“a blueprint for critical resistance and aesthetic defiance in the face of digital capitalism and a rising new age” — Laila Shereen Sakr/ VJ Um Amel
Fear of the ‘machine artist’ reflects a deep cultural anxiety about industrialization, shaped by unresolved conflicts over automation and its potential to supplant human artists. Automated machinery represents both a technical development and a social paradigm that redefines labor, authorship, and creativity itself.
With Glitch: Ontological Exhaustions & System Failures, Spazju Kreattiv in Valletta, Malta becomes an amplifier for reflections on digitality & resistance, history & remembrance: aesthetic “disruptions” (glitches) challenge the audience to reflect on their technology-dependent society. Glitch Art—a powerful tool to deconstruct the technocratic, dictatorial, and repressive dimensions of neoliberal, communist, or capitalist systems—pushes us to the boundaries of our world, governed by surveillance, algorithmic dependence, and systemic exhaustion.
Dates:
Friday, March 14, 2025 (All day) to Sunday, May 4, 2025 (All day)
The selection of the moving image works of Melting Walls - Volume 2 was made to promote a suggestive dialogue with the sound installation of Yanran Bi, and the close environment in Montreux, Switzerland.
Found footage films speak to me afresh, offering unexpected perspectives and new insights, often by using the most pedestrian or trivial of found footage material within which much more meaning resides than meets the eye.
An honor to have on board one of the most revered theorist as our guest author.
Michael Betancourt is a Glitch Art pioneer who began manipulating digital errors in 1990. This collection surveys his HD movies. These movies have shown in film festivals, art fairs, and galleries internationally, influencing the use of glitches in popular culture (such as in the title sequence to Amazon's sci-fi program The Expanse).
This book is about margins and marginality in the art world as sources for critical engagements in the studio. It builds on the pioneering work of critical theorist and artist Michael Betancourt, who has used glitches as an integral part of his art since the early 1990s. This book presents his thinking about his own work linking theory and practice in a larger context of conceptual and theoretical concerns that are neither a statement of intentions, nor merely a subjective series of claims about past accomplishments.
Harmonia, “harmonies,” analyzes the connections between glitch art, visual music, abstraction, and motion pictures. This collection is a chronological survey of glitch art pioneer Michael Betancourt’s artistic research into, around, and with digital motion pictures that theorizes and critiques visual music.
Glitch Art in Theory and Practice: Critical Failures and Post-Internet Art explores the concept of "glitch" alongside contemporary digital political economy to develop a general theory of critical media using glitch as a case study and model, focusing specifically on examples of digital art and aesthetics. While prior literature on glitch practice in visual arts has been divided between historical discussions and social-political analyses, this work provides a rigorous, contemporary theoretical foundation and framework.
