Text by CLOT Magazine
For curators Mohammad-Ali Famori and Sadeq Majlesi, the meaning of the word “glitch” extends further than a malfunctioning screen. Glitch has become a genre of digital art that asks us to question the digital language and binary code behind our technology. By breaking the facade of our seemingly perfect digital interfaces, glitches have the potential to reveal what is really going on behind the screen.
Platform 101 is a nonprofit and independent art institution established in collaboration with Tehran Magazine and Famori Studio. The organisation has put together the group video art exhibition Glitch Art: Pixel Language, which will be open until March 12, 2021, at the Bavan Gallery in Tehran, Iran. The show features 27 artists from around the world over an 11-week period.
The exhibit rethinks the value of pixels in our digital world. By making pixels obvious, the videos confront the viewer with a new way of conceptualising digital languages. The digital work questions how we hide code and write a binary language meant only for computers. Showcasing the glitch brings the computer’s mistake to the front, even if just for a moment, the viewer can reevaluate that binary language as something they might understand.
The show’s curators, Mohammad-Ali Famori and Sadeq Majlesi, understand glitches to build collectiveness. Breaking the pixels up allows us to see the videos as thousands of parts coming together to form one whole. The pixels, in turn, have independent identities but come together to create another identity altogether. It is that zooming in and out that builds a relationship between the digital art and the viewer.
The work featured in Glitch Art: Pixel Language showcases how pixels communicate with each other, the artist, and the viewer. The next set of artists to be featured are Abarca and Nima Mansoury, with sound creation by Ehsan Masoudian. Their work will be up from February 19-25, 2021, at the Bavan Gallery in Tehran, Iran. You can follow the news regarding this exhibition on Platform 101’s social media.
