Meet My Meatspace

My AFK is in my backyard. Currently my backyard is overrun by weeds and dandelions because we don’t have a lawnmower. I figured I could turn this somewhat ugly setting into a really pretty backdrop for the artwork. I thought the feel of the dandelions would also continue to give texture to the piece, but the white color wouldn’t distract too much from the overall piece.

One of my favorite artists from this course was the artist I covered for my midterm project, Petra Cortright. I drew a lot of inspiration from her work for this project, mainly her philosophy on mixing mediums. Cortright uses both physical and digital paint, gifs, videos, sometimes all in the same piece. I feel like this mixing really fits into the theme of AFK and her lack of inhibitions to cross physical boundaries inspired me in this work. Another place I drew inspiration from was TikTok. Over the summer I spent a lot of time on art TikTok and one of the pieces I saw was of yarn painting, basically painting some basic shapes and then sewing more complicated shapes with yarn through a canvas. I made a few of these pieces then and really enjoyed it, so I thought I could use the principle again with paper and thread.

The main theme from the course I chose to focus on was glitch, specifically as viewed through Legacy Russell’s book. Russell, mainly in the context of gender and identity, talks about how glitch takes up space in the real world, “creating fissures in the social and cultural algorithm as an act of advocacy “(Russell 106). I agree with this take and with the power of glitch overall. However, I think most of the world is a little more AFK and less involved in the intricacies of internet glitch than she makes it seem. We are very lucky to be able to have discourse about gender identity here in the US. In many other parts of the world, people are simply trying to survive. As discussed in “Is The Internet Good Or Bad? Yes”, the internet and Twitter in particular is used for means of survival and letting protestors know what is going on. This work proves Russell’s point about how the digital world can make an impact in the AFK world, but also contextualizes its importance. Even sexuality can be punished by death, much less more complex issues of gender and identity. However, within the framework of Russell’s work, I do like the idea of glitch feminism. By setting my artwork in nature, I hoped to ground Russell’s words in AFK reality. I hope that this will make the transformation from online to AFK and back again more meaningful. I left the woman unglitched to represent how it can often feel like the outside world, rather than yourself, is the glitch. If you know who you are, but if that doesn’t fit in with the outside worlds narrative of how you should be, it can feel like the rest of the world is the broken one rather than yourself.

To me, to be IRL/in meatspace means to be able to touch the items. I can feel the texture, the temperature of items IRL, I can smell them and taste them. You can see and hear on the internet, but your other three senses are rendered obsolete. Being IRL means that feeling of being grounded, of feeling the floor beneath you and feeling alive. Not alive in the sense of being happy or feeling good necessarily, but alive in the sense of being a living thing, made of flesh and bone.

I feel like this project helped me deepen my own understanding of the concept of glitch as an art form. Glitch can be empowering and meaningful, but it can also elevate art visually. The way in which an image is glitched can have such an impact on the message behind it- for example had I glitched the entire image instead of just the background that would indicate the subject was feeling the glitch within themselves, rather than feeling whole in a world of glitch. Had it been glitched in larger blocks instead of small lines that would have conveyed a different message as well. Glitch is a complex project and one I was glad to explore in this final installation.

Click here to see how I made it!