Italian artist Dom Barra works in the emerging field of Dirty New Media Art. Jon Cates, a professor at the Art Institute of Chicago says Dirty New Media’s mission is “to express a contrast with the kind of cleanliness that is [associated] with more commercial or corporate styles of digital art and design. It refers to a menagerie of alternative practices and subcultures spanning from punk and digital sampling to piracy and pornography.” Barra says this is done through, “using softwares not designed for the image editing task such as text editing and music softwares. Through these process I manage to corrupt/glitch digital format such as .jpg, .gif, .avi, .bmp, .raw, .tif, .iff and so on.” Barra says of his subject matter, “I work with porn because I think it fits well with the glitch art aesthetics, that feeling of stolen images, corrupted TV signals from a dystopian cyberpunk scenarios. I also believe that sex is the best expression of the human body and its power and energy. I love the way it shows these qualities in a glitched picture/video/gif.”
