[ILLUSTRATION #8q4314U]

Name: Ragnar Digital, LLC
Price range: $

Jon Cates

2022

NFT/Digital

The Ragnar 100

Description

Jon Cates is a glitch art pioneer whose “Glitch Western” style stems from his twin fascinations with the American West and with computational errors. These figure both aesthetically and compositionally in his _mechanicalInterventions _series.

Cates trained AI programs on glitch art, teaching them not to emulate realistic compositions but to instead value the textural effects of compression artifacts and other errors. Cates then manually glitched the outputs, to demonstrate both AI and human approaches to recognizing beauty in imperfection.

In both pieces_, massive landscapes dwarf solitary figures. In the landscape-oriented [ILLUSTRATION #8q4314U], a plain of impressionistic shrubland is interrupted by hills of electric pink and turquoise under a burning sky. [ILLUSTRATION #4x7485G]_ is drenched in more customary hues of sun-soaked yellow, its subject standing before an imposing canyon. Upon inspection, the environments break apart into spikes, duplications, blurs, digitized boxes, and interspersions of color, all evocations of the glitch sensibility that Cates and his models share.