Memphis has a new addition to its small but interesting constellation of house galleries. On every night except the last Friday of the month (e.g. Trolley Night), it is the home of painter Adam Farmer and roommates. On final Fridays, it becomes GLITCH.
I moved back to Memphis from a five-year stint in NYC at the beginning of July. While I was schlepping among the Brooklyn schleppers, attending storefront gallery openings and back room specialty cinema clubs, it seemed like everybody was talking about glitch art.
Glitch art is imaging created in a software malfunction. Has your browser ever frozen on a half-loaded image? Have you ever watched satellite television during a rainstorm? If so, you have seen glitches.
Glitch art plays out when artists insert different x-factors into an algorithm, creating visual effects that at rational variance with an initial formula. Artists intentionally jam data in different ways. The results look modernist (picture bar codes crossed with static? Maybe just picture static) but are post-modernist. Critics throw around the term “post-human.” There’s a definite lack of humanity in the pixellated, scratch-tape successes of the genre.
Glitch Gallery, this past Friday, was more psychedelic than post-human. The show/event, “Fur load” featured wall-to-wall murals, installations, projections, stuffed animal drink tables, and VHS viewing rooms. Two bands, Spoiler Alert and Leolin, played sets.
