total system failure
We’re happy to present three images from the artist Erik Berglin's series Total_System_Failure at ed-art.se. The series' three images with their strong colors and morphed shapes stand in stark contrast to the natural idyll they depict. It is typical of Erik Berglin's way of working. He has come to work primarily with photography in a broad sense, far from the documentary; he creates fictional stories, works with appropriated material from the internet and intervenes in the public sphere.
Total_System_Failure is a series of images produced by manipulating or tricking the digital tools of today's image editing software. Some of the artworks are pure so-called glitches. The term glitch comes from the German glitschig and means slippery. It is used to describe an unexpected technical problem that results in an aesthetically pleasing effect. A real glitch occurs uncontrolled in the software, but the effect has become so popular that special programs are now built, to try to recreate these digital blemishes. Some of the works in this series consist of a large amount of images that Erik Berglin has manipulated to mimic the random aesthetic of glitches, but in fact the artist has done all the effects with painstaking digital retouching.
- The algorithms of image editing software have no aesthetic perception in themselves, says Erik Berglin. They only try to logically satisfy the user's needs and desires. I find loopholes in the systems where it is possible to force the program to produce visual material on its own. It is a collaboration between me and the computer, in which I control the content and the conceptual frameworks while the computer makes the aesthetic decisions.
The three works of art at ed-art.se are examples of images that are not pure glitches, but are composed of a large number of images composed to be perceived as a glitch. The work is more reminiscent of working with scissors and glue - fixed on the computer - than photography.
Erik Berglin received his Master of Fine Arts from Akademin Valand in Gothenburg in 2010. Berglin has received around 20 scholarships and is represented in the collections of the Musée de Elysée in Switzerland, Hasselblad Center, and Gothenburg Museum, among others. In 2022 he was awarded the Swedish Photo Book Award for his book The Bird Project.
