The ongoing project ‘American Glitch’ (2020–) by Andrea Orejarena and Caleb Stein traverses the terrain between illusion and reality, blurring distinctions that have become increasingly fluid in the 21st-century digital age.
With a keen observational eye, the artist duo examines the visual markers of a reality that seems to slip through its own seams, probing into how American landscapes themselves might serve as artifacts of a simulated world.
In an era dominated by screens and a virtual Metaverse, the line between reality and digital experience has grown porous. The popular idea of a "glitch in the matrix" has taken on new weight, circulating widely as a form of shared cultural suspicion, echoed through social media posts that showcase these so-called real-life glitches. 'American Glitch' taps into this vernacular of disbelief and spectacle, examining the places where the ordinary American landscape begins to feel strange or uncanny. This is a landscape animated by conspiracy theories, but also by the inexorable expansion of digital spaces that constantly reshape our perceptions of the physical world.
Through ‘American Glitch’, Orejarena and Stein explore locations across the U.S., marking sites that feel like digital slip-ups in the physical world. Initially researched through the disembodied perspective of Google Earth, these sites were later visited in person. This virtual-to-physical journey gestures to a form of digital anthropology, an exploration of how our constructed online environments influence our perceptions of the world and of reality itself. By casting the internet as a kind of cultural mirror, Orejarena and Stein create images that become artifacts of an emerging "parafictional" America—one where fact and fiction intermingle in unsettling ways.
