Synchronous Glitch: The Serious Play of Digital Matter

I am an artist-designer and researcher working with and through ecology, computation and feminist speculation. My approach is compatible with what Jungians would call myth-making because I operate in dialogue with the unknown psyche, including how the psyche interacts with the almost infinite capacities of computing. In my work I design and fabricate objects which pull upon possible alternative ways of seeing and being.1 Via the screen of the computer, a virtual place2 is formed and like the edges of an empty page or canvas it contains my image work and the serious play it necessitates. A difference between the material page or canvas and this virtual place is that data, a strange digital matter, pours in continuously and can be contained in this place. This for me, like paint or clay, is a medium. Digital matter as I meet with it, is a new medium and as such, it enables new forms of art. Crucially it is like paint or clay in that it can be worked with as ensouled or inspirited.

I have, for some time, been questioning the psychic suitability of the computer as a vessel for my explorations and of digital matter as a creative medium. I have come to realize that I am not alone in seriously playing in virtual space; perhaps others, in their own way, are also visiting forums, playing games and drifting through the internet; maybe they, too, are intuitively seeking and searching this virtual space for meaning.

In 2018, I began a Practice as Research Ph.D., based in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex (UK),