My work is a reflection of the shifting landscapes—both physical and digital—that have shaped my experience. Born and raised in the American Rust Belt, I grew up in a town once defined by industry, now marked by economic decline and faded prosperity. This environment, where time often felt suspended, serves as the foundation for my exploration of digital art.

My practice juxtaposes the remnants of this decaying rural past with the hyper-urbanized, corporate environments I later navigated as an adult. Witnessing the dehumanization and ethical erosion within corporate America, compounded by the systemic failures exposed by economic crises, has profoundly influenced my artistic lens. Through glitched graphics, femme fatales, and pop culture appropriation, I deconstruct and reconstruct digital imagery, exposing the fractures and distortions embedded in contemporary society.

The glitch, a recurring motif in my work, is both an aesthetic and conceptual device. It represents the unraveling of perceived reality—errors that disrupt, distort, and reveal the instability of the systems we take for granted. Glitches serve as visual manifestations of technological and societal decay, forcing us to confront the imperfections within our own structures of existence. They have always been present in my surroundings, evolving alongside me, marking the transition from analog to digital, from past to present, from stability to disintegration.

Through my work, I challenge the illusion of permanence and invite viewers to engage with the chaos beneath the surface—a world that, much like a corrupted file, is constantly breaking, shifting, and rewriting itself.

—Nigel Clouse