David Campany contributes a major essay to ‘American Glitch’ the new book by artists Caleb Stein & Andrea Orejarena. The book explores the friction between fact and fiction and how this is manifested in the U.S. landscape. An ocean of information leaves us questioning what is real — and what isn’t. In an era defined by screens, the notion that we’re in a simulation has become popular, often in a satirical cultural protest of late-stage capitalism, disinformation and increased technological dependence. 

Andrea Orejarena and Caleb Stein spent years treating the internet as their collective subconscious, collecting social media posts of people’s ‘real life glitches’ as part of their lengthy research process, which are presented in the book as four-dimensional reverberations through time and space; the duo later made formal photographs of a series of sites around the U.S. which are reminiscent of the glitches.

David Campany’s essay, ‘The Glitch is in Us’ touches on everything from Hitchcock’s wartime thrillers to paranoia movies of the 1970s, to Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush and Taylor Swift, exploring how the term ‘glitch’ went from meaning technical error to something more ominous, along the lines of the revealing Freudian slip. David’s essay can also be read on the website of the publisher, Gnomic Books.