Mallory Donen

“glitch moves, but glitch also blocks. Glitch prompts and glitch prevents…Thus, glitch is something that extends beyond the most literal technological mechanics: it helps us to celebrate failure as a generative force, a new way to take on the world.”[1]

–Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, 2020

In Russell’s book Glitch Feminism, they argue that glitches are mobile and when their movement is interrupted that’s when errors emerge. When creating System Failure series, my approach was to embrace the concept of a “glitch” as both an act of disruption and creation.

The series was the evolution of an earlier work titled Glitch Series. Both series use source imagery from a selection of digital glitch images that were generated through an unexpected glitch that occurred on my computer in Photoshop by accident. The System Failure Series shifted my role as an artist more towards that of a machine. A machine that when stitching by hand, decided what information to leave incomplete.

Throughout the process I intentionally left parts of the imagery unstitched. This choice was my way of introducing a manual malfunction, an error, a glitch. The result was a glitch within the original glitch image used. Through the motion of stitching and by following the cross-stitch pattern, I’ve re-created the source glitch. Then, I’ve purposefully disrupted the act of stitching in order to produce an error within the pattern in order to generate a new glitch image. By becoming the machine and embracing the error, I use it as a mode of creation and growth to discover new possibilities and outcomes.

[1] Russell, Legacy. "Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto." (2020), 30.