“…then there are of course times when there are problems that can be resolved simply by turning something off and on again, or problems that suddenly resolve themselves within the next two days, for which no one really knows the reason, and then you hear nothing about it anymore.” [Interview 11:425]

This trained agricultural mechanic and precision agriculture specialist describes his experience in the repair of digital agricultural machinery. He describes a glitch, a shaky moment of malfunction, of self-questioning, that is quickly followed by business-as-usual. Taking such elusive and mundane experiences of glitch further,  glitch art, glitch feminism and even glitch epistemologies have mobilized the glitch to point at other issues. Glitch art is “about relaying the membrane of the normal, to create a new protocol after shattering an earlier one.” (Menkman 2011, 341). The curator and writer Legacy Russel coined the term glitch feminism, calling for interventions that challenge gender binaries (Russell 2020). Glitches have been understood as signals of discriminatory orderings and mobilized to “illuminate the ways that race and technology intersect in pernicious ways” (Broussard 2024, 4). Therefore, glitch epistemologies have been proposed as ways of knowing computational cities (Leszczynski and Elwood 2022).

But what can thinking with and through the glitch offer to research on digital agriculture?  What are the potentials and limits? What can be seen through the glitch and what not? Can glitches be a starting point to identify further questions for digital agriculture? Building on ethnographic work on practices of repair in digital agriculture, this talk will explore glitchy vignettes from agricultural repair shops.

Alina Gombert studied Sustainable Agriculture (B.Sc.) and Crop Sciences (M.Sc.) in Kleve, Bonn and Lyon. As an agricultural scientist, she worked from 2018 to 2023 at the Federal Research Centre for Cultivated Plants (Julius Kühn-Institut) and the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture (BMEL). In her current work she is looking for bridges between the arts and the rural, between the agricultural sciences and the social sciences and between agriculture and feminism. As a part of the //KOMPOST ensemble, she explores emancipatory ruralities in northern Hesse. She is excited by the transdisciplinary perspectives opened up by Science and Technology Studies.

About the lecture series

In the lecture series Unstitching Datafication, artists, activists, and scholars explore how digital technologies can be un- and re-stitched by working on their seams. Moving beyond the destructive aspect inherent to unstitching seams and networks, they ask how social and economic relations have been and can be reconfigured by technology in the first place and be deconstructed and transformed through practices of hacking, queering, countering, and resisting datafication and data colonialism – be it through technical manipulations, artistic interventions, or activist action. Inspired by the seam ripper figure and historical forms of technological resistance, the lecture series shows how artists, activists, and scholars work along the edges and boundaries of digital systems. more ➞