Project 1: Son of a Serendipitous Glitch

Shloka Dhar

Displaced Kashmiri, born 1999

Broken Landscapes

2021

AI generated art, datamoshing, pixel sorting, audacity

This series explores the function of a glitch in relation to the surrealist landscape. Multiple random generators, such as word, color, and complex sentence generators were used to create a large word bank. From there, AI generated art was produced through programs such as Nightcafe and Midjourney using words from the bank. These images were glitched through various processes such as pixel sorting and Audacity. Then, they were put into photoshop to create GIFs. Through the randomness, a theme of deliberately breaking the surrealist landscape emerged.

My connection with my ancestral lands feels broken in a similar way. Additionally, surrealism is defined by a mixture of fact and fantasy, which is how I connect with ideas of Kashmir. Photographs and memories from other people help me to visualize the cadences of the landscape, but the gaps are filled with my own mind. Color is also a potent connection to my heritage, a theme which is found throughout the series. In particular, the datamoshed videos demonstrate the melting of visual imagery into bright colors, signifying that the particular details of memory do not matter as much as the essence of it. The GIFs show a progression of being increasingly glitched and colorful. As much as I try to craft a complete narrative for myself, it is ultimately fragmented. It is interspersed with both memory and my current reality, creating a mosaic. Both can exist simultaneously, and even work together to create a colorful narrative that is indeed more whole.

https://vimeo.com/751000382