May Day Glitch by Rebecca Lieberman

“Employ bends and breaks as metaphors for différance. Use the glitch as an exoskeleton for progress. Find catharsis in disintegration, ruptures and cracks; manipulate, bend and break any medium towards the point where it becomes something new.”

– Rosa Menkmann, Glitch Studies Manifesto 

I generated these glitched images from a photograph of the 1936 May Day Festival at Georgia State Women’s College. I altered the image at the level of its source code by inserting language from the May Day wiki page as a means to disrupt the original image data. The resulting visual erasures, discolorations, and displacements are my early explorations of glitch as a potentially political, queer, feminist form of image-making.