Divine Glitches, Profane Comedies

Sub Net is an anonymous artist born out of the internet. They aren’t really based anywhere as much as they circulate, inhabiting virtual spaces in webs one, two and three. Their new series, The Agitprop of Metaversal Rapture, adapts Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights for the post-internet era using a myriad of glitched out scenes from Active Worlds. Active Worlds was one of the first online virtual worlds, a predecessor to the metaverse that began in 1995 and garnered a cult following that outlived corporate turmoil due to a dedicated dev team and user base. Sub Net’s three-part series mirrors Bosch’s triptych: there are three panels, a left vertical panel titled Eden depicts an origin story, a horizontal center panel titled Capital draws on the Garden of Earthly Delights, while the right vertical panel, SystemError shows the hellscape of a final judgment. Sub Net refers to these works as "moving paintings," they are created using live capture software to record the movements and spaces within the Active Worlds Metaverse.

Estelle Flores is an artist based out of Curitiba, Brazil, whose practice spans across generative art, glitch, and video games. She is known for her machinimas, or videos produced within video game environments; especially the machinimas created within the lifestyle simulator, The Sims 4, where she interrogates how players construct meaning by embodying virtual personas in a game driven by aspirational consumerism. Estelle brings a new series, History of Me, featuring three short film vignettes juxtaposing imagery of contemporary urban alienation with an interior monologue. These machinimas create a playful, if sometimes dark, contrast between an exteriority of flashy skyscrapers and bustling urbanism with a personal interiority scarred by anxiety and precarity. These works also feature subtle environmental glitches that conjure an uneasy air of surrealism. These glitches are captured entirely within the game: a noisy screen that once showed a news broadcast, floating fish from a vanished aquarium, clipped spaces and jagged movements. Glitch artists sometimes refer to these malfunctions as “natural glitches,” errors occurred without the forced input of the author, but to capture these an artist needs the quiet patience of a nature photographer, in order to catch what Rosa Menkman eloquently refers to in her Glitch Studies Manifesto as an “uncertain balance,” and an “unrealized utopia connected to randomness and idyllic disintegrations.”

In her book Glitch Feminism, Legacy Russell proclaims that “Glitch is Cosmic,” in the sense that glitch has a transformative capacity that allows a body to tap into a vastness of meaning and signification. Ras Alhague, a Polish artist currently based in the U.S., is a prime example of this potential. Their new series, The Passion, deftly portrays the feelings of lived contradictions through the use of glitched photogrammetric self-portraits. Ras describes themselves as a post-fetish artist, who glitches and positions images of kink as a way to process a life growing-up in a conservative Catholic society and to affirm their own agency and self-expression. There are four 3D GLB models and each one is hand-sculpted by manipulating the source code of OBJ files containing the photogrammetry scans. These works offer a subversive mingling of sacred and profane. These works hearken back to a history of Christian iconography crafted with subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) prurience, from Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa to Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ. The lines between devotion and kink can often feel blurry.

By Sabato Visconti