when we see a digital image, we are truly seeing a simulacrum, a collection of pixels formatted to trick the eye/brain of the observer into forming an impression of the real. it is only through the malfunction of this system, the glitch, that the true material reality of the image can be revealed. the embrace of the mistake or failure represents a powerful gesture in a culture obsessed on maintaining the image of success (even if this image is built on the reality of deep precarity). in fact, the aesthetics of glitch, as a striving towards the real of the digital, in many ways parallels the romantic turn towards nature in response to a new enlightenment of techno-utopic accelerationism (often obliquely referred to by digital art's obsession with water and fluidity), but the pastoral landscapes of glitch are fallen landscapes, haunted by the specter of their own destruction.