The glitch as a dynamic embodied metaphor

The paper explores the cultural phenomenon of the visual glitch to understand the radical embodied potential (Chemero 2013) our digital world has in shaping the way we think and express ourselves. Employed with casual frequency in contemporary Western visual culture as an indexical signpost for the digital world (Jackson 2011), the glitch, a momentary slip on an electronic path, not only offers insight into the hidden messages of Mchulan (1964), but as a nonlinguistic, cultural experience, evokes El Refaie’s dynamic embodiment of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (2019).

Glitches are most often defined as directional, relevance metaphors. As a sign or visual cue, the glitch jolts us from an acceptance to question the reality we face, while questioning the position of the interpreter as agent. Yet the glitch is more than an alienating Verfremdungseffekt, glitches are experienced and “disturbing to our senses” (Menkman 2018). This imperfection of digital form has quickly developed as a consequence of culture to be appreciated as a metaphor for the human condition from isolation, fragility, and pain to hope.

The paper pursues the notion of embodied metaphor further to suggest a dynamic response to action and affordance beyond dysfunction where the body responds on a socio-cultural level from digital as much as physical stimuli. Comparable to Leder’s notion (1990) of how our physicality forces itself into our consciousness when faced with any dysfunction, the physicality of the glitch is like a wound, both to the film as a lived entity (Sobchack 1992) and the viewer (Gallese 2005; Gallese & Guerra 2017), jolting a subconscious engagement with a reality from the embodied simulation in a mirrored world.

Through detailed analysis of the visuals of a glitch from contemporary animation to its application in mainstream film, news and documentary programming, I discuss how glitches are not read like a verbal metaphor but are more akin to dropping the book, attacking our senses (Cameron 2017), and playing out the ‘complexity and volatility’ of the visually conceptual metaphors described by El Refaie (2019). This paper contributes to the debate on non-verbal manifestations of conceptual metaphors, explores how descriptions of the glitch as visual metaphor unfurl to reveal its cultural and embodied roots in spatial primaries (Pitt and Casasanto 2022) and image schema.


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