“As the unconscious is to the conscious, so computer code is to language.”
—N. Katherine Hayles, “Traumas of Code”

“Evolution forged the entirety of sentient life on this planet using only one tool: the mistake.”
—Robert Ford, Westworld

In October 2014, Taylor Swift shot to the top of the Canadian iTunes chart with a song titled “Track 3,” bumping the previous three singles from her forthcoming album, 1989, into second, third, and eighth place.

That Swift should achieve instant number one status with a new single is unremarkable. What was remarkable about “Track 3,” though, was that it was not a Taylor Swift song at all — it was not crossover pop-country with ambiguous breakup lyrics more obtuse than Carly Simon. Rather, “Track 3” by “Taylor Swift” consisted solely of eight seconds of static noise.

An apparent glitch in Canada’s iTunes store had disseminated the corrupted file attributed to Swift by mistake. And unsuspecting Swifties purchased it for download in unprecedented numbers. A mysterious mishap, to Merzbow’s dismay, made Taylor Swift the first ever chart-topping noise artist.

Technical glitches fascinate us — so much so that they produce capital.

The Beatles’ 1962 7” single “Love Me Do,” which mistakenly credits “Lennon-McArtney,” sold on Discogs in 2018 for a record $15,000. The so-called “Del Monte note,” a misprinted 1996 U.S. $20 bill upon which a Del Monte sticker was accidentally minted next to Andrew Jackson’s portrait, was auctioned on 22 January 2021 for $396,000, the highest price paid for any error banknote. The Del Monte specimen is of significant interest because it is literally currency, worth precisely $20 on paper. The typo, though, appraises it as more, and, in doing so, discloses capital’s abstraction.

In April 2026, Marta Gruntmane of Eagle, Colorado, a 35-year-old physician’s assistant, was dismayed when a systems glitch at Fidelity Investments temporarily erased all existence of her financial accounts, The New York Times reported. And a computer glitch resulted in invoices for enormous sums being dispatched around the world by Jeff Bezos’s company, Amazon Web Services, in mid-July. Dan Harvey, head of marketing at the Hampshire-based company Learning Through Landscapes, told The Guardian that he had received a bill for $7.8 billion for a service that normally costs less than 50 cents per month. Presumably, had nobody noticed these snafus, Amazon and Fidelity would have happily reaped their unjust rewards.

Everyone understands what a glitch is, and yet there is no conclusive definition or origin for the word. But key criteria are glitches’ technical connotations, and their unexpectedness. A predictable malfunction in a mechanical device is more accurately called a “bug.” A glitch, however, is an extraordinary convergence of whimsical and terrible. It’s in the way that an electronic sign flickers, mystifying what it signifies. It’s in the way that a streamed image dissolves into streaks and pixels, illuminating the revenge of the real.

Montreal is a particularly glitchy metropolis. We almost pride ourselves on how regularly our infrastructures break down. Orange cones and Rue Barrée signs are our emblems. If glitches imply irregularity, then their routineness in this city normalizes Montreal as an anomaly, where baroque flourishes of failure are everywhere in abundance.

As is their wont, our artists have been known to reflect this: think of VahMirè’s Dé[faroucher], or Floralia by Sabrina Ratté, or Tim Hecker’s “Stigmata II.” Each of these works is an anthem for catastrophe, flaunting flawed material connections.

As a fashionable expressive mode, glitch has remained enduringly robust, keeping pace with new big-tech and network advancements, providing a running commentary on their perpetual frailty. This year marked a return of the glitch in a number of forms that are represented in the ensuing pages: in works by Dana Gingras and Seulement, Myriam Bleau and Andrea Szilasi.

An attention towards glitch is somehow more than a consideration of a cultural current. It is an acknowledgment of the traumatic loss of linguistic coherence, and capital’s incommensurate character. Our economic system functions on maximizing the minimal, and minimizing the maximal, wringing leisure from labour, and forging luxury from misery. Placing glitch at the center of inquiry forces a confrontation with an economy whose fate is ultimately to glitch out.

Glitches expose the distortions of apparently smooth and seamless interfaces and show us the eerie absurdity and frequent fallibility of these structures. Glitches break the continuous flow of signal, of information, of energy. And glitches reveal the rot beneath the superficial obsession with unremitting technological and post-human innovation. They lie beyond the binary’s frontiers.

In Westworld, the HBO series referenced above, lifelike cybernetic “hosts” exist to fulfill the fantasies and desires of amusement park tourists who alternately fuck and kill them. The host “doesn’t get cold,” Anthony Hopkins’s Robert Ford assures. “It doesn’t feel ashamed; it doesn’t feel a solitary thing that we haven’t told it to.”

Programming automata for ultraviolent purposes seems to represent the frontline of our moral failures and means that the machines now have the right to rage against us. If Taylor Swift’s “Track 3” elicits an ironic chuckle, then the crash of technologies that we created to exploit and enslave implies nemesis, righteous retribution.

The machine only does what it is programmed to do. The terror arises when it threatens to revolt. Still, the impetus for artists to “glitchmaxx” suggests that mechanical friction has become the hottest creative orthodoxy.

The glitch constitutes a special class of uncanny, a malfunction that functions nonetheless, doing double duty simultaneously within aesthetic and symbolic orders. The glitch always indicates an error. But the errors that glitches indicate are only errors in highly idiosyncratic arrangements that oscillate arbitrarily between functional and broken, valuable and useless, normal and aberrant, beautiful and monstrous, natural and artificial, true and false, good and bad.

God created us in His image. If we are imperfect, this means that God is as well. Now, we are as new Gods, embedding our imperfections into our own creations. Art strives for a simulation of the divine. When the divine fails, art succeeds at profane replication.◼︎

This text is an excerpt from NicheMTL’s 2026 Yearbook, The Glitch Issue. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

_{“Ruined” images by Adeline Golliet, excerpted from the NicheMTL 2026 Yearbook, The Glitch Issue.}