WHITNEY (WHIT) POW

A Trans Historiography of Glitches and Errors

ABSTRACT In 1978, queer and transgender programmer Jamie Faye Fenton created the first
piece of experimental video glitch art, Digital TV Dinner, using the Bally Astrocade, a home

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computer and game console of her own design that was, for six months, the cheapest home
computer available. Digital TV Dinner stands as a record of computational failure: it was
created by Fenton through a pointed misuse of the computer system that caused the screen
to dissolve into waves of pixelated glitches. What might it mean to center the glitch as
a historically trans mode of media production? And how might we write trans media history
as a history of unmediation—that is, a history of undoing mediation? A history of things that
cannot be documented, or that evade or dismantle mediation, in which the fullness of trans
life and history exceeds the images presented in the screen itself? KEYWORDS Bally
Astrocade, digital media, Digital TV Dinner, experimental video, glitch art, Jamie Faye
Fenton, queer theory, software studies, transgender studies, videogame studies

Jamie Faye Fenton is tall, with long gray hair cut into blunt bangs. She wears
blue jeans and a black leather jacket. We are here in 2018 at the art exhibition
Chicago New Media 1973–1992 at Gallery 400 in Chicago because on exhibit
is an experimental glitch video titled Digital TV Dinner (1978, fig. 1). When
I enter the exhibition’s gallery space, there is a video projection being played on
the far wall, behind a set of arcade cabinets developed by Bally Midway,
a Chicago video game and software company Fenton worked for in the
1970s. On the white wall in front of us, the projection cuts to a black screen
with the words DIGITAL TV DINNER.1
I stand alongside Fenton, watching the images she created with Raul
Zaritzky (with sound by Dick Ainsworth) forty years ago using the Bally
Astrocade, a video game and home computer system that debuted in 1977.
The wall fills with a video projection of white and reddish-black squares,
lines, and digital artifacts cascading down the full height of the room. The
wall becomes the screen: the phrase “SELECT GAME” is garbled at the top
of the wall, intersected by horizontal scan lines of white and reddish brown

Feminist Media Histories, Vol. 7, Number 1, pps. 197–230. electronic ISSN: 2373-7492 © 2021 by the
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FIGURE 1.The author with Jamie Faye Fenton at Gallery 400,
Chicago, 2018. Photo: Jon Cates.

(fig. 2). Repeating panels of artifacts line the wall from left to right, blocks of
reddish black and dark blue assembling in patterns that look similar to the
teeth on a comb, or the dots on the matrix of a punch card (fig. 3). There is
a wipe downward that happens systematically throughout the video—a cas-
cade, a waterfall—that clears the screen, filling it with reddish black only to
fill it again with long lines and artifacts. The repeating patterns of blocks
resemble the patterns in a QR code (fig. 4). Moment to moment the screen,
the wall, is unmade. I watch the repetitions, the looping, the constant
return to familiar arrays of artifacts and words like “PLAY” that are assem-
bled and reassembled. The blocks of pixels undo themselves only to remake
themselves again.

198 F E M I N I S T M E D I A H I S TO R I E S WINTER 2021

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FIGURE 2.The phrase “SELECT GAME” is garbled at the
top. Jamie Faye Fenton, Raul Zaritsky, and Dick
Ainsworth, Digital TV Dinner, 1978.

FIGURE 3. Patterns reminiscent of the teeth on a comb, or the

dots on the matrix of a punch card. Jamie Faye Fenton, Raul
Zaritsky, and Dick Ainsworth, Digital TV Dinner, 1978.

Fenton is a queer and transgender computer and video game programmer,

and the history of computational media production and glitch art is a trans-
gender history. Digital TV Dinner is arguably the first piece of digital video
glitch art ever created, and one of the first pieces of computer-generated video
art that could be produced at home.2 In 1977, Fenton managed the

Pow | A Trans Historiography of Glitches and Errors 199

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FIGURE 4. Repeating patterns of blocks that resemble the
patterns in a QR code. Jamie Faye Fenton, Raul Zaritsky,
and Dick Ainsworth, Digital TV Dinner, 1978

production and design of the Bally Astrocade home computer and video game
console, which was, for six months, the cheapest home computer on the market
(fig. 5).3 Fenton designed the console’s operating system and wrote the pro-
gramming language it was built on, called Bally BASIC. She knew all of the
possible outcomes for its hardware and software. She coded what the user could
do with the Astrocade, and also what the user could not do: she programmed
the error messages and error logs that would pop up on the screen when the
computer could not compute something or carry forth a command.
And yet, in her work as a glitch artist, she was most interested in using the
computer to produce imagery that was happenstance and beyond the binaries
and boundaries of computational rule sets. These glitches were not produced
through the purposeful writing of code, but instead provoked by the user point-
edly misusing the computer system through applying a series of embodied acts to
the hardware of the computer itself—slamming the device with a fist, ejecting
a cartridge at the wrong moment. These actions, (mis)applied to the computer
system, both produce the images and undo the system, unraveling the screen into
a series of unexpected glitch images. These glitches dissolve the computer’s
interface into cascades of randomized visual artifacts that point toward compu-
tational failures that could not be anticipated or programmed, even by Fenton.
Digital TV Dinner stands as its own transgender, or trans, media histori-
ography. It is a record of what-ifs, of outsides, of possibilities beyond the

200 F E M I N I S T M E D I A H I S TO R I E S WINTER 2021

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FIGURE 5.The Bally Astrocade professional arcade and home computer, released
in 1977. Photos: courtesy Evan Amos.

scope of what could be coded and anticipated. This glitch art piece is both
a record of the failure of software and a record of trans history, labor, and
embodiment, and what could not be captured by the computational system:
Fenton’s hands manipulating the console, repeatedly pressing eject on the
Astrocade while it was processing to produce these small and beautiful

Pow | A Trans Historiography of Glitches and Errors 201

failures; the knowledge she had of the computer system as a closed loop; and
her expressed wonderment in willing a computational system to produce
something entirely unexpected, something beyond the closed circuits and
rules and regulations of a software program.
Digital TV Dinner is a record of Fenton knowing a system so well, and so
completely, that she could imagine how the system might be otherwise, and
how it might be unmade. It is a record of the ephemeral, the unknown, what

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is unable to be captured, as much as it is a record of what happened. With
many histories of computational media written as indexical series of facts,
dates, archives, and records pointing toward the things that were ostensibly
there, positioning Fenton and Digital TV Dinner as its own record of trans
life, its own trans media historiography, imagines trans life as beyond the
mediation of what is known, and what is capable of being held, by a computer
system. It is a history that necessarily operates both within and outside of the
boundaries of what can be stored, represented, and fully known. To position
trans life at the heart of computational media history, and at the heart of the
glitch, is to understand how trans media history is a history of undoing—how
technological systems are done, and, most importantly, undone.

UNMEDIATING TRANS MEDIA HISTORY

What does it mean to write a trans historiography of glitches and errors?

I write this history with the awareness of the embodied relationship between
trans life and institutions, taking from trans studies the constant political
awareness of the relationship between trans life and systems of governance
enacted through nations, states, and institutions, which have become invisibly
part of the binary rule sets enacted within computer systems.
Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah, and Lisa Jean Moore write: “‘Trans-’ . . .
becomes the capillary space of connection and circulation between the
macro- and micro-political registers through which the lives of bodies
become enmeshed in the lives of nations, states, and capital-formations,
while ‘-gender’ becomes one of several set of variable techniques or temporal
practices (such as race or class) through which bodies are made to live.”4
The micro-political acts and practices of trans bodies are deeply affected by
the macro-political regulation of gender and trans life. Trans is necessary to
understanding this media history, and necessary to understanding Fenton
and the glitch. Trans history is itself a history of mediation: it is tied directly
to histories of trans people told through documentation, bureaucracy,

202 F E M I N I S T M E D I A H I S TO R I E S WINTER 2021

surveillance, archives, and other forms of mediating power of the state and
nation. Stryker writes:

Previously, people who occupied transgender positions were compelled to

be referents in the language games of other senders and addresses—they
were the object of medical knowledge delivered to the asylum keeper, the
subject of police reports presented to the judge; they were the dirty little

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outcasts of feminist and gay liberation discourses whose speakers clamored
for the affects of the liberal state. The psychotherapist whispered of them
into the surgeon’s ear, while the lawyer nodded in approval. Only rarely did
we speak to others on our own behalf.5

Trans history is a history that has been told through others, through docu-
ments, through institutions, through mediation. To write a trans media history
is to be aware of what it means for trans lives to be taken, represented, and told
to others, and the history of these practices. A trans media historiography must
reconsider what mediation is, and what mediation does, and ask: How can one
write a trans media history when mediation itself has such a violent history in
relationship to trans people and the histories we are told through?
What does it mean to write trans media history as a history of unmedia-
tion—that is, a history of undoing mediation? A history of things that cannot
be documented or mediated, or things that evade or dismantle mediation in
relationship to trans life? Unmediation can take several forms. The first is
considering trans media history as one that evades knowability, with trans life
as “missing” from representation, archives, and recording within histories of
media (and particularly computational media). When writing trans media
history, we must always be aware of that which cannot be saved, that which
will always evade documentation and mediation, and things that have not been
recorded or cannot be recorded in relationship to media.6 Secondly, unmedia-
tion brings to the foreground the construction and interruption of mediation
itself as an active and often linear process, a movement of a signal from sign
to signified, input to output. Here, unmediation is the awareness of how
power circulates within and around media technologies, and the undoing of
these systems. With regard to Fenton, unmediation takes the form of the
breakdown of the screen through the glitch, which makes the user aware of
the construction of the computer system, and the user’s own interpellation
(or lack of interpellation) within these systems.
Interpellation is a word that can be used to describe the way users and
citizens are addressed and the way users and citizens identify themselves

Pow | A Trans Historiography of Glitches and Errors 203

within systems of governance. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun discusses this in
relationship to software, writing that “importantly, the ‘choices’ operating
systems offer limit the visible and the invisible, the imaginable and the
unimaginable. . . . You are not, however, aware of software’s constant con-
striction and interpellation (also known as user-friendliness) unless you find
yourself frustrated with its defaults.”7 Chun draws parallels between software
and citizenship and the ways in which institutional systems of governance

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and computer systems both interpellate or expect and anticipate the actions
and presences of certain users, certain citizens.
The glitch itself poses a momentary experience of undoing, unmending: the
artifacts that appear on-screen show us the breakdown of these systems and
a fleeting awareness of the way we are imbricated, or unable to be imbricated,
within its systems and structures. The glitch might appear as blocky artifacts
that take the shape of ghostly faces when streaming a low-latency video online;
the crashing of Microsoft Word or Photoshop when it is unable to complete
a task; or a moment in a video game when an avatar’s body sinks through the
ground, clipping through the boundaries of the world itself. These everyday
glitches—happenstance, unintended, random—call attention to the fact that
these software systems are designed to be immediate but in reality are mediating,
serving as an intermediary. To unmediate is to call attention to this continuous
mediation, to the continuous interpellation we experience through media, to
the fact that systems of governance function similarly—that some people are
interpellated fully into systems of power, while others are not.
For many trans people, and especially Black and Indigenous trans people
and trans people of color, this experience of interpellation is broken con-
stantly, revealing the ways in which government systems do not anticipate
our presences. We become aware that there are many mediating steps that
comprise seemingly fluid, everyday actions like moving through workplaces,
homes, and public spaces, or getting access to passports, visas, and medical
care. To unmediate is to see the constant systems of rules, the violence of
representation and documentation, and the ways in which mediation does
not work in expected ways, too, for trans people, or for trans history.8
The glitch itself is revelatory in relationship to power structures. While
some might experience glitches as accidental moments in their everyday use of
technology, such moments are still moments of undoing. In the case of
Fenton, it is the pointed and continuous undoing within Digital TV Dinner
that allows for a startling suspension of this glitch moment into moments,
and these moments into minutes. This suspension of the glitch undoes the

204 F E M I N I S T M E D I A H I S TO R I E S WINTER 2021

computer, the game console, and the screen almost to the point of complete
illegibility. As we watch Digital TV Dinner, we are resting in a moment,
expanded, in which we are no longer interpellated, in which the screen itself
is no longer functioning as a representational intermediary, in which we
watch computational interfaces dissolve from symbols to signals that blink,
irregularly, struggling to signify.
In positioning the glitch within this trans historiography of glitches and

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errors, we must consider the tactic of suspension. While the glitch itself is an
everyday, and oftentimes accidental, moment in relationship to media tech-
nologies experienced by many, Fenton’s experimentation with duration,
length, and suspension play a part here in positioning the glitch as a trans
mode of production. The glitch, as mobilized by Fenton, is not a fleeting
moment of failure, but two minutes and forty-one seconds of undoing. It is
a collection of the effects of the repeated bodily acts that Fenton imposes
upon the machine. It is a constellation of moments, dotted through time,
spliced and edited together in the glitch video we know as Digital TV Dinner.
The video itself is a sustained and lingering deconstruction of the sovereignty
of the computer system. It highlights the ways in which we might imagine
alternative possibilities, and alternative futures, for the computational rule
sets we have internalized so greatly that they have become invisible.

HISTORY AS MEDIATION

I write a trans historiography of glitches and errors with the awareness that
history itself is a form of mediation: an assemblage of information that takes
the shape of a person or objects that are deemed meaningful or important.
Fenton was the “first” in several domains of history, but it is not enough to
position transgender life in histories of digital media as a series of elided “firsts.”
To write a trans media history, we must also consider unmediation: the undoing
of the way history mediates, with an awareness of historiography itself as a set of
practices that hierarchize certain modes of knowing, of being, over others.
A “traditional” history of Fenton and her place in computing history
might be positioned with regard to industrial histories of games and com-
putation, focused on dates, objects, and firsts: The fact that Fenton was one
of the founders of MacroMind, a software company that operated in Chicago
in the 1980s, which later became Macromedia and was then acquired by
Adobe Inc., which produces software like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.
The fact that Macromedia Director, a program Fenton created, became

Pow | A Trans Historiography of Glitches and Errors 205

Adobe Director, which was the precursor for what we know as Flash, a plat-
form used in most major web browsers to run games and interactive and
visual media.9 The fact that she led the team that designed and implemented
the Bally Astrocade home computer and video game console, which at $300
was the first and cheapest of its kind for six months.10 The fact that the
Astrocade utilized the Zilog Z80 microprocessor and therefore situates trans
life, labor, and history within the movement of computers and microproces-

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sors from institutions to home spaces.11 We might also consider the history
of Digital TV Dinner’s debut at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s
Electronic Visualization Event 3 in 1978 and its later broadcast on WTTW’s
Image Union public television program in 1979.12 Or that the Bally BASIC
programming language she adapted for the Bally Astrocade home computer
and game console was designed to be sold to households with coding literacy
in mind. And lastly, the economic and capitalistic failure of the Astrocade in
the wake of the Video Game Crash of 1983 and how this movement toward
“accessible” home computing in terms of both the cost of the computer, and
the use of the computer as a learning tool for programming, might be viewed
as one possible trajectory of many for the home computer that was later
outmoded and overcome by companies like IBM, Microsoft, and Apple.
To write a trans historiography of glitches and errors is to unmediate an entire
mode we use to write and tell media histories. Noting the “firsts” or “onlys” of
something, especially with regard to queer and trans histories of digital media, is
itself an eliding process, which reinforces the idea that existing histories of
technology are already complete timelines with momentary lapses in acknowl-
edging the contributions of marginalized people.13 Many existing histories of
technology are centered on computational objects and their preservation, which
is predicated on the institutional form of the archive itself and its systems of
funding, ownership, physical space limitations, and relationship to institutional
modes of deeming who matters, what matters, and what is saved.
The “addendum” and “revision” are regulatory and necropolitical acts that
have been enacted in a number of historical and institutional circumstances
with regard to queer and trans life, and especially Black and Indigenous queer
and trans lives and queer and trans lives of color. To write history is to
produce an assemblage of facts and information, and this history is highly
mediated, historically situated, and revisionist, not unlike the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders itself as a clinical archive that docu-
ments the changing orientation of the American Psychiatric Association, and
the US medical-industrial complex at large, toward the regulation of gender

206 F E M I N I S T M E D I A H I S TO R I E S WINTER 2021

and sexuality.14 The revision and the addendum are institutional acts of knowl-
edge curation that reinforce historical systems of governance with regard to
who may revise these histories, why, when, and for what reason. Achille
Mbembe writes in “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits” (2002):

The archive is primarily the product of a judgement, the result of the exercise
of a specific power and authority, which involves placing certain documents

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in an archive at the same time as others are discarded. The archive, therefore,
is fundamentally a matter of discrimination and of selection, which, in the
end, results in the granting of a privileged status to certain written
documents, and the refusal of that same status to others, thereby judged
“unarchivable.” The archive is, therefore, not a piece of data, but a status.15

We must consider the way that histories of technology have been written
as careful collections of documents and facts narrativized into movements
toward technological “progress,” which is itself a racist and colonialist ideol-
ogy. We must also call attention to the methodology of “adding back” elided
marginalized people to histories of games and technology as, in and of itself,
a historiographic process that has the potential to reinforce the same systems
of power that elided us to begin with. The “adding on” of marginalized
people, especially queer and trans people and people of color, to these sup-
posedly linear histories (which are overwhelmingly focused on dates, objects,
firsts, financial successes, and market saturation) reinforces existing modes of
historiography: who we deem important, why something is important, what
people thought was worth being saved, and what space they had available to
save it. Laine Nooney criticizes the addendum as a historiographic method in
relationship to women in video game history in “A Pedestal, A Table, A Love
Letter: Archaeologies of Gender in Videogame History” (2013):

I am occupied with the historical mechanisms through which gendered

bodies become legible to videogame history. . . . For, what does it mean to
“make [this history] wider”? If “making wider” is simply an act of adding to
a body of already visible thought in order to locate the “roots of electronic
gaming” . . .then videogame history does this quite frequently in relation to
histories of women. If all we try to do is “widen” the scope of analysis,
questions about the relevance of marginalized identities and historically
specific subject positions can only be dealt with through an “additive”
mode as in: “Oh, let’s add women on. Let’s put them back in.” . . . The
historical analysis “widens” to see them, yet cannot account for their
historical marginality.16

Pow | A Trans Historiography of Glitches and Errors 207

 To write a trans media history, we must also be aware of the mediation of
history itself, and call attention to the modes with which facts, dates, archives,
and data have stood in, mediated, and become representations of trans life
and trans history. We must be aware of media, and the act of mediation itself,
as always necessarily materially and historically specific, imbued with their
own practices and politics. I write this trans historiography of glitches and
errors with the awareness of what has not been saved. Re-centering the

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ephemeral, and the acts, erasure, and embodiment within computer and
video game history, allows us to argue that what has been lost—the objects
missing from archives, the trans histories that are left out of historical narra-
tives, all things that have not been recorded—have a life and a history that we
can still trace, and which is still meaningful, that still anchors us as trans
people to our pasts, presents, and futures.

INSIDE/OUTSIDE, ERROR/GLITCH

The history of computational media is a history of enumeration—of

“computing,” the word taken at its most basic value—and the use of com-
puters to hold information meant to stand in for lives, time, and locations,
rendering them as data. Populations are accounted for through the mapping
and accounting of bodies to smaller and smaller units that could fit into
smaller and smaller spaces: the punch card, the transistor, the microchip. We
might read the history of computing as a history of density, a history of
compression, a history of space, motion, of inside and outside.17 In situating
the body as documented inside of these systems, I also ask, is there an outside
to this system? And what might a trans history of glitch tell us about
imagining the possibility of an outside to these technologies of sovereignty?
Nael Bhanji writes about border crossing, motion, and movement, noting
that narratives of linear progression that establish before and after and inside
and outside as fixed objects, tied to place, are colonialist frameworks for
orienting narratives of trans embodiment and history:
Contemporary transsexual narratives are often accounts of linear
progression: the journey from one location to another—“from
fragmentation to integration, from alienation to reconciliation, from loss
to restoration”—where one is meant to leave the transgressive space and
transition towards one’s fully embodied identity. The transitional journey
itself is merely a link between locations—a sort of gendered non-zone
between origin and destination—and not a place to call home.18

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 I return here to the idea of an outside and an inside to computer systems,
their coded enforcement of rule sets and systems thinking, and how we
might imagine the momentary glitch itself as this “non-zone”: a place of
movement, fluctuation, and in-between-ness that calls attention to the fact
that the glitch is a motion, a movement, a flux rather than a resting place,
a point A or a point B. The glitch presents us with moments of fleeting
possibility and promise—imagery that signals to us that there is something

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beyond the coded boundaries of rule sets within software systems, that there
might be the possibility for something unintended, something unstable,
something unimaginable whose status is never quite fixed, never quite
bounded.
The processes that computer systems are purposefully coded to perform might
be viewed as an inside to the system, with a purposefully programmed and known
set of outcomes. For instance, if a user types a command, the computer is
programmed to either accept the command or reject it due to not being able
to process it, and the system will reveal this error to the user with an error message,
or the simple inability to carry forth with a task. This way of conceptualizing
software error does not break the computer. Instead the computer is able to
enforce its limitations and regulations on the user—“No, I can’t compute this
information, it’s not numerically possible,” the computer might think, and the
computer might respond to the command to divide two by zero with an error
message in the visual interface. The software error internal to the computer
system is designed to communicate to the user the boundaries of what the
computer can do, effectively enforcing a limitation on the user’s ability to manip-
ulate the system before the user can exceed these boundaries and break them.
If we conceptualize the error as inside, we might be able to position the
glitch, a kind of software failure, as operating outside—a breaking and over-
coming of the computer system and its coded boundaries, a melding and
dismantling of these rule sets as sovereign. In the glitch, failure is positioned
not as a state but an act that dissolves these boundaries, breaks these limita-
tions, and in turn produces completely uncoded, unseen, and unanticipated
visualizations within the computer’s interface.

SORRY: THE SOFTWARE ERROR

The Bally Astrocade relies on a programming language that Fenton wrote

called Bally BASIC, or Beginners’ All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code,
which was based on Li-Chen Wang’s programming language Palo Alto Tiny

Pow | A Trans Historiography of Glitches and Errors 209

BASIC. The 1981 version of the instruction manual for Bally BASIC begins
with the following:

Welcome to the world of computers.19 There are many versions of BASIC

as well as several other computer languages. The term, BASIC, is an
acronym for: Beginners’ All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. Bally
BASIC is a language designed to make computers and programming easier

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to understand. It is an expanded version of Li-Chen Wang’s Palo Alto
Tiny BASIC. Written by Ja[mie] Fenton, Bally BASIC allows you to
program or create pictures and sounds accompanied by a full range of 256
color choices. Bally BASIC expands your computer by letting you program
your own computer games, electronic music and video art.20

Marketing flyers from 1979 called the console the Bally Computer System
and noted that it contained an “exclusive, built-in Bally Brain,TM a powerful
microprocessor, [that] creates a ‘memory bank’ of more than 12,000 in-
structions” (fig. 6).21 The cassettes (also called cartridges) sold for the Astro-
cade were unique in that they also contained their own chips for memory
storage, where users could “add up to 8,000 more bytes with each Videoca-
deTM Cassette.”22 Much of the language in these marketing materials posi-
tioned the Astrocade as a computer that would allow users to become familiar
with coding and creating visual media, including games, digital art, and
computer-generated audio, programmed using Bally BASIC, which came
packaged with the Astrocade as a separate Videocade cassette. “It’s instant
creativity with Bally BASIC,” a second advertising flyer reads. “This program-
ming cassette is an easy-to-understand version of the BASIC computer lan-
guage [used] to help users create their own games, art, and electronic music.
With these important exclusives: A self-teaching course that lets users create
programs in minutes, an easy to use programming keypad.”23
A 1981 marketing flyer highlights the bundling of the Bally BASIC car-
tridge with each console as one of the console’s main selling points: “The
most fun game of all is learning to create your own computer programs. Now
there’s no easier way to learn about computers than with the new Bally
BASIC system. This plug-in cartridge with built-in audio tape interface
converts the ARCADE into a personal computer you can program yourself”
(fig. 7).24 Fenton and the Astrocade’s creators imagined the home video game
console as a full-fledged computer that could code and produce its own
software. The manual for the Bally BASIC, which she wrote with Dick
Ainsworth, George Moses, and Brett Bilbrey, includes lessons on “Printing,

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FIGURE 6. Advertising flyer for the Bally Computer System, 1979. Image:
courtesy BallyAlley.com.

Counting, and Loops,” “Subroutines,” and “Arrays.” After these primers, the
manual then moves on to lessons about writing code to produce computer-
generated media with sections titled “Video Art,” “Electronic Music,”
“Graphics,” and “Computer Games” (fig. 8).
In a 1978 paper given by Fenton, Thomas A. DeFanti, and Nola Donato
titled “BASIC Zgrass: A Sophisticated Graphics Language for the Bally Home

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FIGURE 7. Advertising flyer for the Bally Computer System, 1981. Image: courtesy
BallyAlley.com.

Library Computer,” they outline their vision for making the programming of
computer graphics and computer-generated art accessible to home computer
users. They situate the video game console and computer hybrid within a par-
ticular historical moment for home technology users and hobbyists, describing
the movement of computers to home spaces within the context of amateur (or
ham) radio and the computer literacies required to teach users to code:

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F I G U R E 8 . Contents page of the Bally BASIC manual (Columbus, OH:
Astrovision, Inc, 1981).

Home systems are not trying very hard to be cheap minicomputers for
expert users. These users when at home can be likened to the ham radio
operators of the nineteen fifties, able to change diodes, violently shake
intermittent boards and, in general, understand the innards. These persons
can also get gratification from fighting with manuals and the trials of the
latest software release, just as we professionals do for a living. Zgrass,
however is designed for the two-hour-a-week user. This type of person is
guaranteed to continually forget the syntax and semantics of whatever
software exists. Zgrass is designed (certainly at the cost of computer time
and memory use) so the user does not have to rely on a manual to decipher
everything.25
Fenton, DeFanti, and Donato position the Bally Astrocade as counter to the
computer hobbyist movement, writing that ham radio was saturated with
home users who were experts, well-versed in the technologies they were using
from home.26 They write that minicomputers, which were very recently

Pow | A Trans Historiography of Glitches and Errors 213

becoming household items, were similarly objects of technical proficiency,
rendered inaccessible not so much due to cost, but due to lack of access to
household programming literacy.
The error message is positioned within this paper as part and parcel of
computer literacy and as a disciplinary method to structure and regulate user
interaction. The manual for Bally BASIC discusses how errors are commu-
nicated to the user, with advice like, “If you make a mistake in punctuation

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(as in leaving out a comma), the computer cannot run your instruction. If
this happens the computer will print the instruction on the screen with
a question mark in the position of your error, to show you where your
mistake is.”27 In the same conference paper, Fenton, DeFanti and Donato
propose the programmed software error as a kind of pedagogical tool that
would allow coding and programming to become easier for novice
programmers:

The essence of the teaching problem stems from the fact that novices have
tremendous problems with meaningless (to them) error messages. You
really have to know nearly everything about a system before you can start
knowing why what you have typed does not work. This is absolutely not an
overstatement of the problem. . . . Commands are gentle to users. If not
enough arguments are supplied, if an incorrect argument is given or the
argument is non-existent, a special error fixup routine is entered. This
routine prints out the command in error, points at the argument in error
and says, for example, “No! this command wants a variable name here.”28

The Bally BASIC programming language is built around simplifying the

signaling of error on the behalf of the computer to the user. The error is
a system that has always been in place—the computer signaling in various
capacities that the user’s input is illegible, incomputable, unrecognizable,
unactionable. That the user’s capacity for acting within the system is not
possible.

***

In early 2020, before the shutdowns due to COVID-19, I made several

research trips to the Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive, housed in the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The collection was curated by Pro-
fessor Jon Cates, and I visited under the supervision of educator and glitch
artist James Connolly. The archive itself is a room filled wall-to-wall with old
magnetic tapes in a variety of formats, from Sony U-matic to VHS. Over the

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FIGURE 9. Tapes the author digitized at the Phil Morton
Memorial Research Archive at the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago, 2020.

course of several weeks, I digitized a small group of U-matic tapes that, I had
been told, had never been viewed or dubbed before. Among the videos
I digitized was a series of KC-60 U-matic cassettes with the titles “B-
BASIC WITH DAN” scrawled on them in block letters and numbered from
one to three (fig. 9). The tapes begin with a video capture of a television
screen hooked up to the Bally Astrocade. The voice of Dan Sandin, a com-
puter graphics artist and creator of the Sandin Image Processor (an analog
synthesizer that was used to augment video art in real time) narrates the code
he enters and executes on the screen.29 Throughout these three tapes, Sandin
gives a live demonstration of how to program sounds and images with the
Bally Astrocade home computer.
Sandin’s first demonstration on the first tape is a lesson on the error
messages that have been programmed into Bally BASIC programming lan-
guage. Sandin begins, “Let’s start with the error messages. . . . There are three
error messages. . . . Now, a normal large computing system normally has
several hundred different error messages. This one, which is a very minimal
system, has three.”30 The three error messages, as Sandin demonstrates, are
programed to be presented by the computer to the user when the computer
does not understand the user’s input: WHAT?, HOW?, and SORRY. These
error messages are earnestly colloquial, each signaling a different type of lack
of comprehension on behalf of the computer and the limitations of the user.

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WHAT? Screenshot from BALLY BASIC W/
FIGURE 10.
DAN #1 (Dan Sandin), undated.

In the video, Sandin goes through the process of manufacturing circum-

stances in which these three error message would appear on-screen.
WHAT? appears when the computer cannot recognize a statement. The
example he gives is a statement with incorrect syntax—he types >PRINT
DAN, which the computer cannot take in as a list of commands, asking
WHAT? Sandin then corrects the statement to >PRINT “DAN”, with
quotation marks, which allows the computer to execute the statement and
print the word “DAN” on the screen (fig. 10).
HOW? appears when the computer understands the syntax of the state-
ment but can’t execute the statement. In this case, Sandin asks the computer
to divide ten by zero. He types >PRINT 10O0, and the computer responds
with HOW? He then corrects the query to >PRINT 10O1, and the answer
is printed: 10 (fig. 11).
SORRY appears when the computer does not have the hardware capabil-
ity, specifically memory in this case, to execute a process or command. The
example Sandin gives is >PRINT @(1000), to which the computer responds
with SORRY (fig. 12). Sandin explains: “What happened here was that it
tried to find the value stored in an array number 1000. It’s in a sense
a number one bigger than I’ve got . . . available memory for, and the ‘sorry’
command is an error message that says ‘Sorry, I’m all filled up, you have to
delete something.’”31

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HOW? Screenshot from BALLY BASIC W/DAN
FIGURE 11.
#1 (Dan Sandin), undated.

FIGURE 12. SORRY Screenshot from BALLY BASIC W/

DAN #1 (Dan Sandin), undated.

There is a cybernetic loop that the user is encouraged to perform with the
computer through these error messages—a constant, preprogrammed stream
of feedback between user and machine where the user interacts with the
computer in ways the computer anticipates (typing out commands using the
Bally Astrocade’s keypad), and the computer announces to the user the
possibilities of what is programmable, and what is error, through its user

Pow | A Trans Historiography of Glitches and Errors 217

interface. The visual interface here functions disciplinarily: it encourages the
user to continue interaction with the computer within the terms that the
computer communicates to the user. In Bally BASIC, the error message is
designed to be corrective: it signals to the user what is possible and impossible
for the user to do, and the user learns from this what actions are possible and
encouraged and which are not, enforcing a feedback loop governed by the
software system that dictates the behavior of the user.

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The error, manifested in the screen, is a signal. These signals manifest in
the Bally Astrocade as blank, uniformly colored backgrounds with black text.
They manifest as letters that form legible words and syntax, communicating
to the user the limits of what is possible and able to be executed. Fenton’s
coding of the hardware limitations of the computer through the error mes-
sage apologetically, and colloquially, reinforces a coded boundary that has
been positioned to prevent the user from going any further, from affecting
anything more, that signals the end of motion or possibility. SORRY, the
program says. SORRY.

PLAY A GA7: THE GLITCH

In 2018, Fenton created a video titled Primordial Glitch Art. In it, she sits in
what looks like her home office. Behind her on the desk is a trapezoidal box
with a wood-grain pattern adorning its front lip and sides: the Bally Astro-
cade. This Astrocade is missing the smoky plastic lid that normally sits on top
of the console, revealing a recess filled with an array of cartridges. From my
own experience encountering the console at the Phil Morton Memorial
Research Archive at SAIC and the Strong National Museum of Play in
Rochester, New York, I know a few additional things, too: That the console
is largely covered in dark brown lightly pebbled plastic, with wood veneer
covering its sides, and yet it still has a heft and weight to it. That the gold
trim lining the edges of the console is gold paint on plastic that flakes off over
time, but the golden number pad has a thin aluminum-like covering that is
cold to the touch. That the console very easily accumulates dust in its crevices
and corners. That the Astrocade is very prone to glitches: when I first turned
on the console and inserted a cartridge at the Strong, I was met immediately
with a screen filled with bright repetitions of pink and white horizontal lines
that appeared to break and rejoin in jagged steps from the upper left to the
lower left of the screen (fig. 13), an image that persisted until I turned the
console off.

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Glitches that appeared on-screen after the author
FIGURE 13.
turned on the Bally Astrocade at the Strong National
Museum of Play, Rochester, New York, 2019.

In the video, Fenton faces the camera, with long salt-and-pepper hair
tucked into the neck of her gray T-shirt. “What I’m using here is a Bally
Astrocade computer hooked up to a TV to channel 3,” she says. “What
I do is I take one of these cartridges, I insert it into a slot here.” She
holds a copy of a cartridge titled Blackjack (1978) and presses it into the
console. “I press reset. Then I usually enter into the cartridge’s thing, and
I spit the cartridge out.” She starts up Blackjack and arrives at its bright
green opening menu, which reads “Player 1 Place Bet.” Once the cartridge
is spit out, this menu flashes into a series of black vertical lines of
different widths over a white background. This screen flashes to this
pattern for half a second before the console resumes normal function
and returns to the Bally’s “SELECT GAME” menu. “And you see, you
get a glitch,” Fenton says. “Let’s do a few more of these. Depending on
how lucky you are, you get different types of glitches.”
Fenton describes out loud what she is doing with her body, and how the
console is responding to her. Because the generation of these glitches is so
repetitive, she describes the same procedure several times as she executes the
same actions over and over throughout the one-minute, forty-three-second
video. “I work the user interface here, make some selection, and at some point

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FIGURE 14.Green screen with blocky pixels at the bottom in Jamie Faye Fenton,
Primordial Glitch Art, 2018.

while the code is actually executing the game, I spit the cartridge out and
press the eject button,” she says while producing another glitch. This time the
screen flashes briefly between a green screen with blocky pixels at the bottom
(fig. 14) to another frame filled with vertical lines of varying widths (fig. 15).
Each frame lasts barely a second, maybe even a fraction of a second.
The act of pressing the eject button is something she performs using both
hands, with one hand operating the Astrocade’s keypad and the other pressing
the eject button under the cartridge slot, with one act happening quickly after
another. The screen abruptly flashes to a barely half-second-long frame of a gar-
bled image before quickly shifting back to the console menu screen. “And see,
different types of glitches, different circumstances,” she says, as she produces
another half-second error. She leans her body in toward the console. “Sometimes
it resets just like that, other times . . . [something] more interesting.”
Fenton ejects Blackjack and inserts a Star Battle (1978) cartridge. Imme-
diately the small TV screen fills with tumbling, serrated lines of pixels that
cascade in intervals down the screen, like a Slinky falling down the stairs (fig.
16). The screen then washes from top to bottom in waves, producing long
vertical stripes that look like a smearing bar code, a waterfall (fig. 17). The
screen moves back and forth between these two types of glitches—the water-
fall and the cascade—for twenty seconds. It is an impossibly long time
considering the length of the previous glitches, which flitted in and out of
existence. Here, the glitch lingers. We cannot miss it, we cannot mistake it for

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FIGURE 15. Frame filled with vertical lines of varying widths in Jamie Faye Fenton,
Primordial Glitch Art, 2018.

FIGURE 16. Cascade in Jamie Faye Fenton, Primordial Glitch Art, 2018.

anything other than what it is. I watch the back of Fenton’s head as she gazes
at the screen, watching the pixels move. She’s silent for a few moments. “Not
sure what we did to deserve that one,” she suddenly says, glancing at the
camera, smiling, then turns quickly back to the screen to watch. “That one
just goes on and on and on,” she laughs.

***

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FIGURE 17. Waterfall in Jamie Faye Fenton, Primordial Glitch Art, 2018.

FIGURE 18. Algorithmic curling of a sea wave or the curve of

an Ionian column in Jamie Faye Fenton, Primordial Glitch
Art, 2018.

When I watch Digital TV Dinner, all I can think about are the things that are
not there, that are not represented, and the things that the video is not
a record of: The labor of Fenton’s hands repeatedly jostling the hardware
console, ejecting the cartridges, over and over, if only for a momentary, half-
second cascade of pixels and blocks to appear on-screen. The time it took to

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generate enough half-second to ten-second glitches to fill a two-minute, forty-
one-second video. The fact that Digital TV Dinner has been edited to isolate
the glitches on the screen, and how these cuts remove the full duration of
time it took to generate these images. I think of the home spaces in which this
computer and video game console existed, and the spaces in which this piece
of glitch art was created, and the bodies that necessarily must have moved,
must have circulated around it, to produce these glitched signals. All of these

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things are not represented in the glitches on the screen, but these things must
have happened, must have been there, for this video to exist.
The glitches in this video call attention to everything unseen, unsaved, and
the undoing of the programmatic, the symbolic: the movement of sign !
signified. The pixels in Digital TV Dinner assemble themselves in shapes of
varying sizes and repeat in varying intervals, with configurations shifting from
moment to moment. Some moments the interface dissolves into what ap-
pears to be a randomized assortment of small squares, dancing and moving
across the screen like static or noise on a television set. Other times these
blocks appear in larger sizes, with more obvious assemblages of repetitions
and randomizations. In one moment, the patterns repeat in horizontal layers,
pixels forming what looks like the mathematical curling of a sea wave or the
curve of an Ionian column (fig. 18). In the next, the screen fills with vertical
repetitions that take the shape of what looks like a series of spectrograms, or
sound waves, turned on their side, reminiscent of the ridges and repetitions of
a tapestry (fig. 19).
In all of this, there is constant motion: The prickling of static dancing across
the bottom of the screen. The screen wipes that move downward and upward
that clear the pixels from the screen in waves, or introduce new patterns of
pixels. The constant and irregular leaps between one panel of pixelated patterns
and another, with one image jumping from what looks like the ridges of a bar
code (fig. 20) to patterns that repeat diagonally, like the topstitching on a quilt
(fig. 21). There is a constant undoing and remixing of familiar assemblages: the
top of the screen, reserved for titles and contextual menu information in the
Bally Astrocade’s interface, is rendered into pixelated blocks or glitch-ridden
text that scrambles, undoing itself. It begins with “PLAY A GAME” (fig. 22),
later flashing to “PLAY A GA7” (fig. 23), and even later, flashing into blocks of
scrambled pixels that take the shape and form of letters, words, and language,
without connection to a signifier (fig. 24).
I see, in these moments, a computational system that cannot fulfill
the functions it was designed for. Instead of the seamless procession of

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FIGURE 19. Spectrograms, or sound waves, turned on their
side, reminiscent of the ridges and repetitions of a tapestry
in Jamie Faye Fenton, Primordial Glitch Art, 2018.

FIGURE 20. Ridges like a bar code in Jamie Faye Fenton,

Primordial Glitch Art, 2018.

input ! output, there is a breaking of this programmatic linearity, with the

assumption that the screen fulfills a function, conveys a message, to the user.
Instead with the glitch, the ! of this equation stands on its own: a record of
movement, of motion, of processing, of failure as a verb rather than a state.
And here, in Digital TV Dinner, we linger in this moment, expanded into

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FIGURE 21. Like topstitching on a quilt in Jamie Faye Fenton,
Primordial Glitch Art, 2018.

FIGURE 22. PLAY A GAME. Jamie Faye Fenton, Primordial

Glitch Art, 2018.

minutes, experiencing waves of this !, this motion, instead of lingering at

the moment when the glitch began, and wondering when the glitch will end.
We are affected by cascades of these glitches that seem to go on endlessly. In
Digital TV Dinner the glitch becomes a wading pool, a “place to call home,”
as Bhanji writes. We linger here, we are suspended here, in these moments,
stitched together, losing track of where and when something begins, and

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FIGURE 23. PLAY A GA7. Jamie Faye Fenton, Primordial
Glitch Art, 2018.

FIGURE 24. . Jamie Faye Fenton,

Primordial Glitch Art, 2018.

where and when something ends. We sit here, in this moment of undoing,
watching the structures and systems we know become continuously undone,
looping, repeating, watching as shadows of the familiar interface are broken
into components, into pixels that shudder on and off in patterns and arrays.
This is unmediation: undoing as a verb, a process. It is the lingering on
the movement of a signal as it is translated from one state to another:

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sign ! signified, input ! output, with the ! itself as an unquestioned and
invisible intermediary, a type of mediation that moves a signal between
positions. Unmediation is the questioning of the linearity of these processes
and movements. Unmediation is a signal that is jammed, reversed, or broken,
or called attention to and extended as it moves between states.

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LUCKY, DESERVING

This, too, is trans methodology. Fenton’s patient dismantling. Her solidity,

returning time and time again to the same seemingly unyielding systems. Her
certainty that embodying the same actions, enacting the same movements,
will produce the flickering possibility of different outcomes, unanticipated
futures. Her knowledge of a system that is so complete that she knew there
were more possibilities beyond the SORRYs, the WHATs, the HOWs. Her
desire to linger in disparate moments of disruption, stitched together as
evidence of the trans life that must have breathed, moved, labored, for
something like this to exist.32 She shows us that the coherence, monotony,
and sovereignty of the computer system does not and cannot dictate all that is
possible, all that is available to us.
Two words in particular that Fenton uses to describe the process of
producing glitches and glitch art strike me: lucky, and deserving. “Not sure
what we did to deserve that one,” she says, as if the glitches are a gift we have
been given, each time she restarts the console. Digital TV Dinner can only
exist because of her patiently repeating the same steps over and over. As the
programmer of the Bally Astrocade, she coded all of the software’s rulesets
and boundaries. She knew what could be done with the console, and in
silhouette, what could not be done. And yet there is a joy she takes in
repeatedly running up to the same threshold and knocking at the same door,
each time with both the hope and certainty of the computer producing
something even she could have never intended or imagined. Her wonder-
ment is startling: each time a glitch appears, she remarks that we might not be
deserving of these moments of breakage, these instants of something else,
something other that gives us a brief and wonderful glimpse beyond the
possibilities tightly held and predetermined by a binary computer system. n

W HITNEY (W HIT ) P OW is an assistant professor of queer and transgender media studies in New
York University’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication. Pow’s research focuses on
queer and trans histories of video games, software, and computational media. Their current book
project locates queer and transgender video game designers and programmers in histories of early

Pow | A Trans Historiography of Glitches and Errors 227

software and hardware development, looking at the intersection of queer and trans medical history,
surveillance, and policy with computer and video game history.

N OT E S
This research would not have been possible without the support of many. I would like
to thank Jon Cates for his incredible support of my work as well as for founding the
Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago,

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which has been such a treasure to look through. My heartfelt thanks go to Chaz Evans,
Jonathan Kinkley, and VGA Gallery, whose support of my research and design work
has meant so much to me over the years, and I would like to thank Jon, Chaz, and
Jonathan for including the interactive art piece I designed about Jamie Faye Fenton,
Digital TV Breakfast (2018), in the art exhibition Chicago New Media 1973–1992. My
many thanks go to James Connolly, who led me through the Phil Morton Memorial
Research Archive during my visits to SAIC, and who showed me how to use the Sandin
Image Processor. I would also like to thank The Strong National Museum of Play, The
Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play, and the International Center for the
History of Electronic Games for supporting my work through research fellowships
I received in 2017 and 2019 that allowed me to visit The Strong’s archives and
collections. And lastly, my sincerest gratitude goes to Jamie Faye Fenton, who I met
for the first time in Gallery 400 on a cold November day in 2018. I hold that meeting
very close to my heart, and am looking forward to future conversations.
1. Jamie Faye Fenton, Raul Zaritsky, and Dick Ainsworth, Digital TV Dinner
(1978), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼Ad9zdlaRvdM.
2. Michael Betancourt, “The Invention of Glitch Video: Digital TV Dinner,” Mil-
lennium Film Journal 65, no. 1 (2017): 56.
3. Jamie Faye Fenton, bio, http://www.fentonia.com/bio/.
4. Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah, and Lisa Jean Moore, “Introduction: Trans-,
Trans, or Transgender?,” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 36, no. 3 (2008): 14.
5. Susan Stryker, “(De)subjugated Knowledges: An Introduction to Transgender
Studies,” in The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle
(New York: Routledge, 2006), 11.
6. In An Archive of Feelings, Ann Cvetkovich writes about the affective resonances of
archives as sites of loss, with emotions, affect, and trauma as ephemeral experiences unable
to be contained through their institutional saving mechanisms: “The archive of feelings is
both material and immaterial, at once incorporating objects that might not ordinarily be
considered archival and at the same time resisting documentation because sex and feelings
are too personal and too ephemeral to leave records.” Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of
Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2003), 244. While Cvetkovich is writing about lesbian histories, her acknowledg-
ment of affective loss resonates with trans history. The pointed resistance to documen-
tation she writes about is of importance to my approach to trans media studies.
7. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age
of Fiber Optics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 20.

228 F E M I N I S T M E D I A H I S TO R I E S WINTER 2021

 8. This work is indebted to trans of color critique, and specifically the work of Black
trans artists, thinkers, and scholars who have been critiquing the process of mediation
itself through images, representations, histories, and archives, including Reina Gossett,
Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton, eds., Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and
the Politics of Visibility (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017); C. Riley Snorton, Black on
Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2017).
9. Jon Cates speaking at the Chicago New Media Symposium, November 1, 2018,

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available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼a1PQdzO6rUI&t¼5520s.
10. Fenton writes about this on her website (http://www.fentonia.com/bio) and is
likely comparing the Astrocade’s price to other home computers released during this
period, including the Apple II, released in 1977 (which sold for $1,298), and the IBM
5100, released in 1975 (which sold for $8,974). For more information on computer
prices that year see Evan Comen, “Check Out How Much a Computer Cost the Year
You Were Born,” USA Today, June 22, 2018, https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/
2018/06/22/cost-of-a-computer-the-year-you-were-born/36156373/.
11. The Z80 microprocessor was released in 1976 and used for a number of
computers and video game consoles, including the Bally Astrocade, its planned (but
never released) Zgrass Computer Expansion, Sega Genesis and Sega Master System, and
TRS-80, among others. More information about systems that use the Z80 can be
found at http://www.z80.info/z80cs.htm, and more about the specifications of the
Bally Astrocade is on Fenton’s website at http://www.fentonia.com/bio/.
12. For more on this see Michael Betancourt’s very thorough history of Fenton and
Digital TV Dinner through the lens of glitch aesthetics in chapter 1 of Michael
Betancourt, Glitch Art in Theory and Practice: Critical Failures and Post-Digital Aes-
thetics (New York, NY: Routledge, 2016).
13. Recently there have been movements to reconsider methodologies for writing
video game history, helmed by scholars like Laine Nooney and through scholarship
published in the journal they founded with Raiford Guins and Henry Lowood, ROM-
chip: A Journal of Game Histories.
14. See for instance the history of revisions made to the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders. Reclassifications of queer and trans people appear in the
Homosexuality Revision of 1978 in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders and subsequent revisions to the DSM-V, with the deletion and addition of
terms like “gender identity disorder” and “gender dysphoria” respectively.
15. Achille Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits,” in Refiguring the
Archive, ed. Carolyn Hamilton et al. (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic
Publishers, 2002), 20.
16. Laine Nooney, “A Pedestal, A Table, A Love Letter: Archaeologies of Gender in
Videogame History,” Game Studies 13, no. 2 (December 2013): http://gamestudies.org/
1302/articles/nooney.
17. Of particular interest is Jonathan Sterne, “Compression: A Loose History,”
in Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures, ed. Lisa Parks and
Nicole Starosielski (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 31–54. In this

Pow | A Trans Historiography of Glitches and Errors 229

essay, Sterne chronicles the “storage and transmission” of media through signal
and infrastructure.
18. Nael Bhanji, “Trans/scriptions: Homing Desires, (Trans)sexual Citizenship and
Racialized Bodies,” in The Transgender Studies Reader 2, ed. Susan Stryker and Aren
Aizura (New York: Routledge, 2013), 521.
19. Of note is the first version of the Bally BASIC manual, published in 1978,
whose introduction is very similar, though it begins much more focused on the
programming language versus the console as a computer: “BASIC is a language de-

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signed to make computers easy to understand and use. Simple words like RUN and
PRINT tell your computer what to do.” Bally Consumer Products Division, Bally
BASIC Programmed Instruction Course (Franklin Park, IL: Bally Manufacturing Cor-
poration, 1978), 1.
20. Dick Ainsworth with George Moses, Jamie Faye Fenton, and Brett Bilbrey,
Bally BASIC (Columbus, OH: Astrovision, 1981), 2.
21. “The Bally Computer System” ad, Bally Alley, https://ballyalley.com/ads_and_
catalogs/flyers/bally_pamphlet_1of2.jpg.
22. “The Bally Computer System” ad.
23. “The Bally Computer System” ad.
24. “The Bally Professional Arcade Plus Expandable Computer System. Now with
Bally BASIC Included” sales flyer, Bally Alley, https://ballyalley.com/ads_and_catalogs/
flyers/arcade_plus_flyer_page_1_of_2.jpg.
25. Thomas A. DeFanti, Jamie Faye Fenton, and Nola Donato, “BASIC Zgrass: A
Sophisticated Graphics Language for the Bally Home Library Computer,” in SIG-
GRAPH ’78 (New York: Association for Computing Machinery, 1978), 33.
26. It is also worth noting that ham (or amateur) radio traces back to the 1910s, and
was not isolated to the 1950s, as Fenton, DeFanti, and Dontato write in their paper.
27. Bally BASIC Manual (1981), 71.
28. DeFanti, Fenton, and Donato, “BASIC Zgrass,” 34.
29. Dan Sandin’s Image Processor was institutionally affiliated with the University
of Illinois at Chicago, which is where the analog video synthesizer was originally
created, and several copies of it now exist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
I had the pleasure of creating live video art with James Connolly using the Image
Processor during my visits.
30. B-BASIC with DAN #1, Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive, School of the
Art Institute of Chicago.
31. B-BASIC with DAN #1.
32. I am indebted to micha cárdenas’s scholarship, especially “Trans of Color
Poetics: Stitching Bodies, Concepts, and Algorithms,” S&F Online, 2016, https://
sfonline.barnard.edu/traversing-technologies/micha-cardenas-trans-of-color-poetics-
stitching-bodies-concepts-and-algorithms/, where she positions the stitch itself as a trans
methodology: “The stitch is an operation of trans of color poetics that can be used to
create algorithmic methods for challenging surveillance technologies and contributing
to the survival of trans people of color.”

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