After our lecture on glitch art and reading Russel's Glitch Feminism Manifesto, I learned that "failure" in digital art is frequently a plan rather than an accident. Russell presents the glitch as a refusal, a mistake that reveals the mechanisms we should be able to navigate quietly and easily. She asks what happens if we stay in the glitch instead of attempting to solve it. This concept quickly resonated with the way early internet artists viewed the web as a political, unstable, and easily broken medium rather than as a neutral instrument.

The Female Extension by Cornelia Sollfrank seems to be the ideal illustration of Russell's glitch in action. In addition to criticizing gender exclusion in the art world, Sollfrank flooded the EXTENSION competition with hundreds of fictitious applications from female artists. Technically, the museum's request for "internet art" was fulfilled, but it was also totally undermined. That's precisely why the outcome wasn't as polished or readable as institutions would have liked. The problem here isn't aesthetic; rather, it's gendered, bureaucratic, and quite embarrassing for the organization (LOL).

This explains why when museums like the Whitney attempted to gather and display the movement, net.artists proclaimed it "dead." Systems of power depend on control and legibility, as Russell argues. When net.art made its way into institutional settings, its glitchy manner ran the risk of being reduced to a displayable and safe form. What was originally available around-the-clock abruptly changed to a projection on a museum wall, which is contained, carefully chosen, and possibly less disturbing.

By viewing glitches through Russell's perspective, digital failure is reframed as something constructive rather than defective. Spamming a museum inbox, databending, or Y2K anxiety are examples of glitches that become a way to exist sideways in systems that were never intended for everyone. Error is a procedure, not a mistake. :)

I found this reading especially interesting since it makes a clear connection between the history of early computing and the current state of artificial intelligence, particularly with regard to ChatGPT. Prior to taking this course, I genuinely believed that artificial intelligence (AI) was a relatively new concept. However, after learning about ELIZA, it became clear that many of the "innovations" of today are actually just scaled-up versions of much earlier concepts

The concept of the "ELIZA effect," in which individuals begin to think that a machine truly understands them, is what most intrigued me. This has a lot to do with what we've discussed in class about digital media and Internet art, particularly how interfaces affect our perspective. Because ELIZA was presented as a therapist, users projected meaning onto it despite the fact that it was merely pattern-matching. That is not all that dissimilar from our current interactions with AI. Despite the fact that ChatGPT and other similar systems are far more sophisticated, we still often approach them as though they have feelings or intentions, which is untrue.

Discussions in class on how technology might mask the underlying systems are also related to this. AI appears to conceal complexity behind a simple, conversational interface, whereas Internet artists frequently attempt to expose or criticize hidden infrastructures. Because it encourages us to trust systems we don't comprehend, the interpretation makes clear that this might be risky. Considering how much we depend on algorithms in our daily lives, that concept truly resonated with me.

Overall, the reading caused me to reconsider AI as a continuation of long-standing concerns about human reasoning, innovation, and control rather than as a startling breakthrough. It also helped me realize that, in addition to the technology itself, how we create and use these systems is just as important.