this Glitch Western Wednesday, January 8th 2025, we’re going back to 2016, where it all began, here in Taiwan…
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invited to exhibit at 鳳甲美術館 Hong-Gah Museum’s biennial, i created the first Glitch Western Art, 鬼鎮 (Ghosttown) in 2016. i made this Glitch Western dream sequence drift across frayed cables, precarious computers, faultering screens, && a beautiful bright projection in the museum show. all the images were dreamt into being by The Cowgirl, my haunted time-traveling character. she manifests from my imagined of the Old West on her adventures to what some have called the Far East, in 台北，台灣 (Taipei, Taiwan)
當機藝術 (Glitch Art) acknowledges the beauty of decay && artistic potential inside systemic collapse. all technologies are engines of instability that radically reconfigure landscapes. in this Glitch Era, we embrace digital compression errors && electronic signal disruptions when we create the Art of Surprise. i myself was surprised to also be asked to not only exhibit this new work in the museum but also stage a part of it, an extension we could say, at the ASUS Corporate Headquarters, where i shared Animated GIFs. folks at ASUS could download the files from the installation && keep them for themselves, like keepsakes of bygone era
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this is how my Glitch Western began, as a physically-distributed digital network-of-meaning, a puzzle-not-meant-to-be-solved, an installation at a museum in their biennial while simultaneously installed at an international computer corporation’s headquarters, a bit of mystery in my American brokenness && perfect technological failures of a Catholic cowboy — jonCates
