Find joy in this sensation.

Find joy in this sensation.

Find joy in this sensation.

Find joy in this sensation.

Find joy in this sensation.

Find joy in this sensation.

Find joy in this sensation.

Find joy in this sensation.

Find joy in this sensation.

Find joy in this sensation.

Find joy in this sensation.

Find joy in this sensation.

Lucy Glendinning

PROLOGUE

I have a fear of letting go. I also have a fear of letting in, and sometimes also letting out. The idea of not only opening my practice (I can’t say that I fully know yet what it is) to others, but ultimately letting go control and allowing those who share the space with me to shape what my practice is in that event, is frightening. Perhaps one of the reasons I find myself fascinated by errors, faults, malfunctions, mistakes, glitches, and deviances is because how much I fear them, or rather, how much I fear realising that I might also be just a failure. But I guess I already know that.

THE PROBLEM

I came into this elective thinking about technologies: things that are both the machine and the knowledge that operates them. Desire is a machine, and therefore a body is one, too (Buchanan, 1997: 83). If a collective of body-machines form different relations within an event, there is knowledge that operates this movement (otherwise no formation could be possible), and therefore a collective body technology is formed. The misery and beauty of technology lays in the inevitability that it will fail. Technology was invented to fail (Sundén, 2015). So too, I hoped, the body technology would fail.

A specific type of technological failure, glitch is a non-human force and an affective event that is experienced by humans. According to Dutch visual artists and researcher Rosa Menkman, a pure glitch is accidental, coincidental, appropriated, found, and real (Menkman, 2011: 36). My artistic interest is not to reproduce glitch-alikes, but to trigger the emergence of a true bodily glitch. Therefore, the question I came with into the Schizosomatics practice was: how can a human body experience glitch?

THE RESEARCH
My practice led research investigates the relationship between glitch, narrative and women-monsters. I am investigating ways how glitch could be adapted in theatre and performance art to disrupt hegemonic narrative of becoming women-monster in order to allow alternate configurations and materialisations of monstrosity to emerge. In this research, I transpose the notion of glitch from digital technologies to performance practices. Within this research, ‘glitch’ is understood as a disruptive (but not destructive) and creative force that allows to experience how a machine (the notion of the gendered body) functions and what is it made of. Through the glitching of the body, I argue that the narratives that constitute this body become visible and therefore malleable into different, non-conforming and ambiguous forms.