DISTORTION SERIES

 2016-2024

We live in a time of rapid change. Computing power increases while efficiency improves. Inventive technology has become magical. The Internet and smart phones have changed everything at a dizzying pace. It’s more, better, faster—all the time. We stream media at an ever-increasing rate—until it isn't. There is a technical glitch at the transmission source. The broadcast signal becomes digitized. The stream buffers, exposing a single frame. This is annoying, bothersome, agitating. But, with the apparent stoppage of time, you notice things. An artifact appears. Individual pixels are revealed. The colors are saturated. Objects repeat in unusual patterns. Images are distorted. Resolution is not as clear. It’s as if you are looking through a portal into another dimension. But only for an instant. The stream is flowing again, on and on, ever faster. Until the next glitch.

These images were collected over the course of 2016. The images combine screen captures of streaming video that I intentionally—or accidentally—distorted. Each piece is identified by the time stamp of when the image was captured. I spent 2017 and into 2018 organizing the distortions and creating digital sketches of pieces to refine later. There are over two hundred images in the series. In 2018, I started creating the artwork by refining the captured imagery. Some pieces were left as they were captured, others completely reworked by adding hand drawn or painted embellishments, repeating patterns and unusual textures.

These pieces capture moments when a disturbance happened in our relentless streaming media age. They give us a chance to pause and see the world in a different way.