Glitch and Glamour: Worlds Collide

A few weeks ago, in a fit of nostalgia, I watched the 1943 musical "Meet Me in St. Louis". As a watched, I noticed how perfectly calculated each shot was, everything perfectly styled and framed, optimized for maximum viewing pleasure. During my "formative years" I watched a lot of old hollywood musicals from the 30s-50s, often many times over, so that visual style has a lot of significance for me.

I knew that I wanted to learn how to make animated gifs for my final project, and the idea of using such a 21st century medium in conjunction with a style that was so much a part of a different era really appealed to me. I also wanted to unite this project for my final project in my photography course, and I saw an opportunity to learn how to recreate the hyper-stylized, manufactured studio look of old hollywood in my own photos. I wanted to bring them forward in time, and smash them together with both a medium and a style that are symbolic of the post-modern, internet era aesthetic.

For this project, I was thinking about Macluhan's ideas about time, the overlapping of it and, thanks to technology, the phenomenon of "all times at the same time". McLuhan's ideas about the old and the new intersecting and overlapping is very directly applicable to my project. By using the fiercely New mediums of gifs, glitch art, and the digital aesthetic in general, I wanted to address the art that is happening now, which is very influential for me as a developing artist. And by imitating and appropriating the style that has come to immortalize the Hollywood studio era of the 1940s and 50s, I wanted to include both the nostalgia of that time and of my own childhood, which functions as a bridge between the two periods.

You can view the whole collection on newhive.com!