UNDRGRND - UNDRGRND ARTIST: CAJABEATS

UNDRGRND ARTIST: CAJABEATS

NFTjoe — August 19, 2022

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AUG 19TH, 2022

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Barquisimeto is a small town in Venezuela famous for their sunsets. Currently, the best tourist outreach program for Barquisimeto is the glitch art inspired by these sunsets from Cajabeats. While the phrase glitch art may conjure an image of chaos and distortion there is an immense amount of control and care applied to Cajabeats’s work. 

“I don't do 'real' glitch,” Cajabeats explains, “I don't take advantage of software malfunction or data corruption. I produce glitch-like works in a controlled environment, I addressed this in my series Expected Behavior.” The series toys with the idea that abstraction and glitch are “happy accidents” and proposes rather that they’re precise decisions made by the artist.

The evidence of this control and precision also shows his series on f(x)hash. Here Cajabeats shows why he refers to himself as literally a “light person”. Not limiting his work to focus on just sunsets he focuses the abstraction of light and the wide array of color refracting and how it hits our eyes as seen in Long Exposure and Squares and Dots.

“I don't understand the physics of light,” Cajabeats says, “nor have I studied color theory, I am just an empiric admirer of the light phenomenon and the colors that derive from its interactions.” 

This has not always been the case as Sky Goodman wrote previous in UNDRGRND DIGS 016 when introducing Cajabeats, “We’ve come a long way from the days of arguing in glitch forums about ‘what glitch is’ and ‘what glitch should be,’” she writes, “It is incredible to arrive at this place where an artist can work openly with Glitch Aesthetics. As a kind of rebellion, we have been obsessed with accidents and errors for years. I love what the scope of time can do; it can bring us here, where glitch becomes something married to intention, where the new punk rock is to go on a journey of clear vision and bring it to fruition.”

Lack of formal training seems to fit perfectly with the glitch aesthetic. All the skills, tools and parameters required for formal training or education are also needed for success within non-traditional training or, in this case, the art of Cajabeats. The abstract nature and chaos of his art does not imply a lack of care or vision and is the antithesis of how he creates. However the freedom and undefined nature of glitch art appears to be the perfect home for an artist such as Cajabeats.

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