Allison Tanenhaus is here to make friends. Glitch artist extraordinaire, she collaborates with musicians, sculptors and other glitch and digital artists to bring immersive, dynamic and other worldly art to audiences around New England.
What is glitch art? Several decades old, it began with artists experimenting with altering analog signals, manipulating them with magnets and messing with wiring to intentionally create unpredictable visual “errors.” Tanenhaus started to be curious about glitch art when her computer crashed, and jagged lines appeared on the screen. Her reaction was contradictory, “Gorgeous! Terrible!” (because her computer was broken), but then willed the screen to stay still so she could grab her camera. After a lifetime of searching for her visual medium, she had finally found it in a computer glitch.
Tanenhaus began her artistic journey with words and humor, composing satirical ad slogans and jokes on Twitter. She transitioned to something more permanent, and started to make street art interventions — cards, magnets, parody flyers for missing things, posting photos of them in the early days of Instagram. She was curious about using different filters to manipulate the images and when she came across her first glitch app, the images she created became more and more vibrant and abstract. “It was a fluke, I didn’t have a lot of intention behind it or investment,” she explained. “I just swerved very hard from doing words and messages and things that made sense or were funny, and just went all the way out to abstract craziness that I don’t want to say has no meaning, because I think it does, but it doesn’t have as prescribed a meaning, it’s more open-ended, and I fell in love with that.”
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