Glitch | lunarlodge

In 2016, I watched a lot of Letterman on YouTube. It rooted and reminded me that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Dave’s 20-year-old jokes about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton could have been pasted from today’s headlines. And thanks to several prolific uploaders—among them Don Giller, Daniel Poitras, and a user called Zschim—there is a wealth of shows to view from across the NBC and CBS years.

Embedded within these episodes, I began to notice interesting glitches: many were due to videotape malfunctions, others from some sort of encoding incompatibility. Still more were an indistinguishable combination of the two. I began collecting these as screen shots.

Quickly, I started to love cataloguing these images. Some were easier to grab than others. Some sprawled out in time in beautiful, deforming patterns; others lasted for only a single frame. Each one seemed to communicate something at once far removed and deeply intimate. Some are pure data. All of them are goofy.

In her essay entitled Loving A Disappearing Image, the author and professor Laura U. Marks writes: “Faded films, decaying videotapes, projected videos that flaunt their tenuous connection to the reality they index, all appeal to a look of love and loss.”

Writing on dupe aesthetics, the film scholar Lucas Hilderbrand says that each successive iteration of bootlegged media is “an illicit object, a forbidden pleasure watched and shared and loved to exhaustion.”

I suppose it was this exhausted pleasure—staring at the intersection of formats, of materiality and ephemerality, at history through the screen of the present—that compelled me to assemble these images.

I hope you enjoy them. Follow @geniusglitch on twitter and @geniusglitch.tv on instagram for more…