A Glitch in My Plan
Currently, I am a sophomore at Loyola University Chicago, I have a great group of friends and a support system I can always rely on. When I look at my amazing friends I have made, I often find myself comparing my friendships now versus my friendships from high school. When I was in high school I distinctly remember promising to my friends that we would talk every single day and we would never grow apart, using the “absence makes the heart grow stronger” idea to only support our idea that we would be best friends forever.
If you were to ask me how my relationship with my high school friends would be during my sophomore year of college, I would have shown you our group senior portraits that we had taken for our yearbook. If you asked me now, I would tell you that I still have a good relationship with my core group of friends from high school but it is not nearly the relationships I thought they would be. For the glitch art assignment, I decided to use a senior portrait because it represents the idea that my friend group was perfect but now that we have all gone our separate ways, the glitches represent the bumps in our relationship.
Bentancourt writes that glitch art is “ambivalent” and “the interruption that the glitch poses is the breakdown of the perfect surface”. That is what I would call my high school experience, the perfect surface. My friend group, classes, and and extracurricular activities were all perfect. This was immediately disrupted when I went to college. Suddenly I was 1500 miles away from home without a single friend and people I had grown so close to and felt so comfortable with, were no longer down the hallway of my all-girls Catholic high school. This is why the image of my friend group immediately came to mind when I had to choose what my glitch art would be.
Using programming, I was able to glitch or distort the image so that the faces of my friends and I were covered and distorted. I did this because I no longer am able to see their faces everyday, whether they be laughing from our latest inside joke or stressing over college applications. While I knew that I would not be able to see them as often, I had imagined that I would use technology like Skype, Facetime, and normal phone calls to keep in constant contact with them (strangely enough, we hand wrote letters more than we texted). The glitches emphasize how our college careers have interrupted our friendships but the fact that the glitches did not ruin the image altogether also reflects our relationships. Just because we are not as close as we used to be, I still value my relationships with everyone of the girls in the portrait.
The glitch art was very interesting because when you input information, you were never exactly sure how the image would turn out. Likewise, when embarking on a new journey you are never exactly sure how it will turn out but in my case, it is always for a positive and like this glitch art, the bumps and glitches make the outcome more interesting and gives perspective when looking at the big picture, literally and figuratively.
