Glitch art comes in all shapes and sizes, and much of it is very, very bad. (Google it and you’ll see a lot of low-rent ghost imagery and, um, that one dreamy picture of Kurt Cobain?) The work of Wayne Edson Bryan cuts a different figure, though. It starts with process: Bryan actually hand-makes the artwork, printing off paper, cutting and reassembling it back into sharply geometric, almost Mondrian-esque compositions. They’re richly textured, evoking blown-out dot matrix printing and cathode-ray feedback in equal measure. 

While this inspires images of immense, three-dimensional collages, the actual works are only presented as digital replications of these montages. In other words: he makes these huge cut-and-paste “glitch” works, but all you’ll ever see are pictures of them. Parsing the glitch-inspiration-to-real-world-construction-to-digital-presentation requires roughly four conceptual leaps, which I have not had the coffee for, but the method of their production is nevertheless like a panic-nightmare of a cubicle-job: all the printers aren’t working, the keyboards aren’t showing normal letters, and there’s fucking glue all over the place. Still, the final works lack the damaged (or “spooky”) tone of so much glitch art. There’s something almost Talking Heads-ish about the way they rearrange the errata of corporate life into something architecturally profound. 

You can get a primer in the video below, but I prefer spending a bit more time on the stills. You can see a bunch over on Behance. 

P/D3 Glitch Collage Studies from Wayne Edson Bryan on Vimeo.