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List of contents
Foreword (Steven Jackson, Cornell University, USA)
Imperfections: Introduction (Ellen Rutten, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands)
Part 1. Imperfect Shapes
1. The Aesthetics of Imperfection in Everyday Life (Yuriko Saito, Rhode Island School of Design, USA)
2. Making Meaning with Mistakes (Mieke Bal, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands)
3. The Perfect Inverted: Dirt Aesthetics in Russian Art Activism (Yngvar Steinholt, University of Tromsø, Norway)
4. Promoting the Imperfect: Marketing Strategies to Reduce Waste of Imperfect Products (Ilona E. de Hooge, Wageningen University & Research, the Netherlands)
Part 2. Imperfect Sounds and Systems
5. Electronic Contingencies: Goeyvaerts’ Sine Wave Music and the Ideal of Perfect Sound (Melle Kromhout, University of Cambridge, UK)
6. Imperfection in Experimental Instruments and their Performance (Caleb Kelly, University of New South Wales, Australia)
7. Silicon Ashes to Silicon Ashes, Digital Dust to Digital Dust: Finitude and Fragility in Vlambeer’s GlitchHiker (Jakko Kemper, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands)
8. The Imperfections of Listing the Past: Listing Names in Holocaust Commemoration (Ernst van Alphen, Leiden University, the Netherlands)
9. Retracing an Imperfect Vision of Language with Artist Xu Bing (Tingting Hui, Leiden University, the Netherlands)
Part 3. Imperfect Selves
10. The Forced Samaritan: On Face-Distorting Wearable Objects (Linor Goralik, writer/poet, Russia/Israel)
11. ‘I Am A Strange Video Loop: Digital Technologies of the Self in Picture-Perfect Mediations (Patricia Pisters, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands)
12. Dream in a Suitcase: An Immigrant’s Transformative Journeys to Imperfect Homes (Domnica Radulescu, Washington and Lee University, USA)
13. Polder Panda: Imperfection and Sustainability in Dutch Dairy Farming (Oskar Verkaaik, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands)
Epilogue (Joanna van der Zanden, independent curator, Amsterdam, the Netherlands)
Index
About the author
Caleb Kelly is a curator/academic from New Zealand. He teaches at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Kelly’s areas of interest are sound (art) and noise. His publications include Gallery Sound (2017), Sound (ed.) (2011) and Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction (2009).Jakko Kemper is Assistant Professor in Digital Aesthetics and Platforms Vernaculars at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His research focuses on critical theory, media aesthetics, and the environmental implications of digital technology. He previously published the edited volume, Imperfections: Studies in Mistakes, Flaws, and Failures (Bloomsbury, 2021).Ellen Rutten is Professor of literature at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Her interests include Russian & global contemporary literature, art, and media. She is author of Sincerity after Communism (2017), co-editor of Memory, Media and Conflict (2014), and editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed journal Russian Literature (from January 2024 onwards Slavic Literatures).
Summary
This open access book synthesizes the swiftly growing critical scholarship on mistakes, glitches, and other aesthetics and logics of imperfection into the first transdisciplinary, transnational framework of imperfection studies.
In recent years, the trend to present the notion of imperfection as a plus rather than a problem has resonated across a range of social and creative disciplines and a wealth of world localities. As digital tools allow media users to share ever more suave selfies and success stories, psychologists promote 'the gifts of imperfections' and point to perfectionism as a catalyst for rising depression and burnout complaints and suicide rates among millennials. As sound technologies increasingly permit musicians to 'smoothen' their work, composers increasingly praise glitches, noise, and cracks. As genetic engineering upgrades with swift speed, philosophers, marketeers, and physicians plea 'against perfection' and supermarkets successfully advertise 'perfectly imperfect' vegetables. Meanwhile, cultural analysts point at skewed perspectives, blurry images, and other 'deliberate imperfections' in new and historical cinema, painting, photography, music, and literature.
While these and other experts applaud imperfection, scholars in fields ranging from disability studies to tourism critically interrogate a trend to fetishize imperfection and poverty. They rightfully warn against projecting privileged (and, often, emphatically western-biased) feel-good stories onto the less privileged, the distorted, and the frail.
The editors unite the different strands in imperfection thinking across various disciplines tools. In fourteen chapters by experts from different world localities, they offer scholars and students more historically grounded and more critically informed conceptualizations of the imperfect.
The book editions of this books are available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com.
Foreword
This open access book synthesizes the swiftly growing but fragmented critical scholarship on mistakes, glitches, and other aesthetics and logics of imperfection into the first transdisciplinary, transnational framework of imperfection studies.
