Artists Are Using Insects as a Metaphor to Disrupt Museums and Archives
A new paper argues that glitch art—deliberately corrupting digital systems—can learn from actual insects to challenge institutional power structures. The framework offers practical strategies for organizations to rethink how museums, archives, and collections enforce authority, with implications for cultural institutions seeking more inclusive approaches to curation and historical narratives.
Originaltitel: The Transformative Bug Glitches, Moths, and Monstrosities
This essay proposes a new “entomological” turn in the genre of glitch art, illustrated by the figure of the bug as an actual insect. Our point of departure is an incident from 1947, when engineers at Harvard University found a moth stuck in one of the Mark II computer components and taped it into their logbook, labeling it “first actual case of bug being found.” We suggest that approaching the glitch as bug and its insect characteristics beyond the humancentric points to wider critical potentials of disrupting a system’s logic, organization, and procedures through a “nonhuman vision.” Drawing on Jussi Parikka’s Insect Media (2010) as well as Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020), we argue that an “entomological” approach offers glitchy strategies for feminist, queer, and decolonial disruptions of oppressive systems. This is addressed through works by artists Amalie Smith, Esse McChesney, and Josèfa Ntjam, who in our readings are glitching museums, archives and collections, historical (colonial) narratives, and heteronormative concepts of gender. An entomological understanding of media embraces swarms, webbing, symbiosis, metamorphosis, virus, composite vision, and extinction. As this chapter will exemplify, approaching the glitch as bug thus opens space for agencies and frictions from both the machinic and the natural realms. In our readings of the works we highlight Donna Haraway’s monster as a counter-figure to the standard white embodiment of anthropocentric normality. Furthermore, the metamorphosis of moths is a powerful symbol for human changes and is often used in queer and trans* activism. Rosi Braidotti also turns to insects as ultimate hybrids, noting how they point to posthuman sensibilities and sexualities, suggesting an insect paradigm as a model for polymorphous anti-phallic sexuality. The contemporary art practices of Smith, McChesney, and Ntjam employ glitching in ways that create ecologies of in-betweenness in bodies, media, technologies, and insects and other nonhuman animals.