LONG LIVE THE GLITCH
“We have an obligation to build a sustainable, healthy environment for the generations to come. We are the pioneers – with great opportunities come great responsibilities.”
From a scanner and a photocopier, to a computer, mobile phone, and access to the internet, Dom Barra has engaged with technology creatively since he was a boy. Later in Leeds, he felt a need to explore art academically and enrolled in the Leeds College of Art and Design in 2004.
During those years he came across the work of experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage, who “treated 8mm film like a canvas, marking and changing the format supporting the analog data.” In researching Brakhage’s work, years later Dom came across glitch artists Nick Briz, Rosa Menkman, and Jon Cates. Glitching became a metaphor for “a way to hack life.” Altering the data within a digital format is Dom’s practice and a way to build his storytelling.
Dom was an OG before there were OGs and has had many defining moments in his career, including an obfuscating project on Facebook during the Cambridge Analytica scandal; visiting artist at the School of Arts Institute of Chicago’s 125 anniversary; being a member of the political activism Pirate Party in Naples and lecturing at the Rome University of Fine Art.
Dom joined the crypto art community on Telegram, where he participated in an online auction, selling his first crypto art piece. He then minted on EOS, Tezos, and Foundation. Dom is part of the Italian crypto art group Riot on Telegram. “For the young people in this group, this is their future – they have so much hope. We have an obligation to build a sustainable, healthy environment for the generations to come. We are the pioneers – with great opportunities come great responsibilities.”
Dom is the “firestarter” of the White Page Gallery/s, a decentralized and distributed art network born in 2019. Using WPG/s practice, the community of artists, curators, academies, festivals, and cultural operators, host art projects made and curated by others on their websites without the aim of profit. All those who are part of the network have total and independent decision-making ability with respect to the methods, times, and artistic projects they choose to exhibit in their online spaces. Dom says of the bold distortions and haphazard nature of Glitch Art that make it so subversive and distinct: “A glitch will always find a context in art because our society will always be defined by states of instability, disorder, and imperfection, and the drive for destruction and redemption will always be alive in us, it’s all in our nature.”