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Unknown System Errors is a series of glitch-like digital collages that form part of a larger body of work titled “Anchoritic Works (2020–)”. The project began unexpectedly, emerging from an earlier series called “Library of Unlearning”, in which I scanned the covers of books and obscured their titles with pieces of paper. These fragments—initially used to redact, to erase—became source material in their own right. The images in Anchoritic Works are the result of digitally processing those overlooked scraps in Photoshop, transforming an act of concealment into a space of generative abstraction.
This gesture of repurposing the redacted becomes a kind of devotional practice—quiet, recursive, and attentive. The term “anchoritic” refers to a religious recluse withdrawn from the world, and the works embody a similar inwardness: a retreat into a private logic of image-making that resists readability and narrative. They explore a form of meditative computation, operating on the threshold between code and contemplation.
In "Unknown System Errors", this process intensifies. Each image functions as a visual interruption—a glitch. The glitch is more than a technological failure; it is a contemporary metaphor for the wound. As the poet writes, “The wound is the place where the light enters you.” It is a rupture in the seamless flow of information, a break in the expected. But it also carries a transcendental charge: it sets off an entropic chain of reactions with the potential to reimagine the system from within. It is not only a failure of code but an aperture—an opening through which something unanticipated can emerge. The glitch reveals the scaffolding of the system precisely by disrupting it, exposing the tension between automation and collapse, between logic and its limits.
Thus, the glitch becomes a revolutionary symbol, an anarchic presence within digital order. It challenges the fantasy of perfection, revealing that within failure lies the possibility of renewal.
The works echo corrupted data streams, distorted barcodes, failed transmissions. They resemble the visual residues of systems breaking down—architectures of information becoming illegible. Each composition feels like the fossil of a lost language or the static left behind by a vanished message. The visual tension—between order and noise, symmetry and disruption—invites a sustained, contemplative gaze.
In this way, "Unknown System Errors" continues the logic of "Anchoritic Works": to discover a hidden order in silence, absence, and technological breakdown.
*"The wound is the place where the light enters you" is a quote attributed to the Sufi poet Rumi -
