glitches.remixes.edits.filters
The title of my final OSS project will be entitled glitches.remixes.edits.filters.
As an artist, my work revolves around picking up the trash and debris that is feelings, and rework them into something that’s worthwhile. A presentable melancholy, an accessible darkness. Melancholia and it’s friends are like glitches. Remixes, edits and filters rework these glitches and help assimilate them into normality, and giving them new life. It is a way to re-represent old information.
As a large part of my work derives from my participation in the virtual, digital space, I’m also looking at glitch art, and digital manipulation as ways of presenting my content. A glitch is defined as a “a short-lived fault in a system and often used to describe a transient fault that corrects itself, and is therefore difficult to troubleshoot.”. I’m treating this definition in a metaphorical manner in relation to the process of blogging and writing in journals. These accounts are my way of dealing with negativity and issues, and eventually they exist as evidence that indeed, “this too shall past”.
Hence, I’d like to think of the issues I’ve blogged about as glitches, as transcient matters.
Digital manipulation had been a constant method of my art-making. In these series of collages, I’m combining real collages scanned from my physical journals, and reworking them digitally to create more layers of symbols and meanings. The addition of the planets, for example, is an allusion to early Internet art, part lo-fi, part ephemera, a reference to my own participation in the virtual space. In the last image, I’ve included some palace chat avatars, “dollz”, which were really popular ten years ago. It goes back to my hyperessay #1 in which I talk about the timeline of social media and popular websites. These dollz and other “relics” – the now defunct MSN messenger, MS Paint – constitutes this sense of nostalgia in the third space.
I’ve also distorted certain parts of the images and increased the colour information drastically, creating highly saturated areas of colours. This produces a “glitched” effect and is also symbolic of the intensity and saturated nature of my journals and blog.
In the first micro-project where we made one minute videos, I’ve briefly talked about the idea of the “double”. I want to go back to this theme as it is quite apparent in my practice.
The ‘double’ refers to writing and illustrating, two halves that make up my main practice as an artist. Writing and illustrating have always existed as separate processes for me and not processes that complement each other. The outcome for this final OSS project will include both writing and visual arts.
