Statement
The Glitch is commonly referred to in art as an art form based entirely, or at least being produced entirely, through a digital medium. The simulation of Glitches through technological process evidently aligns the occurrence of Glitch with digital mediums, however the Glitch is also capable of existing and occurring in a physical world. The capacity for Glitch to exist in both a virtual and physical world, often times simultaneously, is what makes it so diverse as an art form, yet the physical qualities of Glitch are very rarely referred to or even acknowledge at all. Through my artwork I am attempting to blur the distinction between physical and virtual in order to understand to what extent characteristic of Glitch can be exhibited in each.
My artwork ‘Decay’ features a set of five photographically documented digital images, each with varying compositions and subject matters. The purpose of documenting my work is to blend the mediums with which the artwork is produced. Initially the artwork itself was had physical form, yet through its documentation it has become a digitally based art form. The decision to exhibit the work through digital media is intended to show the demarcation between my work as virtual and physical as it would become had it been reproduced as a print for purposes of presentation. The resulting distinction between virtual and physical worlds is ironic as the initial process of recording my works in a digital media explores the capacity for overlap between virtual and physical. Indeed if my artwork had been presented as a print or as the original composition itself, there could be no discussion regarding the relationship between the possible overlap of virtual and physical after the event of the Glitch. The original composition of my digital images was influenced entirely by the definition of Glitch as “decay”, leading me to believe that there were various methods of reproducing the Glitch in a physical sense. Decay is seen all around us. It is the product of maintenance, and additionally a lack of maintenance. Distinctly different to change, decay infers an absolute loss of original functional capacity. This is why I chose decay to represent Glitch within my artwork through the material properties of sculpting clay. By leaving the clay to dry out the function qualities of the material are rendered inert to the point of breaking under pressure. This is important to my work as it not only brings the element of Glitch into the physical, but defines Glitch as being a process through which change is brought about in order to draw attention to failed aspects of a system, in this case the prolonged exposure of clay to an unsuitable atmosphere.
The use of newspaper in my artwork was intended as an experiment with Glitch and the human perception of information, reproducing the relationship between digital technologies and information. If you were to describe the newspaper simply as a ‘folded piece of a paper with information printed across its surface’, then the resulting perception of a newspaper could potentially vary drastically from the intended. I decided to fold the newspaper multiple times and in no organised or predesigned fashion in order to reproduce the nature of a digital Glitch through a physical medium, myself. In this instance I became the medium through which the Glitch, the incorrect interpretation of information, was able to occur. Through resulting effect of the Glitch was then recorded, demonstrating the parallels between human error and computational errors.
The incorporation of found objects within my compositions reflects on the potential for the Glitch to, in the words of Nick Briz, “[call] attention to that system, and perhaps even [lead] us to notice aspects of that system that might otherwise go unnoticed”. The presence of found objects, random as they are, is to explore exactly this, the potential for the Glitch to produce or reveal an element of a “system” that was before unnoticed, concealed or non-existent.
Conclusively my work seeks to blur the distinction between virtual and physical through the exploration of Glitch as a digital medium that is capable of transcending the boundaries between the two.
