“Investigate the misusage of technology as a gesture of freedom”: Glitch Dysfunction in New Media Art and Art Education

Digital dysfunction in contemporary new media art can be used to outline possibilities for productive and even radical applications of the digital in art educational practices. In this paper, I will analyze the work of a number of contemporary new media artists who use the motif of the glitch. I will provide suggestions for pedagogical approaches that relate and respond to these specific artistic tactics: the provocative, playful, and probing ways that new media art deals with various forms of dysfunction. Art educators at many levels can learn much about how digital technologies can be used to make art by studying how digital technologies fail.