MassArt x SoWa

glitch ecology brings together nineteen members of MassArt Graduate faculty and staff—past and present—whose works inhabit moments of slippage, interruption, and instability, describing glitches in systems which cease to function as expected. Rather than treating this system failure as collapse, the exhibition considers the glitch as a generative condition: a site where hidden structures emerge, meanings shift, and new forms of relation become possible.

The work unfolds into landscapes that are fragmented and remade, bodies that resist fixed representation, and material systems that oscillate between order and disorder. Glacial boulders endlessly tumble without arrival, maps dissolve into shifting territories, digital scans fracture reality into incomplete translations, and domestic, political, and ecological structures reveal their precarious foundations. Repetition, ambiguity, distortion, and misalignment become methods for understanding a world defined by continual transformation.

At a moment marked by environmental uncertainty, technological mediation, and social fragmentation, glitch ecology asks what can be learned from breakdown. The works gathered here suggest that disruption is not merely an error in the system but a force that reveals unexpected connections across humans, machines, and the space they share. In these moments of fracture, instability becomes a catalyst for the perception, resilience, and the artistic process.

–Felicia Scott Flint | June 2026

Director, MassArt x SoWa