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Glitch as a remedy
Anna Christine Sands,
Nina Ołtarzewska,
Mother Woolf • #fubar_expo • 2023
Seeing the 2023 exhibition, both in person and in fu:bar’s online labyrinth, I couldn’t help but notice so many of the artists looking directly at me through the distorted pixels on screens. There is something challenging, perhaps slightly troubling, about curating self-portraits. Having an artist not afraid to present themself as they are sends a clear message: this is me, my work, my life, all combined together, meticulously intertwined and impossible to separate. As a fellow artist, this notion feels encouraging, as a curator–slightly intimidating. Suddenly, I find myself up close and personal with the talent and I think, who am I to comment on the struggles and lives of these people? Is there anything I can truly offer here as a passive observer? And yet, the intimacy of the situation hypnotizes me and beckons me to come closer and investigate.
It’s easy to dismiss self-portraiture or other forms of inserting yourself into your art as vanity, but in the online world, a visual representation of the self (real or fake) becomes crucial in formation of one’s identity (please, do not mistake it for what the corporate Internet likes to call “branding”—brr!). That’s especially true for those who grew up with Internet access. As a daughter of an early pioneer in personal computing, Anna Christine Sands is no stranger to the WWW. Having formed a symbiotic relationship with the online world very early in her childhood, her portfolio is both a tribute and a reflection on the influence the Internet had on her artistic development.
Lucky Little Me is a series of digital art pieces created using a Macbook camera and datamoshing techniques. Images are screenshots of “unbaked” files. In the world of glitch art, “baking” (or “baking the mosh”) is a term coined by Way Spurr-Chen used to describe the process of saving a glitched file in a way that causes the corruption to be treated as the actual content of the video instead of, well, glitches. That makes a file safe to open and edit with most video players and editing software that would normally refuse to work with corrupted files. A properly “baked” glitch video is also good for upload to streaming platforms.
“Unbaked” files, on the other hand, are highly unstable and fragile. Working with them can lead to unpredictable results and a lot of the time programs will simply refuse to read them. When viewed in a video player that tolerates this much corruption, visual effects and artifacts can be inconsistent and impossible to recreate upon replay.
The vulnerability of Lucky Little Me is therefore both literal and conceptual. The artist’s face is obscured by a digital distortion that feels organic and fluid, almost like tears. Not the pretty, cinematic ones, but the ones that absolutely destroy your face as you’re bawling your eyes out. The distorted caption says “I think god killed you to protect me and I’m so sorry”. (The fact that the glitch—which I enjoy talking about as if it was a sentient entity—chose to emphasize “you” is a lovely touch.) Marked with pain and loneliness, the history of prolonged personal suffering in Sands’ work is so obvious, exploring her art feels like a long, heavy conversation with a close friend. Emotionally draining, yet somehow therapeutic and refreshing.
An invitation into the artist’s world is an invitation into one’s own innermost self. Art prompts us to explore our own psyche, uncovering aspects of our identity that may have remained hidden or forgotten. A London-based French artist, Nina Ołtarzewska, extends this invitation to the viewers through Chambre 2003, an artwork reflecting on the unrestricted access to the Internet and the consequences it had on the development of—what she likes to call—The Trial Generation, people born between 1995 and 2005, the first to use smartphones in early adolescence.
Aiming to mimic the appearance of stripped steel structures, Chambre 2003 was created using Fusion 360 and Blender. Soft pink light shines upon the 3D objects that seem to construct a room or what’s left of it anyway. With only a skeletal structure remaining, the minimalism and emptiness of the artwork beg the question: what is missing? What did it use to be? Designing an art piece that directly focuses on what’s missing from it is both bold and challenging. In its concept, Chambre 2003 reminds me of liminal spaces, a phenomenon widely popularized on the Internet in recent years. In short, liminal spaces are empty or abandoned places that evoke feelings of eeriness and uncanniness. They’re void of life, but they feel like they shouldn’t be, because they’re specifically designed to be occupied.
The liminal qualities of Chambre 2003 are highlighted in the process it reflects on. The artwork is an artist’s attempt to reconstruct their own bedroom from the pre-smartphone era. A place that—one would like to imagine—was once full of life, joy, play as a child’s life should be. A room that once served as a safe haven, slowly transformed into a space of mindless consumption with the rise of smartphones and the immediateness of the Internet’s accessibility. The artist tries to remember the world before apps, social media, and endless scrolling, but memories of the offline, tangible life seem to be completely consumed by the overwhelming vastness of the online experience.
There is some heartfelt irony in recreating this space in a digital setting. Ołtarzewska’s artwork exists both in a digital and physical form, although I am unsure which came first. While the physical form will always be restricted to and limited by, well, the physicality of the space it is presented in, the digital version exists in the perfectly empty void of a 3D-viewing software, which, as a result, emphasizes the rawness of its structure and its meaning so much more.
Interestingly, while Chambre 2003 brings up feelings of isolation and desertion, I Hate What Ireland Has Become by Irish artist, Mother Woolf, was created as a direct result of the Internet’s connectivity.
The motivation behind I Hate What Ireland Has Become is simple: it’s to regain control over the narrative around Trans people by letting them represent themselves. The artist, in a very literal way, uses Trans voices to interrupt and disrupt the hypocrisy and bigotry of anti-Trans voices. The piece is a multimedia creation that begins with simple moving text videos, which were transformed through a series of technical and creative processes. The captions feature comments made by Irish people against the Trans community. Glitches were created in Audacity by incorporating voice recordings of Trans individuals discussing their experiences. This distortion introduces a new narrative layer. The hateful comments become nonsensical, their message is lost and impossible to fully decipher. The final composition is a unified video overlaid with an audio track comprising samples of bell sounds and sheep noises–a mimicry of herd mentality.
The video highlights an increasingly worrying tendency in the media: Trans voices—unless used for the sake of tokenization—mostly exist as a response to discrimination. Navigating a world that demands they explain and validate their identity, Trans people face relentless scrutiny that turns their personal journey into a matter of public debate, overshadowing, often stripping off their humanity and individuality. Being Trans, sooner or later, you find yourself forced to engage in an endless defense of your identity, validating your right to simply be.
Mother Woolf recognizes that even though this response is a necessity, the safety and well-being of Trans individuals involved in the project comes first. Although they’re anonymous and their voices were only used to disrupt the images, the artist makes it clear the participants may request to remove or edit their submitted audio at any time, no questions asked. As painful and complicated as a Trans life can be in today’s social and political climate, it deserves to be protected.
Despite having a documented history of their influence and contribution, Trans artists’ involvement in the creation and development of glitch art is still being questioned today. I Hate What Ireland Has Become made me reflect on a personal experience. When talking about potentially writing a piece on the Queer and Trans qualities of glitch art, I was swiftly challenged with the following question: “How are you going to prove a possible correlation [between glitch art and being Trans]?”
I’m not. This is not a matter of proving or justifying anything. Whether the intention behind the question was driven by the lack of knowledge on the history of glitch art or something less innocent than pure ignorance, it minimizes Trans artists’ involvement to a “possible correlation”, which is simply misleading. It does not, however, erase anyone’s talent, work, or the reality of why LGBTQ+ people find solace in using glitch art as a tool for self expression.
Glitch isn’t an error or a mistake, it’s merely a manifestation of natural consequences of existing in a system that at its core is defective. Glitches don’t happen when something goes “wrong”, they’re unexpected and unwanted only when their environment doesn’t expect or want them. In a society that constantly tells you that your mere existence is wrong and/or needs to be validated, analyzed, or intervened upon, glitch art offers a sense of comfort and reassurance.
As an artistic anomaly, glitch art embodies a transformative power, serving as a cultural commentary on our relationship with technology. Of course, in a world that I’d hope we’re all striving for, an individual doesn’t feel the need to constantly justify their existence. Pieces such as I Hate What Ireland Has Become wouldn’t even exist as there would be no need for them. But this is not the world we live in. For that reason, glitch art continues to exist and thrive. Not just as an aesthetically-pleasing art form, but as a remedy to the reality of living in a naturally flawed system.
Collection & text: Ras Alhague
Fubar curatorial collections are a part of the /’fu:bar/ 2023 Glitch Art Exhibition program.
