Ilona Kovacs
Professor Noah Travis Phillips
Internet Art Cultures
April 8th, 2021
G̵̳̣̏L̷͓͐I̷̢͕̕͝T̴̨̲̆C̶̻̓̎H̶͙̰̏́

This glitch started from the ‘blue screen of death’ which to me is the most ultimate and easy to recognize glitch. The only part of the error message left after glitching was ‘A problem h…’ I think it is fascinating how that worked out because glitches are considered errors and problems, and the theme we have been challenged to explore in class is the beauty and aesthetic within the glitches. Because of the blue screen of death’s relevancy in the history of using computers and them being glitchy, I find that the final glitch results in a sort of nostalgic and ironic feeling. If you find that you or a loved one have been stopped by a blue screen, you can follow some of these tips when you are done panicking.

By deleting, rearranging, and keyboard smashing the text file version of the original image, I think my glitch has accomplished a sort of beauty that seems so organic. The way that the colors fade into the bottom right corner of the final glitch almost feels natural because of the softness of the pixels especially in contrast to the left side of the glitch.

The rumors surrounding many celebrities being replaced by robots, clones, or lizard people inspired me to create this glitched piece. We have explored memes in class, and because of this I decided to bring in a meme exposing a celebrity ‘clone’ of Beyoncé at a basketball game. The video went viral of Beyoncé stuck staring out into the far distance seemingly disassociated with her surroundings.

People on the internet said that she was glitching and I liked the idea of glitching things that were already considered or are glitches, resulting in my creation of this colorful and choppy horizontal grid. Having previously referred to celebrity flukes as a typology of memes, it becomes even more interesting when we can apply glitches to this topic pretty literally. I was incredibly intentional about making sure the entire piece could have a sense a balance between the horizontal rectangular sections splitting up the image.

In this piece, I explored imposing a glitch on a photo of our environment, and more specifically, the Amazon Rainforest. In class we explored the idea that glitches can be anything, even just something as simple as stumbling over your words or even. putting an extra. period where it doesn’t belong. I wanted to explore this further with the overarching question ‘where are these glitches around me.’ As humans, we are incredibly hard and abusive to our planet, causing our Earth to have a glitch or alteration in the atmosphere ultimately leading to climate change.

The Amazon Rainforest endures heavy oil spillage, fracking, and deforestation, so I focused on portraying those sorts of effects while glitching by removing a lot of text and also adding in textual facts about humans’ effect on the rainforest provided by National Geographic. Every time I open this image it looks a little bit different than the last time that I opened the file, so I think the overall file may have been glitched until it was slightly broken, but this unintended effect plays even more into the constant change and unpredictability of the Earth’s climate change glitch.