Imperfections

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 (Bloomsbury 2017), Sound (ed.) (2011) and Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction (2009). Jakko Kemper is a PhD candidate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands). His research focuses on digital culture and the aesthetics of imperfection, and is part of the NWO-funded research project Sublime Imperfections. His work has previously been published in Information, Communication & Society and Intermediality. 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).

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