GlitchKraft: Allison Tanenhaus and Friends
2019 | Tanenhaus is a Boston-based digital glitch artist who specializes in abstract geometrics, vibrant color fields, optical perspectives, playful patterns, and unexpected dimensional qualities. Her source material consists of original photographs and previous glitch works that she digitally alters via smartphone. Created with equal parts deliberation and experimentation, the results are rainbow-hued, architectural, fantastical compositions that take on a psychedelic life of their own.
GlitchKraft is an exhibition of digital glitch art that celebrates the aesthetics of interruption as it transforms the gallery with bright abstract patterns, techno-colors, and dynamic moving compositions. Images that are usually limited to be viewed on a screen—mobile or otherwise—here are projected larger than life onto the full surface of the gallery walls to create a technicolor ‘glitch-world’ that will surround visitors and allow them to be fully immersed in light and sound.
Glitch art is the creative practice of interfering with or intentionally altering image files for aesthetic purposes. The display of the images can take many forms including LCD monitors, CRT TVs, and projections directly onto gallery walls. For GlitchKraft, Allison Tanenhaus collaborated with color-bending new media artists Ben K. Foley, Alex Kittle, Lauren Klotzman, and J. Bagist and DebStep. The resulting exhibition is an immersive, ephemeral ‘glitchscape’ made to overload the senses and inspire a sense of awe.
When considering the relationship between the artists, the data, and the process of creating the visual glitch imagery, it’s one of collaboration, or perhaps even symbiosis. The outcome of the process, although intentional and deliberate on the artist’s part, is always unexpected and unique after its machinic transformation.
This exhibition traveled to the McIninch Art Gallery at Southern New Hampshire University, March 14–April 30, 2022