Learning to Glitshn: On Trying to Be (Impossible)
Amit German
The word glitch derives from Yiddish terms glitsh (n) (‘slippery ground’) and glitshn (v) (‘to slide or glide’). I think about this not only in relation to computers, circuits or code, but also to bodies traversing systems that were never designed to accommodate movement that slides, loops, or arrives out of order.
The video work Digital TV Dinner (1978) by trans programmer Jamie Faye Fenton, with Raul Zaritsky and Dick Ainsworth, is often cited as one of the first recorded works of glitch art. By slamming her fist into a computer system she herself created, Fenton generated glitches on the screen, exposing intricate structures hidden within. The work demonstrates knowledge emerging from intimate familiarity with the system, and her fist becomes the interface through which she interferes and exposes it: a blunt, bodily, risky move. It signals a willingness to test what can be when glitch becomes embodied. The trans fist is practical: a way of thinking through the body which Legacy Russell would describe as a ‘refusal to protect the idea, the institution of “body” that alienates’.
A practice of embodied movement forces curiosity and presence, but sometimes, being in a body is hard work. If glitch is when a body refuses legibility, as Russell notes, it is not abstract to understand that the labour of embodiment is made explicit in a trans body. There is ongoing negotiation: within gendered systems, in control over how one is read, in the work of keeping a slippery form safe. Glitch doesn’t resolve this tension; instead it affirms this complexity to persist without apology.
Forty years after Digital TV Dinner, in a recorded demonstration of a gentler technique, Fenton repeatedly attempts to produce glitches. Process made visible, most of these attempts produce unremarkable results. Finally, a sustained, unusually complex glitch appears, and with Fenton, I fall quiet as we watch it unfold. ‘Not sure what we did to deserve that one,’ she remarks with a chuckle. In this, Fenton is teaching something significant: glitch arrives unpredictably, not as skill or achievement, but as evidence of remaining in contact long enough for a system to give way.
I consider this in relation to my body-based practice. In the movement approaches of Butoh and BodyWeather, you commit to tasks that may be impossible to complete; the value here lies not in success, but in the genuine, embodied trying. You move incorrectly, things go wrong, and you persist anyway. Such logics are unsettling to systems organised around results, productivity and bodies performing correctly. Here I embrace transmobility, Mallory Kay Nelson’s term for bodies moving across, through and beyond prescribed pathways.
To glitch with the body, one must live inside it, staying in relation with its rhythms, limits, refusals. Where does my body reveal itself as delayed, misaligned, out of sync? Through testing, sliding and observing, without aiming for coherence, I let go of demanding improvement. In this pursuit, glitch offers companionship with an open hand; all I am asked for is trust.
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[1] Glitsh’ and ‘glitshn,’ in Solon Beinfeld and Harry Bochner (eds.), Comprehensive Yiddish-English Dictionary, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2013.
[2] Jamie Faye Fenton, Raul Zaritsky and Dick Ainsworth, ‘Digital TV Dinner,’ Youtube, uploaded October 9, 2009, https://youtu.be/Ad9zdlaRvdM?si=ZEPG4ClGX_HICbzw; Michael Betancourt, ‘The Invention of Glitch Video: Digital TV Dinner,’ 2017. Millennium Film Journal 65, no. 1 (2017): 54–63.
[3] Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, Verso, London, 2020, p. 152.
[4] This is true of many other bodies, of course, though I can only speak for mine.
[5] Jamie Faye Fenton, “Primordial Glitch Art,” Youtube, uploaded October 9, 2009, https://youtu.be/MMhqFtkDk9s?si=F8gymeapDSMwIAsN (accessed 10 April 2026).
[6] Mallory Kay Nelson, Ashley Shew and Bethany Stevens, “Transmobility: Rethinking the Possibilities in Cyborg (Cripborg) Bodies,” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5, no. 1 (2019): 1–20.
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