Any attempt to see works by 245 artists in one go inevitably results in some kind of failure. No matter how well the works may be displayed or how well they work technically, there is quite a good chance that something will go wrong as one views them. The reason can be as simple as taking a wrong turn, or in the case of viewing a virtual exhibition, pressing the wrong button. Thus, to view such a large-scale exhibition within the online premises of fubar.space, one has to find an appropriate navigational strategy. As fubar.space welcomes numerous works without any specific sense of direction, the viewer is basically invited to get lost in the labyrinth and to find one of many possible perspectives. From curiously moving from wall to wall where the displayed works hang to meticulously studying a particular piece. From search to research, from getting lost to wayfinding.

Being invited to curate one of the possible guided walks through the exhibition, I have decided to start right there, from the sense of place, its spatiality, navigation, mapping, as well as its dispersibility, its fragmentation and its translatability from the physical into the virtual. The walkthrough of the exhibition, incomplete and subjective, attempts to delineate one possible reading of selected works as well as to create provisional dialogue among them. And precisely because my perspective is shaped by the limitations of virtual space, I wonder how space or sense of space is represented in specific works within the exhibition.

It can work as simply in the work Streets by Francesco Seren Rosso in which the image was edited with multiple GlitchLab effects, thus erasing the ordinariness of the actual street. Instead, its vividness comes from its broken code, now represented through various colors and layers.

The artist Andrew Reys takes a step further in the work Ghost roads in which he animated photographs taken on 120mm Kodak film. Even though he starts from an actual scene, the author, inspired by horror and mystery films, draws supernatural consequences of image manipulation. Similarly, in the work Zona Rental, the artist Cajabeats starts from landscapes that can be seen from the busiest subway station in Caracas. The views are captured within acrylic paintings and taken further by glitch distortions. The interpretation of the actual place is translated into the digital realm where it works through its loud aesthetics.

The initial point of the work by architect Amina Kovačević was a famous building in Sarajevo, and thus the work is entitled Stometarka – the 100 meters long building. An accidental special effect created by a broken phone camera made the fragment of a building look wavelike, changing its original shape.

On the other hand, in the work Every Building [Transition] on the [Google Street View] Sunset Strip, Kailum Graves starts from a digital image. Inspired by Edward Ruscha’s 25-foot-long accordion-folded book Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), the artist was interested in »better understanding of contemporary photography in the current juncture of conceptual uncertainty and technological transition.« By focusing on the »mishap glitched frames (a natural snag/flaw that happens in Street View as the frames transition), the artist introduced the fluidity between digital information and art, and between new technologies and old systems.«

Similarly, in the work I Will Be Waiting, the artist Dimitris Gkikas uses Street View technology in order to capture the timeless frozen shores of the remote north. Even though the artist uses real-world imagery, throughout its recontextualization, the artist creates a sense of a place in which every direction brings you to the same place.

The work Don’t step on the grass by Circe Clingert can be easily understood as its counterpart, as the aim of the work is to stop any kind of movement. In this case, the warning “Don’t step on the grass” prevents one from starting what seem to be video containing apparent grass. The image appears as a video player, leaving the mischievous viewer confused as it is not possible to start anything anyway. Deliberately stepping into the limitations of the physical and virtual realms, the author attempts to blur the space in between.

The exploration of digital space is also present in the work Cartesian Divide I-IV by Chris Coleman. A slot canyon, from which the artist derives the work, is a liminal space, where »you are below the surface and yet still in the sun. The canyon in Escalante Utah has no exit, making any journey into it a loop, starting and ending in the same place.« The canyon was captured by a digital camera and these captured images function as »reality fragmented into bits of true and false so that a computer can digest it.« The artist decoded these images to reconstruct the canyon but the result is a new image. The new digital space is determined more by points X, Y, and Z than its site of origin. Even though various algorithms try to rebuild the slot canyon, the final appearance lacks the understanding of place. The artist problematizes attempts to apply Cartesian space onto the world as if everything would fit into grids and cubes.

Chris Coleman also explores the understanding of digital and physical space in the work Threaded Tracing. The images were captured with LiDAR on an iPhone while the artist walked through forests, parks, and airports. Within the video, these spaces shift shapes, they become places of passage in which the viewer is invited to seek for patterns that may offer some sense of direction.

Another mapping strategy is visible in the work Is Registration Possible? by Daniel Tuomey,in which he used misappropriated publicly available models of the neighbourhood, mashed together bits of other people’s code, trash found on the street, stitched together drawings, jpgs and pngs, and lots and lots of loopy, recursive, glitchy writing. The publication that came out of this collecting and composing functions as a digital version of Charlois, the Rotterdam neighbourhood where the artist has lived for the past eight years. For the artist, »this is a Charlois reassembled from publicly available datasets and populated by glitching and twitching pieces of detritus. Like the residents of the real Charlois, they are worried about gentrification, surveillance, and how to assemble a linguistic subject position in the wasteland of neoliberalism.«

Finding absurd objects in the immediate surrounding was also the initial strategy of Riitta Oittinen when making the work Be careful. The plastic mushrooms found in a park in Brussels became the main protagonists of the work. The artist manipulated photos of the found mushrooms in order to play with the precaution that is necessary when it comes to found objects.

Unlike the works that deal with discarded objects, Sierra MacTavish dealt with a document of her own memory in the work Memories of Versailles. The photograph of a statue placed in the palace of Versailles functions as a fragment of a memory that the author manipulated in order to bring back the memory of the surreal place.

Lieu de mémoire (site of memory) is tackled in the work Kozara by Mila Gvardiol. The author placed the image into Notepad++ and deleted parts of the code. The broken image of the anti-fascist monument can be understood as a broken relation towards anti-fascist heritage that is being pushed to the margins by right-wing political currents.

Within the fubar exhibition there are more works that deal with issues of particular space or location on different levels, but I wanted to create a small collection like this, that makes you wonder how glitch, so abstract in its appearance, creates dialogue with very concrete space in time. Seemingly, neither glitch as a method, nor virtual gallery as a structure represent this lost space well, as they themselves remain groundless. Hopefully, this collection made you think and inspired you to conceive your own.

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Collection & text: Irena Borić

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Fubar curatorial collections are a part of the /’fu:bar/ 2023 Glitch Art Exhibition program.