Whit Pow & Alexander Galloway: Error, Noise, and Randomness
In October 2024, EAI paired with NYU’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, and the NYU Center for Disability Studies to organize Open Circuits Revisited, a series of programs and discussions focused on the legacy of artists engaging with video technologies and central concerns in the field, specifically preservation, distribution, and accessibility. The intermix of these topics, not often discussed in tandem, was key. Artist-scholars Alexander Galloway and Whit Pow presented a talk, screening, and live glitch demonstration on the 1978 Bally Astrocade video game console. Drawing from video works in EAI's catalogue, Galloway and Pow addressed the topics of error, noise, and randomness in the history of media art, and the legacy of the computer programmer and glitch artist Jamie Faye Fenton.
Galloway is the author of multiple books on digital media and critical theory, including Uncomputable: Play and Politics In the Long Digital Age (2021), and Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation (2013) with Eugene Thacker and McKenzie Wark; his contributions to the collective Radical Software Group (RSG) are available through EAI’s distribution catalogue. Pow’s writing on computational metaphor and trans history may be accessed on their website, and their book, People Orientations: Toward a Transgender Software and Video Game History, is forthcoming.
This event was supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art as a part of Video After Television: Open Circuits Revisited.