Published:  08 JUN 2021. Text By Manu Sharma. 

An Indian artist currently based in New York, Visakh Menon discusses his craft and its exploration that revolves around error.

Glitch art is a creative genre that clubs together a vast variety of techniques used to distort, damage or otherwise manipulate data in order to produce results that are largely subversive and transformative. Its practitioners often apply multiple techniques, both software and hardware related, in their explorations, and have manifested a rich history of doing so in order to materialise various socio-political ideals through their craft. The same may not be said for Kochi-born Visakh Menon, who also utilises software and hardware, often combining them through an abstract drawing and painting practice. However, seen from a predominantly exploratory perspective, his work may very will sit near the front of glitch art practices as they are currently being pursued. Menon spent most of his youth in India, where he committed himself to both, an undergraduate and graduate degree in graphic design.

He tells STIR, “I started out in advertising as a designer, and continue to work as an art director, designer, and design educator”. However, this does little to shed light on his captivating glitch arts practice, which seems to have really picked up post-2007, when he moved to New York, and found himself within a welcoming community of artists along with acquiring access to his own studio. Discussing his work since then, Menon says, “I also started showing my work, something I had never done before while I lived and worked back home in India. My current series of abstract drawings and paintings focus on the visual language of digital artefacts and the aesthetics of glitch, error and noise”.