as the QR codes in Blink: pass an image into your [fictional/real] device, which converts it into data, which you then consume.

Crucially, though, Blink’s player character is reading these codes in a very different way. One room – tucked away, one of the more difficult locations to access – contains a conversation played out across nine QR codes. One reveals that ‘we are communicating in secrets etched in the wall. Etched so that we can both feel it and read it without ever opening our eyes’. In other words: this is a writing system similar to Braille, read through direct contact with the body; felt as well as read. A process closer to the unwieldy process of manually parsing the code’s binary than it is to simply holding up a phone.

Interestingly, there is one QR code that categorically could not be read this way. It flashes briefly on the screen as the player character falls through a succession of chutes – such that you can only read it by taking a screenshot, or if you already have your phone ready. The message reads ‘the biggest fools make kings, whom neglect the hands that serve them. These are the true clients of hell’, and it is the closest thing Blink has to a conclusive moral statement. Perhaps it can only be read through machine vision because it is intended to stand outside the narrative, to address the player directly. In any case – seeing it suddenly appear on my screen, scrambling to grab my phone in time, failing to do so – I acutely felt the fallibility of my body and my eyes.

Similarly, in the third and final forest segment of Hana’s Light, you cast the light across the surface of a lake. There, just for a second, you catch a glimpse of a glitching shadow, reflected in the water’s surface. By this point, the game has taught you to keep the light moving until you see the orange glow – so on a first play-through, you’ve likely moved on before you’ve processed what you’ve seen. Move the light back and it’s gone. Again, I felt the imprecision of my body. Again, I wished for the instantaneous reflexes of machines.

This sense of destabilisation pervades both games; neither gives us a full and accurate impression of our surroundings. Blink’s art style is loose, pixelated, impressionistic. It offers the broad strokes of a place, a suggestion of its structure, and little more. It’s a perfect encapsulation of the game’s mechanics – the kind of loose visual idea you might gain from opening your eyes and immediately closing them again. Furthermore, you must frequently navigate in total blindness, aided only by the sound of your footsteps and your memory of the space. The art of Hana’s Light is comparatively detailed – particularly the forest backgrounds – but the player can only ever focus on one or two details at a time. In the forest, your vision is limited to a small circle of light, and the stylised story illustrations offer nothing but the most essential elements of the scene. You fumble and falter your way through both stories, struggling to access what you need.

Lately, for the first time in years, I’ve been doing some quasi-academic research. It has left me in a similar frame of mind: wading through pages of enshittified search engine results, trying to discern which websites are most likely to be AI-written, rephrasing my searches as many as ten times before they bear fruit. It’s not just me – a 2024 report by Janek Bevendorff et al found Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo all frequently succumb to spam campaigns and make disproportionate use of affiliate links5. The most reliable way to find sources has been using my own knowledge to find and follow citation breadcrumbs, but this only gets me so far. When faced with an area of study I don’t already have a basic grounding in, I’m lost. I’m used to treating the Internet as a prosthetic extension of my knowledge – and as it grows less and less reliable, my sense of the world around me grows more and more compromised.

Blink’s lore extends the analogy further. In that set of nine QR codes I mentioned earlier, the speakers (whom it is near-impossible to distinguish) collectively wrestle with the actions of their king and the situation he has left them in. One speaker remains loyal, maintaining ‘it was for the best’. Another maintains that ‘his venture into Hell clearly left [them] ruined’. The conversation’s turning point comes with the admission that ‘his majesty does have an air about him’ (emphasis mine)6. The 2024 US election was met with a wave of headlines concerning the ‘vibe-ification’ of politics, as gut instincts and vague impressions gained greater primacy in the discussion. Writer and philosopher Robin James draws a connection between this cultural turn and a shift in our technologies: ’in the same way that experienced cooks and bakers can judge an ingredient’s volume by sight or feel without measuring it first, pop cultural “vibe checks” are how people apply the same epistemic practices these algorithmic technologies use without having to do the math’7. We use our devices to categorise, and learn to categorise in turn – immediate, gut-instinct processing, imprecisely parsing the world that passes by.

More recently, we have seen the proliferation of large language-model chatbots, with a marked tendency for confirming our gut-instinct hunches. A recent analysis of ChatGPT transcripts by the Washington Post, for example, found that it agreed with users ten times more often than it disagreed8. In Hana’s Light, we might find an equivalent in the Tamagotchi spirit who, when Margot asks if it is Hana, readily agrees. It transpires that this is a lie: the spirit is actually a capricious catboy trapped within the Tamagotchi, only interested in using Margot to escape9. He transparently does not care about Margot – cheerfully remarking on how miserable she is. A friendly voice behind a screen, pretending to be someone lost, indulging your desire to get them back while devouring your personal data. Sound familiar10?

In both games, the player character’s fumbling progress brings them closer to the truth of the world they live in, and in both cases, that truth comes with the offer of power. Blink’s nameless protagonist (re)forges the Crown of Thorns and takes the throne themself, while the catboy offers Margot a choice between returning home and becoming a catgirl like him. Both triumphs ring somewhat hollow – neither the king nor the catboy ever had your best interests at heart. The cycle repeats, the Curse remains in place, and Margot can never go home again. Still, here you are – sitting atop your mountain of hard-earned knowledge, firmly entrenched in the technologies you used to obtain it. The question that remains: what will you do?

On Sea Swimming

There is a story my mother likes to tell: me, as a toddler, playing in a fountain after all the other children had run back to their parents. My mother asks me if I want to come out. “No!” I shout, “I like it! I like it!” even as my lips turn blue.

I love my body best when I am in the sea.

The cold of it shocks my cells into crystalline sharpness. It creeps into every part of me. I am laughing, gasping, making noises. I take it slow – let the water rise an inch or so at a time, let my legs get used to the chill before I subject my torso to its grasp. Of course, the waves have other ideas – and once I am deeper in, each pounding, churning wave is breaking against my scalp, sending me off-balance, tumbling through the surf, and I must hold my breath until it’s done.

Later, I will talk excitedly about horror and comedy, and how similar the two modes are – how it’s all about timing and intensity. Timing: if I kick off the sand at exactly the right time, the wave will carry me with it. I will surge towards the shoreline like the figurehead of a ship, fast and powerful and free. Intensity: Sometimes, even if I get the timing right, the wave will be too tall for me to crest and it will pummel me beneath the water’s surface, send my hair over my eyes, rush up my nose, leave me gasping and disoriented and a little too aware of what it might feel like to drown.

Silly, really. I am never so far out that I cannot touch the ground. Once I am in up to my neck, the waves are gentler. The sea no longer tries to expel me. I drift above each swell, lifting my face to keep my airways clear, catching pale flashes of seagull wings above me. It is at this point that I scarcely want to swim at all. My body is almost entirely numb – moving my arms or legs too much causes a strange jangling sensation to shoot up and along my nervous system, but I am too content to worry about that.

I am in raptures. I begin to repeat ‘glorious, glorious, glorious’ under my breath, when I am not laughing or humming or diving beneath the waves. A friend once told me that they had found the secret to happines, and it was swimming in the river. They weren’t wrong, but nothing compares to the sea.

A gaggle of surfers have joined me, enveloped by their wetsuits. I am protected by the cold only by my swimming costume, and feeling remarkably smug about this. One of the surfers – farther out than the rest, and not too far from me – is whooping and cheering and suddenly falls off his board. I do not have the patience to be a surfer; so little time surfing, so much bobbing around. Still, I understand them – I, too, have braved the cold to be beaten by the waves.

When I stagger out after letting the waves return me to the shore, I cannot feel my legs. I stagger up the beach to where my partner waits, doing my best to ignore the people giving me ‘in March? Is she mental?’ stares. My entire body is singing as the bloodflow slowly returns. I am the plucked string of a harp, with one high and clear note reverberating through my every cell.

Disasters Never End

“…the apocalypse began / when Columbus praised God and lowered his anchor.”

“Disasters begin suddenly and never really end.”

Night in the Woods (Finji, 2017) follows college dropout Mae Borowski as she does, on the whole, very little. As the player character, she is defined in large part by her aimlessness. Where her friends and family all have jobs, Mae is free to wander her hometown of Possum Springs—to explore how it’s changed, reconnect with old friends, and generally hang out.

From a gameplay perspective, this means you spend much of your time walking around, looking for new content. You may learn that examining things or speaking to people multiple times sometimes nets you new information—from then on, you click things repeatedly. Waiting for something new. The next day, you do the same.

It’s easy to find parallels here with the pandemic experience: stagnation, limitation, flattened routine, “doomscrolling.”undefined Take your pick. Playing Night in the Woods in lockdown, though, just walking through a busy street and hanging out with friends, felt like the height of escapism. Sprinkle that with a growing sense of dread—a severed arm, an abundance of ghost stories, frequent nightmares—and you have something that more resembles early March 2020. The calm before the plague.

It’s not a perfect comparison. The growing horror in Night in the Woods is far more solid and palpable than anything I experienced before lockdown; an occasionally mentioned news story, a small-but-growing number of cases. Looking back, though, it gains a sinister significance: the present stains the past. The restless, doomscroll-esque quality of the gameplay fits this model, too: the events belong to the past, but the expression to the now. About two-thirds of the way through Night in the Woods, Mae investigates a kidnapping she witnessed. You are given three potential clues to investigate in any order you choose. In the language of videogames, it’s clear what this means: when you’ve done all three, the endgame will begin. Only the endgame doesn’t wait—the scripted events leading up to it trigger after you’ve investigated only two things. Your plans are cancelled, your life is thrown awry. Your carefully planned routine is shattered.

At the end of the game, you discover there is a pit deep in the town’s mines that houses a Lovecraftian horror. A group of the town’s elders—“a buncha old boys doing their damnedest to protect their own and their neighbors”—abduct society’s most vulnerable to feed them to the beast. They claim that doing this will ensure the town’s prosperity. It promised them so.

The connection between Mae’s misplaced nostalgia and the cult’s desire to return to the town’s heyday has been widely commented on—the game is deeply concerned with what happens when you try too hard to recapture what’s long gone.undefined What stands out to me, though, is that there is no origin point for Possum Springs’ troubles. The kidnappings have been going on for years. What we see of the town’s past suggests violent upheaval and widespread worker exploitation. Even its origin story, referenced by the lead cultist in the final confrontation, features a poisoned spring. Neither Mae nor the cultists can return to the blissful past they imagine. The true tragedy, though, is that the halcyon past does not exist.

The awfulness of 2020 has become something of a cultural touchstone—a scapegoat for the varied political and personal horrors we find ourselves living through. Similarly, the phrase “the new normal” has been repeated ad infinitum in the UK government’s messaging about the virus. There’s a desire to view the year either as aberration or threshold, to separate the time before COVID-19 from the now. It’s an understandable impulse, but to do so is to ignore how we got here and why the pandemic still rages on today. The governments that failed to heed the warnings, the ways we’ve been taught to think about each other. The hole at the center of everything.

While it is true that disasters never really end, Night in the Woods reminds us that they never really begin, either. Their roots go back decades, centuries—the past cascading down into the present, the present becoming the past. In this light, Night in the Woods’ tagline becomes ever more urgent. At the end of everything, hold onto anything—and it is always the end.