We all know the cliché, that young people think they are indestructible. When you are young, you don’t yet have any experience with, any understanding of death, so you are likely to act as though it will never happen to you.
My understanding of it is a little more nuanced. While it is probably true that young people do not fully grasp the possibility that they will die, they also can’t imagine being old.
Because we do not have to experience to understand, we simply exist with two concurrent and opposing feelings; that death is so foreign that it feels impossible yet living to be an old person is so far out that it also feels unlikely.
Humans are complicated creatures; our minds manage to juggle seemingly opposing views like this all the time. Yet we all struggle to grasp things that we have not experienced ourselves, and we frequently misunderstand each other.
The algorithms that run so much of our lives have a hard time understanding us, just as we have a hard time understanding each other. They operate with the biases of their creators. They tend towards simple answers when situations demand intricacy. They have a hard time with unexpected, or new information. The struggles of our machines parallel our own, and that feels like an interesting point of entry for some exploration about the destruction our misunderstandings cause.
The reference image for this painting is, exactly what the title implies. A glitch caused by the word no.
When presented with an unexpected piece of information, the algorithms that create the images you see when watching a video do their best to determine what it means, and what should happen next. In this case, I cut audio of the model speaking the word “no”, as if it was another piece of video. The video player has no experience with this type of information, and the misunderstanding results in this moment of violent chaos.
This is my third or fourth attempt at this composition, and it feels like it is finally working. The secret to making it work for me (which is completely obvious in retrospect), was to spend less energy manipulating the image as I painted, to create a source image that worked, and then just paint it as it is.
Now that it seems to be working, I am looking forward to exploring some other ideas that this approach feels right for. Moments where we struggle to understand each other. Moments where we are pulled in two directions at once. Moments where a small decision creates drastic and unexpected changes. Moments our mind weaves together concurrent opposing ideas.