SOPHIA POPPY ERICKSON, GLITCH IN THE SYSTEM
“To be trans is to be a glitch—an interruption in the binary, a rupture in the system. But in the fracture, there is also liberation. Glitch in the System explores the beauty that emerges when trans bodies are freed from surveillance, when privacy becomes a sanctuary, and when self-encryption allows for true autonomy. My work explores this rupture through a digital-analog process that distorts and reinterprets intimate imagery, reflecting the fractured relationship between body, identity, and perception. Inspired in part by Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism, this series embraces malfunction as resistance—rejecting the demand for trans bodies to be legible, consumable, and controlled.
Using a flatbed scanner, I manipulate found pornographic media in real-time, capturing a single moment stretched, disrupted, and misaligned. These distortions mirror my own experiences of gender dysphoria, dissociation, and the ever present hyper-surveillance and scrutiny placed on trans bodies—both fetishized and hated, desired and erased. Dust, fingerprints, and smudges remain embedded in the image, grounding the digital in physical presence, refusing the illusion of a clean, consumable form.
Glitch in the System emerged from isolation during the first COVID-19 lockdown, a time when I found myself replaying intimate memories, trying to untangle why desire and identity had always felt disjointed. I came to understand that my discomfort was not innate but imposed—that my body, my pleasure, and my presence had always been filtered through an external lens. By encrypting the identities of those in my glitches, I offer them refuge. Their identities remain theirs alone, shielded from the extractive nature of a world that both fetishizes and rejects them.” - Sophia Poppy Erickson