GLITCH/CART
Santa Fe, NM turns into a ghost town after 11 p.m. Driving around aimlessly I tended to notice all the abandoned shopping carts that littered the vacant parking lots. These long -exposures of forgotten carts are glitchd in different file formats with quotes about consumerism. The digital distortion seen in the images is an actual visual representation of the words from the quotes. By digitally integrating the text into the image, I am able to capture the essence of the sentiment about consumer driven culture. Also, essentially breaking the file raises questions about the validity of proprietary software used to make images, and the frailty of various file types. Glitch/Cart combines the unsettling beauty of a glitched file with the distant loneliness of the carts left out through the night. The quotes used to glitch the images are located directly under each image.
"Commerce is so far from being beneficial to arts, or to empire, that it is destructive of both, as all their history shows, for the above reason of individual merit being its great hatred. Empires flourish till they become commercial, and then they are scattered abroad to the four winds." - William Blake
“Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence - those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you'd collapse. And while you people are overconsuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster.” - Aldous Huxley
“Governments are deemed to succeed or fail by how well they make money go round, regardless of whether it serves any useful purpose. They regard it as a sacred duty to encourage the country’s most revolting spectacle: the annual feeding frenzy in which shoppers queue all night, then stampede into the shops, elbow, trample and sometimes fight to be the first to carry off some designer junk which will go into landfill before the sales next year. The madder the orgy, the greater the triumph of economic management.” - George Monbiot
“Our modern society is engaged in polishing and decorating the cage in which man is kept imprisoned.” - Swami Nirmalananda
"The essence of the Liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment." - Bertrand Russell
“All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.” - Noam ChomskyAll images © C Alex Clark 2012