Project 1 Artist Statement

I’ve been feeling this lingering unease in the rural South for as long as I’ve been visiting. I wasn’t very sure how to express this feeling. It was like a word on the tip of my tongue that refused to budge. However, when I began pursuing glitch art, it clicked into place. The South, to me, was like a glitch in my life. The base of each memory was there, but something was wrong. 

I attempted to give this feeling a narrative in my project. I would take photos from the rural south that felt like my memories, and I’d edit their code in text editor. The first step was to delete crucial letters and numbers from the code to begin the image distortion. Often, this would mean blurring, displacing, or pixelating parts of the image. The use behind this was recreating the feeling of lost memory. When I try to remember my visits to the South, I can’t fully grasp anything. Everything is just slightly off, slightly wrong. 

I also glitched these pictures by inserting biblical verses into the code. The idea behind this is to show the unintentional corruption that religion can cause when used incorrectly. The first time I attempted this code editing, it was more of a fluke than anything. I had a picture of the interior of a church and inserted John 3:16 into the color section of its code. The entire bottom half of the picture became drenched in red. I found that very substantial for my project and continued using it to a similar effect.