Glitches and Defects is an ongoing digital art series that interrogates the entanglements of technology, queerness, and viral transmission through acts of simulated infection and visual corruption. At its core is a custom computer simulation modeled on the biological transmission patterns of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). Rather than spreading between bodies, this simulated virus spreads between digital images—specifically, vintage homoerotic photographs—altering their visual structures in the process. The resulting files bear the aesthetic scars of their “infection”: ruptured color channels, corrupted data, and abstracted forms that resonate with the visual language of glitch art.
But glitch does not equal error. A glitch is an interruption: an unexpected moment in a system that calls attention to that system. Glitches and Defects interrupts not only the technical protocols of the digital file, but also the colonial systems of empire, archive, and visuality that have historically controlled how queer bodies are seen—or erased. Glitch art is never accidental; it is a political, time-specific practice of rupture. In this work, glitch functions as a refusal of smoothness, of seamless assimilation, of the sanitizing logics of dominant culture. It is not a medium but a methodology, one that treats corruption as resistance and distortion as reclamation.
By corrupting archival homoerotic imagery—images long stigmatized, censored, or relegated to the margins—the series performs an act of reclamation. The bodies and desires once disciplined by empire’s archive are reanimated through rupture, made visible precisely in their breakdown. The project also engages contemporary discourses of HIV Undetectability and Transmission Neutrality, insisting on a politics that moves beyond stigma toward complexity, agency, and resilience.
Alternative print versions of the images are image transferred onto 5x7” aluminum panels using a binding medium containing HIV-Undetectable DNA, forging a symbolic and material link between body, data, and image. Limited edition high-resolution prints on framed aluminum panels, measuring 36x48”, are produced via dye sublimation. Contact for custom prints.
ALUMINUM DYE SUBLIMATION (32X48”)
VIDEO
DIGITAL ARCHIVE
