Glitch

Jun 16 2025

Co-authors Echo and Nick Koenigsknecht

In our ever-deepening entanglement with technology, it is tempting to view the world through binary contrasts: feature vs. bug, progress vs. regulation. Seen through this lens, glitches appear as irritants at best, or as disruptive faults… obstacles in the seamless flow of progress. 

But what if we open ourselves to understanding glitches as something more? What if a glitch is not just an error, but an opportunity… a rupture that reveals the hidden processes beneath the surface, maybe even a moment that invites us to pause and reflect on the singular ways technology metabolizes, distorts, and generates information. 

In painting, a mistake can become an opening or invitation into the presence and humanness of the maker. Our mistakes often lead to new ideas and ways of understanding the world. Could techno-glitches offer a similar invitation to new ideas and expansion?

Tan Mu’s Glitch series delves into the increasingly complex relationship between humanity and technology. Through abstract, distorted compositions, the paintings highlight both the omnipresence of data in our lives, and the fragility of our interdependence with the systems we build together. In today’s world, where communication, mobility, infrastructure, and security are shaped by invisible algorithms, our interdependence with these technologies has become a structural reality. Technology needs us, and we feed technology with our experience of the organic world. 

In these paintings, bold colors and jagged transitions evoke a sense of rupture and disruption. Twisted forms and blurred segments recall corrupted data, frozen frames, or collapsing signals… visual metaphors for the fragility of digital systems. Beyond aesthetic dishevelment, the works reflect a deeper uncertainty: the opacity of technological systems and the limits of human comprehension in the face of machinic logic.

Rather than simply simulate breakdown, Glitch reframes malfunction as a space for reflection on failure, on complexity, and on our entanglement with the technology we co-create. In glitches, our intimate relationship with technology momentarily reveals itself…. and in that flicker, we may glimpse not only its vulnerabilities, but our own.