You’re playing your favorite video game. You’re on the verge of just about winning, when all of a sudden your tv shuts down. The game you were playing completely stops. Everything you had worked for was lost.
This sudden malfunction is what two artists decided to conceptualize and relate to contemporary life.
GlitchGlitch, which opened January 23 and can be found at Art Underground, is a two-person collaborative exhibition featuring the works of Crist Espiritu and Angge Lorente. Images from old cartoons, video games and comic books are deconstructed and thrown in humorous scenes. Its subjects are morphed into fragmented lumps of flesh fading into rainbow colored pixels and mutated into binary hybrids, highlighting the parallelism between real life and virtual existence.
And what does “GlitchGlitch” exactly mean?
The duo said the name came from their notion that “art should act as a glitch in the boring programmed routine that most people are stuck in.”
Espiritu said he makes art to comment on the human condition by making pop culture references and creating a colorful chaos that, he believes, lingers in one’s psyche. He wants “to instill a culture of critical thinking amongst his audience.”
Lorente similarly aims to stir up the human psyche. Through GlitchGlitch, she analyzes peculiar human behaviors that she found are adaptations resulting from today’s fast paced society. She then relates her observations to video games and focuses on the “glitches” within these situations.
These glitches are what Espiritu and Lorente said we, as a society, have to learn to deal with.
Image Source: Crist Espiritu and Angge Lorente