exhibition text by Leila Chaoui
installation — CRT video, motion sensor projection, sculpture, HTML interactive interfaces , digital archive.
This work is is an immersive, multi-sensory installation that explores the glitch not as malfunction, but as rebellion — a political refusal of coherence, legibility, and control.
Rooted in the frameworks of technofeminism, posthumanism, and digital hauntology, the work interrogates how bodies are rendered, misread, and discarded by systems of surveillance and computation.
I created Corpus Glitch as a space where the body is no longer seen as human, but rather rendered through the mechanized gaze — scanned, calculated, and broken down into data. In this translation, the body never fully arrives. It glitches. It is blurred, misread, and hauntingly archived.
Referencing Rosa Menkman’s concept of the politics of resolution, the installation reveals how digital visibility is never neutral. What appears as objective recognition is governed by technical standards and political connotations. Bodies that fall outside standard parameters — too slow, too compressed, too complex — are perceived unreadable, and thus disposable.
“Corpus Glitch’offers sanctuary to these misread bodies. It sanctifies the ghosted, the glitched, and the corrupted, allowing fragmented entities to haunt the systems that tried to erase them.What surfaces in the installation is not a coherent or rendered subject, but a stitched and coded monstrosity — a hybrid entity that resists strict logics of recognition and instead inhabits the space between visibility and failure.
Glitch becomes not an error , but an act of rebellion.
As a viewer your role is never passive in Corpus Glitch: you are the system’s trigger! Your motion activates distortion. Your presence is re-rendered and archived.The installation demands your presence.
At the heart of the installation, there are two interactive browser experiences: a glitch-consent ritual inspired by Glitch Feminism (Legacy Russell) that asks you to abandon binary structures, to leak outside the self, to become plural.
The second browser interface asks you questions and your answers will form a shapeshifting, living archive: a growing repository of previous visitors’ fractured replies, visible to all,not stored in the shadows of corporate algorithms, but on display, pulsing and rearranging on screen.
Referencing David Palatinus’ theory of digital hauntology, this archive embodies a frankestenian spectral space of contamination, and trace.