Paper short abstract:

Let me take you to a farm, where a small weeding robot calmly frees the rows of field vegetables from weeds. Sudden errors are part of the everyday: The robot pauses when there is soil on the sensor or an interruption of mobile connection. How can such digital failures be theorized?

Paper long abstract:

Glitches herald the breakdown of digital infrastructures. Glitch refers to routine moments of malfunction and irregularity in digital technologies. On one hand, glitches grant us a behind-the-scenes perspective on digital technologies and give us a sense of their materiality and fragility. On the other hand, glitches appear as generative fissures, pushing us to reflect on a technologies logic and pointing at the contingency and potentiality of other digital infrastructures. Glitches constitute the starting point for this project, which looks at digital agriculture in Germany. The research will explore how glitches are both experienced and evoked by those who farm with digital tools. With this, previously underexposed aspects of digital farming come into focus: the quotidian irregularity, tinkering, circumventing, and dealing with errors. In the fine arts, glitches have emerged both as a subgenre and a subject of theory-building: The curator and writer Legacy Russel coined the term glitch feminism, calling for new worlds and the refusal of gender binaries. In human geography, glitch epistemologies were used as a vehicle to understand digital urbanity. Building on glitch scholarship, this project shifts the focus from urban to rural contexts and builds a bridge to STS literature on breakdown and repair. This project asks how digital farming can get known through the glitches. Looking at these digital failures can lead to a more nuanced engagement with digital technologies, attending both to their tendencies to enforce certain logics and as well to their potentials to challenge the status quo, opening landscapes of possibility.