This talk was original delivered at GLI.TC/H 2112, on Saturday 8th December 2012. The talk expands on ideas I have been carting around for a few of years now. Updated with Object Oriented insights I hope it acts as a mental toolkit for artists looking to dance with objects, in all their glitchy splendour. As usual, I completely ignored my notes whilst talking, for this reason it’s worth listening to the question and answer bit afterwards. See here for more: machinemachine.net/text/arts/an-object-oriented-glitch-ontology Infinite thanks must go to Rosa Menkman, Jon Satrom and Nick Briz – the GLI.TC/H Bots at the heart of the fest. Thank you for inviting me to participate.

I took a trip to Chicago for GLI.TC/H 2112! – A conference/festival/carnival/movement in honour (and despite) of hardware/software/wetware errors, databends and feedback blackholes. I took a ton of photographs, you can view them on Flickr (better quality) or Facebook (dotted with comments, insights and exultations from the GLI.TC/H community). I intend to write more about the event, but for now I will post my talk here, which I gave on Saturday 8th December. It’s title is Glitches in Things and the “Friendly Medium”, a talk expanding on an idea I have been carting around for a couple of years now. Updated with Object Oriented insights I hope it acts as a mental toolkit for artists looking to dance with objects, in all their glitchy splendour. As usual, I completely ignored my notes whilst talking, for this reason it’s worth listening to the question and answer bit afterwards. Infinite thanks must go to Rosa Menkman, Jon Satrom and Nick Briz – the GLI.TC/H Bots at the heart of the fest. Thank you for inviting me to participate. More on OOO, glitches, kipple and Things to come reeeeal soon… (the talky bit starts a few minutes in)

HARMAN AND OBJECT-ORIENTED ONTOLOGY

In THE THIRD TABLE, Harman gives a brief summary of the principle themes of his object-oriented ontology. It is a little book, published this year in a bilingual (English-German) edition, and theEnglish text occupies a little over 11 pages (p4-15). The content is quite engaging as Harman accomplishes the exploit of presenting his principal ideas in the form of a response to Eddington’s famous “two tables” argument. This permits him toformulate his arguments in terms of a continuous polemic against reductionism in both its humanistic and scientistic forms. All that is fine, so far as it goes. However, problems arise when we examine his presentation of each of Eddington’s two tables, and even more so with his presentation of his own contribution to the discussion: a “third table”, the only real one in Harman’s eyes.

A really new aesthetics might work differently: instead of concerning itself with the way we humans see our world differently when we begin to see it through and with computer media that themselves "see" the world in various ways, what if we asked how computers and bonobos and toaster pastries and Boeing 787 Dreamliners develop their own aesthetics. The perception and experience of other beings remains outside our grasp, yet available to speculation thanks to evidence that emanates from their withdrawn cores like radiation around the event horizon of a black hole. The aesthetics of other beings remain likewise inaccessible to knowledge, but not to speculation--even to art.