GlitchesAreLikeWildAnimalsInLatentSpace!-BOVINE Karin + Shane Denson

GlitchesAreLikeWildAnimalsInLatentSpace!—BOVINE
Karin + Shane Denson
A Special Installation in the Inner Room Gallery
Running concurrently with Material Dialogues: Danny Rosales &
Jules Campbell.
Dates: October 30 – December 6
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 1, 1-4pm
Artists’ Talk: Saturday, December 6 at 2pm (with Danny Rosales and Jules Campbell
as well)
GearBox Gallery is pleased to present this year’s winning Inner Room Call for
Entries proposal, GlitchesAreLikeWildAnimalsInLatentSpace!—BOVINE by
Karen and Shane Denson.
Inspired in equal parts by glitch-art vernaculars, the chronophotography of
Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey, the cut-up methods of Brion
Gysin and William Burroughs, and generative practices from Oulipo to Brian Eno
and beyond, our ongoing series GlitchesAreLikeWildAnimalsInLatentSpace!
stages an encounter between human imagination and automated image-making.
We begin by training AI models on a set of Karin’s glitch paintings, which are
produced by subjecting wildlife videos (all shot by Karin) to aleatoric
“databending” processes. The digital videos break and reveal their underlying
protocols and infrastructures in the form of glitches and compression artifacts.
Selected images are then painted by hand in acrylic on canvas. Fed back into the
machine, deep learning models are prompted to generate new images in the
style of Karin’s glitch paintings. But since contemporary (“diffusion”-based) AI
models are effectively trained to eliminate “noise” and glitches, we are pushing
them against their intended purpose—and the results are accordingly
unpredictable.
Having obtained a new image, Karin translates it back onto canvas. In this case,
we are working with a cow that the AI surprisingly, and humorously, generated in
response to the prompt “glitches are like wild animals.” Shane then takes an
image of the new painting as the “seed” for an AI-generated video. Produced in
short bursts of animation and strung together, the video is then subjected to the
original glitch processes that are responsible for its training data.
Because the video is broken, it plays differently in different software. When the
various versions are combined, they fall out of phase with one another, producing
a ghostly effect. The soundtrack is also produced through generative methods by
computationally (mis)interpreting a jpeg of the original painting as an audio file.
Custom software cuts and combines the video in real time and draws on Shane’s
book Discorrelated Images to generate novel sentences.
Finally, the generative video serves as a kind of latent space for the production of
new painted images. In this iteration of the project, Karin has chosen five frames
from the video and painted a slice of each one as a panel of a pentaptych, thus
capturing the video’s temporal progression in a spatial form that is equal parts
digital chrono(post)photography, automated cutup, and human resistance to
automation.
Through this recursive and collaborative process, which shuttles repeatedly
between the digital and the physical, the invisible and the perceptible, we hope to
open for viewers a space of glitchy imagination, if not insight, into the opaque
black-boxed operations of the algorithmic media that are rapidly reshaping our
visual cultures and environments.
About the Artists
Karin Denson is a Bay Area artist working with paint, photography, video, and
collage. Shane Denson teaches media theory and aesthetics at Stanford’s
Department of Art & Art History. In their collaborative work, they travel back and
forth between theory and practice, implementing generative and aleatoric
principles across the media of pigment and pixel, canvas and concept, machinic
and manual production.
Karin Denson: In my paintings, collages, and photography, I explore the fragile
intersections of nature and technology. Drawing inspiration from digital glitches
and broken ecosystems, my work engages with visual metaphors for the
disruptions and imbalances shaping our world today. Glitch aesthetics—those
accidental or aleatoric artifacts of malfunction—become a lens through which to
examine ecological collapse, transformation, and the possibility of renewal.
My work emerges from a deep love of the natural world and a sustained curiosity
about digital processes, especially their wild, unpredictable outcomes. Through
abstract forms and layered imagery, I aim to express concern for endangered
environments while also revealing their unexpected beauty and resilience. Some
species, like the California Brown Pelican, have been pushed to the brink of
extinction more than once, only to return through ecotechnical interventions.
Others are adapting in real time, expanding into human-altered habitats and
reconfiguring old boundaries.
I hope to make these entanglements—between species, systems, and
technologies—visible in the fleeting, fragile passage of time. My work asks
viewers to sit with malfunction, not as error, but as a mode of attention to the
interdependence and precarity that characterize life in the Anthropocene.
Shane Denson is Professor of Film and Media Studies and, by Courtesy, of
German Studies and of Communication at Stanford University, where he also
serves as Director of the PhD Program in Modern Thought & Literature. His
research interests span a variety of media and historical periods, including
phenomenological and media-philosophical approaches to media arts, film,
digital media, and serialized popular forms. He collaborates with Karin Denson
on generative media art projects and is a member, along with Brett Amory and
Karin Denson, of the non/phenomenal collective. He is the author of four books:
Bride of Frankenstein [film|minutes] (Lever Press, 2025), Post-Cinematic Bodies
(meson press, 2023), Discorrelated Images (Duke University Press, 2020) and
Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface
(Transcript-Verlag, 2014). See shanedenson.com for more information.
All are welcome to join us for the Opening Reception celebrating a decade of presenting
contemporary art in Oakland. Stop in anytime Saturday, November 1, 1-4pm to greet
the artists and enjoy the light refreshments. Free street parking in the nearby
neighborhood.
770 West Grand Ave, Oakland, CA 94612
Contact: [email protected]

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