Glitch: Street Harassment
“You’re trying to find this really fine balance where something doesn’t break fully, but breaks just to the point that you can see it breaking,” — Sabato Visconti
Much like the hidden code of a picture consists of thousands of carefully placed symbols and letters, humans are made up of many different aspects, emotions, and experiences. But what happens when some of those small parts of you are attacked or are tainted? I used glitch art to make a comment about a problem in our society: street harassment.
I chose a picture of my roommate on the streets of Chicago. My roommate, Madison, and the majority of female peers that I have spoken with, have been at one time or another subjected to cat calling on the streets. This attempt for men to assert their power and dominance can have detrometal effects. Women should not be objectified nor assaulted when walking down the street.
To make my glitch art, I wanted to have more autonomy. Rather than using a glitch app, I used a tutorial by Daniel Tempkin to help along with the process. First, I converted the JPG file to a TIFF file. Then I opened it through text edit.
To alter the image, I took a symbolic approach to street harassment. I typed in versions of cat calls that I have personally expierenced on the streets of Chicago.
Throughout my coding, there are phrases such as “hey baby”, “nice legs” or “damn mama”. Additionally, I erased large portions of the code to represent the feeling of derailment as victim of street harasment. You feel smaller, like someone has taken some part of you, and you want to hide.
The result: a glitched and broken image. For when women are harassed and cat called on the street, they are being slowly broken. However, this glitch art is also imperfectly beautiful. The glitched image also represents the imperfection of human kind and the empowerment throught everyday battles that oppressed identities, whether that be gender, sexual orientation, race etc., are subjected to. I hope that through art like this Glitch image, one is able to visually see the implications of hate and disrespect in our society.
