GLITCH Digital Art Gallery - Student Led at University of Cambridge
GLITCH
Re-seeing Reality Through Error
As Legacy Russell writes in Glitch Feminism,
“to embrace glitch is to challenge the normative order.”
The term “glitch” first emerged in the mid-twentieth century within the broadcasting and television industries, referring to interruptions, distortions, and errors in signal transmission. Today, in an age where reality is continuously mediated by algorithms, screens, and data, glitch is no longer merely a technical malfunction. It has become a cultural experience — and a way of seeing.
Broken images, flickering screens, delayed signals, and digital noise are often treated as errors. Yet these moments of disruption can reveal the hidden structures and logics within technological systems. They interrupt the assumed smoothness of reality and remind us that reality itself is never stable, neutral, or singular.
GLITCH explores the perceptual fractures exposed by technological failure. The exhibition asks how technical systems shape bodies, identities, and visual experience, and considers whether alternative realities might emerge when established orders begin to shift.
As the first contemporary art project at the University of Cambridge centred on digital culture and glitch theory, GLITCH seeks to create an interdisciplinary dialogue between art, technology, and education within the traditional college space. The exhibition is initiated by researchers from the University of Cambridge Faculty of Education, together with Cambridge Asia Forum and Cambridge EdTech Society, and developed in curatorial collaboration and dialogue with a curator from Tate Modern. It transforms the college environment into an open and fluid site of perception.
The exhibition brings together moving image, installation, and cross-media practices by a group of research-based artists. Through artificial intelligence, mechanical disruption, and digital interference, the works allow what is often hidden, suppressed, or excluded by technological systems to briefly surface.
The participating artists do not understand glitch as system failure. Instead, they approach it as an intervention into normative structures — a method for reorganising perception and reality.
Noise in the image.
Pauses in language.
Dislocations in identity.
Delays within the system.
These fractures briefly unsettle the stability of reality, allowing viewers to glimpse multiple worlds beneath the surface of the everyday.
Perhaps it is precisely in the moment of glitch that we come to realise:
the world has always contained other possibilities.
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GLITCH
19–22 May 2026
12:00–17:00
Mary Allan Building
Homerton College, University of Cambridge
Registration: https://forms.office.com/e/VLph1MCGKN