Glitchistory

The Visceral Glitch is the alter ego of Daniel Kramer, a digital video artist living in Brooklyn.

 

Daniel grew up with an unexplained feeling of dread and terror originating from deep in his mind. He felt like the world around him was on the verge of collapse. He envisioned complete chaos as the world crashed and burned around him on a daily basis. Cars crashing into each other, bridges collapsing and the entire world disintegrating.

 

In 2018, Daniel began a daily discipline of creating glitched up and broken images of the world around him,  but he didn’t understand  what drove his passion until an intense psychedelic experience helped him make the connection: It was deep-seated inter-generational trauma. His family had fled pogroms in Poland; then the German bombing of London in WWII; then chaos and revolution in South Africa. Generations of his family were locked into a state of fear as their worlds crumbled around them and family members were lost.

 

Daniel was born into this chaos and, without him knowing it, the fear of destruction that had been ground into his parents and grandparents was his as well. And now it spoke and spat and screamed its way through the destructive deconstructed art he was creating. Upon making this connection, he realized his art was a transmutation of fearful energy into something beautiful. Instead of running away, he leaned into the destruction he witnessed to create new worlds and share them with an audience.

 

With his new knowledge, his art took on a new meaning. It was always fun for Daniel to glitch up the world around him, but now he realized the importance of embracing destruction to create something new. Keep falling into the destruction. Where does it take you? These are the moments of The Visceral Glitch. Only by leaning in and facing our fears do we break through to the other side and realize the destruction was never the end but only the beginning.

 

The process begins with original photos of unusual shapes, colors, and textures. He then pushes and pulls them through a series of apps on his phone. Pixels are slammed into each other creating distorted and surreal shapes as RGB layers are ripped apart revealing a broken landscape. This was the destruction that was always in his mind and now he was making it happen. But instead of death and destruction, he created a vibrant world that rose out of the ashes.

 

The Japanese concept of Wabi-Sabi is an important inspiration for The Visceral Glitch. The philosophy celebrates nature’s imperfections. Daniel moves this concept into the realm of digital creation: art, like nature, should be raw and messy—the imperfections contributing to a felt sense of beauty

 

As you view these singularly visceral creations, he hopes that they both disrupt your comfort zone and stimulate your mind.