Designing the Corrosive Moment – MFA Exhibition

Regardless of what we think the year 2012 will bring, now is a good time to stop and think about the world we live in. Are we all aware that our civilization is supported by fragile, man-made, digital structures that exist among untamed forces of nature?

What would it look like if the visible world suddenly and unexpectedly disintegrated before our eyes? Would it be digital?

‘Designing the Corrosive Moment’ explores digital glitch as a disruptive force, an aesthetic agent, and investigates its role in designing a digital catastrophe. Although identifying the ‘natural’ and unpredictable glitch with intentional design is a paradox, much is to be learned from this phenomenon.

First of all, this collection of works attempts to portray what happens when undetermined and incorrect processes operating underneath the surface, accumulate and reach critical mass, causing the photographic reality to collapse under the vandalizing force of the glitch. This looming threat constitutes a catastrophic force of destruction, much like an earthquake. It is a moment of corrosion when represented reality, and all its presumed truths become dissolved by the entropic force of digital corruption in a colorful, acidic path of pixels and absurdity. It is an apocalyptic moment, because it is both a failure and a revelation of a system our civilization depends on.

It is also a moment of awareness since the destructive potential of the glitch exposes our illusion of control, our reliance on flawed structures and our false sense of stability.
Glitch is a nihilistic force that reveals the postmodern fragmentation of consumer psyche, causes disruption in communication, and engulfs the world in the apocalyptic noise where form, control and meaning are denied their operations. Just as the early punk culture embraced anarchy to bring attention to the meaninglessness of life, so does the glitch destroy or deny the authority of structures. But what if we accept it, and use it to decorate? This is how punk became popular while at the same time it ‘unbecame’ punk.

The imagery here oscillates between chaos and order, accident and intention, by harvesting glitches from their natural occurrences, stimulating them in digital files, and assimilating them aesthetically into visual content through intentional design.
As a result the corrosive glitch moves on a sliding scale from being an active ingredient in the process, to being an aesthetic shell where the visuals are only a faint echo of the original moment of disturbance.

So is this a show about the end of the world or the end of glitch? Both are the destroyer and the destroyed, a serious threat and an assimilated effect.