“GLITCHBODIES” by Rebecca Merlic

Title:

GLITCHBODIES

Artist(s) and People Involved:

Filmmaker, Video Artist, or Animator(s):



• Rebecca Merlic

Symposium:

• ISEA2024: 29th International Symposium on Electronic Art

Venue(s):

• The Loft Theatre, QUT Creative Industries Precinct, Brisbane, Australia

Artist Statement:

GLITCHBODIES is a multiplatform project that consists of a visual novel Game, a VR-Game Experience, an animation movie, and a performance piece. The inclusive project portraits more than 59 international protagonists from Vienna, Munich, Zagreb, Hamburg, London, Bangkok, Berlin, and Tokyo who co-created a parallel GLITCHBODIES-verse with me.

Created through collaborations and rituals GLITCHBODIES explores new forms of feminism, LGBTQ+, Drag transformations and intimate sensitive representations of the protagonists and aims to bring them to a wider audience. In GLITCHBODIES, Avatar becomes a collective and politically charged body. Video games have undoubtedly become the most widespread form of entertainment and its impact on representational stereotypes is huge. GLITCHBODIES responds to socio-political factors as well as to the very male-dominated world of video games by creating an interactive digital space, a fluid journey through infinite individual, gender, and realities. GLITCHBODIES provides a safe platform for non-heteronormative gender positions sharing the notion of queer as political attitude, providing new perspective for the player while celebrating its protagonists with motherly care. The game engine creates safety by ritualizing the celebration of all protagonists within the world, as a mother would. This generates and opens new perspectives for the player, for you. The world within a world is instantly familiar, full of ambitions, wishes and desires through strong and sensitive collaboration with the all-important issue of all-gender equality. As more protagonists gather in GLITCHBODIES, the resolution of gender in the world rises higher and higher.