Exploring a âGLITCHâ
Assessment 2 : Concept statementÂ
A glitch is ânaturalâ in that it arises from an unknown and often unwanted series of actions. Yet this occurrence of nature is rarely left alone. We tamper and try to âfixâ the glitches we are born with, a result and product of our idealist contemporary society. We seek perfection but in this process we leave a trail of waste, waste which becomes yet another glitch of our world. Following on from my experiments with purple carrots, exploring and aestheticising their natural imperfections, I have continued to work with natural glitches focusing this time of the process of correcting the glitch. While I seek to explore our relationship with consumerism and its normalisation of beauty and perfection ideologies, I am aware of my own interaction with this behaviour - I am after all a product of my society. Through my work I have aestheticised through a grotesque and visceral manner, the process of teeth straightening by Invisalign. I was inspired by the work of Anicka Yi and her focus on the ââŠconnections between materials and materialism, states of perishability and their relationship to meaning and value, consumerist digestion and cultural metabolismâŠâ. Her work is highly visceral (and essentially unhygienic), achieved through her use of permeable and bodily materials such as fungus, female bacteria and fermented milk. She explores ideas of time and impermanence, culminating in dystopic stance on consumerism and its unrelenting metabolism.
I began my experimentation by photographing my Invisalign plates, each progressing from its natural crooked formation to my desired straight appearance. The plates themselves are 3D printed in a laboratory in the US from a mold taken of my teeth. Each one has an identification code consisting of my last name and client number - I am number 266317. Through these macro photographs I began to see each 3D printed tooth as a topographical map of my mouth, slowly transforming its ridges into what I deemed perfect, void of the glitch is was born with. I applied different lighting and placing of the plates from scattered across a blank surface to lined up ordered and straight. I found that lighting the plates from underneath with a scanner created quite surreal images, and although they are really quite gross to look at, I have pushed this uncomfortable grotesque reaction to the limit through my end work. While the images themselves give my desired reaction of a conceptualised abstracted process of normalising the glitch, I pushed it further by overlaying these images on a concrete slab impregnated with the teeth plates themselves. The plates are now useless waste, but they surrendered their use as soon as they stopped moving my teeth and serving their purpose. They are essentially a tool in our consumerist idealist society, a tool I have used to aestheticise our flawed social values. The use of concrete in my work was influenced by street artist Will Coles who uses concrete casts of banal objects to comment on consumerism and environmental destruction. His works Soy-Fish and Sweet Tooth shows the dark humour through his work, a feature I have tried to replicate through my work.
My work is a contrast between the aesthetics of industrial and natural where the concrete and bolts create an architectural man-made feel while the transparent films of the teeth plates have a natural yet grotesquely sterile and medical feel. Originally I wanted to layer the films in order from a scattered mess progressing to a neat linear formation however the disordered layering I have ended with stands as a reminder that although we may seek perfection, our valuation of perfection is ultimately flawed by the contradictions of society.
The permanency of the glitch is heightened through the use of concrete in that while the âglitchâ of crooked teeth may be fixed it is ultimately a genetic defect and will be passed on through generations, a never ending burden on social perfection. I say âsocial perfectionâ as this glitch was not caused by genetics, God or any other higher power, it only exists as a glitch because society deems it so. Is this then the fundamental definition of a âglitchâ - an occurrence seen as undesirable or wrong in its natural state?
https://www.artsy.net/artist/anicka-yi
https://www.artsy.net/artist/andy-goldsworthy-2
https://www.artsy.net/artwork/paula-hayes-gg8
https://www.artsy.net/artwork/cai-guo-qiang-impromptu-no-5
http://willcoles.com/street/
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00347587
http://www.osti.gov/scitech/biblio/4423418
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