Glitches of the Society- Gender Inequality
Gender inequality is a highly debated issue and it is especially obvious in advertisements. Women are always sexualized and seen as a sex object if not damsel in distress while males are always portrayed as a heroic and masculine figure. We need to dismiss the archaic thinking that males are dominant and females are submissive because this attitude discourages women who are fully capable of excelling in things society denies. For my assignment, I would like to raise the awareness of gender inequality through my glitch art and to showcase how my resulting art reflects on this issue.
This is the picture before editting :
In this picture, there are more men than women and it clearly shows that the woman is subjugated to the men. Also, this image caused a controversy in 2007. Spain’s Labour and Social Affairs Ministry branded the campaign as illegal and humiliating to women, saying the woman’s body position had no relation to the products Dolce & Gabbana was trying to sell. This advertisement was called “a glorification of gang rape” and declared “one of the most controversial advertisements in fashion history” by Debonair Magazine.
In order to critically reflect on the gender inequality issue, I first opened the image file in Text Edit and paragraphs and paragraphs of unruly alphabets and symbols appeared on the Text Edit sheet.
And then I counted the number of the alphabets “m” and “f”; “m” representing males and “f” representing females, by using “command f”. There were 3904 “f”s and 4068 “m”s. Coincidently, the number of “m” in the data chunk was more than the number of “f” which aptly depicted the scene in the image above where the men outnumbered the woman.
To make the number equal, I decided to try two approaches. First, I added 164 “f”s to make it equal with the number of “m”. Figure 1 shows how the image turned out. The lady in the image can hardly be seen as if the universe it telling us that it is impossible for women to be empowered and be equal with men.
Figure 1
The second technique, I deleted 164 “m”. Figure 2 is the resulting glitched image.
Figure 2
Figure 2 is not very appealing so I used another method. I replaced all “m”s with “f”s to satisfy my inner feminist and Figure 3 is the result.
Figure 3
It was quite surprising that the result appeared to be a blank sheet. Before I gave up trying to generate an artistic masterpiece, I decided to randomly add more “f”s and reduce some “m” and voila, I created two legit looking glitch arts as shown in Figure 4 and 5.
Figure 4
Figure 5
Last but not least, I tried entering “genderequality” into the data chunk to emphasize on my critical statement and this is what I get.
Figure 6
From my observation, I noticed that if I added “f” into the data to achieve the same number as “m”, the resulting image appeared to be a glitchy art with no obvious recurring pattern. Also, when I deleted 164 “m”s to make the numbers even, 2/3 of the image turned grey/blank. If I replaced all the “m” with “f”, the image became blank as if to say the world cannot function without men, which is true because both genders have to be equal. Furthermore, if I arbitrarily added more “f”s and randomly deleted some “m”s in order to get a more balanced “m” and “f” “data ecology”, we could see stripes and bars of different colors across the glitched images. In conclusion, the images above show that the general glitch pattern generated by the databending method is horizontal bars.
In my opinion, messing around with glitch art is an interesting way to express our opinion on certain issue that concerns us. This is what the digital era has granted us- the ability to demonstrate our views and express our feelings through databending instead of risking our lives protesting on the street. Also, making a critical statement this way is subtler and it will not come across as too harsh or offensive.
