Analogue Glitch

Analogue Glitch

The random result of time & paper slipping

I can’t believe it has been over a year of stuffing around with my new website, and as a result, I haven’t posted a single blog post since February 2022. However, despite my digital hiatus, in the real world, I have still been making, drawing, and developing several new projects during that time.

Since early 2022, I have been rethinking the light drawing project. I wanted to find a new way of pushing the idea into something that wasn’t so structured. It was at this time that I found a type of paper in the US that was translucent and black. How exciting! I bought both the black translucent and the white translucent version. The paper is quite dense, and despite the following images looking like they are crumbling apart, the paper is deceptively robust. This current light drawing has taken several months to get to this point (unfinished), and because of the long process, the large cracks now found in the paper have resulted from the paper slipping and moving during the process of making. Over time the pin holes sometimes go over areas that have already been pierced and hence the cracks. A random type of analog glitching has formed in the image. I only realized this idea after recently reading about the digital art movement known as Glitch Art.

I had no idea about the Glitch Art movement until I read an article about Southerby’s just a few weeks ago. In the article, it explains that Sountherby’s had to pull the pin on a “Glitch-ism” art auction because one of the artists (Patrick Amadon - hats off to you, Patrick) pulled his art from the auction in protest of the fact that not a single female or female-identifying artist was represented in the auction.

I started this particular light drawing in 2022. I had no idea of the Glitch Art movement at that point or that this new paper I had discovered would tear and yet hold its form in such a way when creating the drawing. I also decided to make the imagery for this drawing in a digital kind of humanoid alien way based on an image I found online and then overlaying code stolen from AI coding in a silent protest against AI stealing from us. Not that it is any match for the violation we will probably encounter from AI, nor am I pretending this will be in any way significant enough to stop anything - that horse bolted long ago. It’s just for my own personal amusement. What I find fascinating is that this alien digital subject matter I decided to use, the paper, the very analogue process used to make this drawing, and my new understanding of a digital art movement so big Southerby’s had planned an entire auction dedicated to it has all come together at this particular point in time.

The above image is looking down on the drawing. I began the process by sandwiching five layers of paper and then creating a single light drawing by doing minute pin holes through the five sheets simultaneously. Although, each sheet of paper creates a different drawing in that the pressure of the pinhole is different. The image is clearest on the top sheet and becomes like a ghost by the fifth sheet of paper.

In this particular drawing, the white translucent paper is on top, followed by the black translucent paper in the middle, which is followed by a sheet of drafting paper on the bottom. The images below are taken looking up underneath the drawing at the black sheets of paper: