The digital and virtual realms may bear the promise of perfection, of a seamless and flawless world, yet the opposite is true. Behind veils of perfection, and more often as part of the veil, imperfections show up. Technology is human, after all, and so are all its ‘glitches’. 

Before I learned about the project American Glitch by artist duo Andrea Orejarena and Caleb Stein, I’d never even pondered the origin of the term glitch. It means a hitch or snag. As an intransitive verb ‘to experience a glitch’ means a setback, a malfunction, or for things to go wrong. A glitch is not unlike a bug, yet is rather something more mysterious, alluding to the unexpected and unprogrammable. 

For Orejarena and Stein, the notion of glitch proves a fruitful framework for reflecting on many questions, not least on the ubiquitous medium of photography and its changing meaning and purpose in the screen age.

In a statement on American Glitch, the artists refer to the ‘ocean of information’ in which we’re living now, leaving us ‘perpetually asking what’s real and what’s fake’. The idea that we’re living in a simulation is becoming more popular. This notion ‘appears online where images are posted as personal evidence of spotting a “glitch in real life”.

For many years, the artists have been exploring the World Wide Web (akin to ‘our collective subconscious’) in search of evidence of real-life glitches on social media and in Reddit conversations. This search led to a large archive on the artists’ computers of threads and images, which became ‘a place for a new form of community and connection across time and space’. 

The duo set out to travel by car the vast United States (to which Orejarena immigrated from Colombia and Stein from the United Kingdom), to photograph sites reminding them (or the conspiracists on the internet) of glitches in real settings. Could the artists find proof for all the wild theories about Americans living in a simulation they’d encountered in the virtual rabbit holes? 

Some of the photographs they took on the road appeal to the tradition and grandeur of American landscape photography. Others are as surreal and mysterious as the imagery collected in Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel’s Evidence (1977), which, through its interweaving of science fiction, technological experiments, and catastrophe, questions conventional wisdom about photographic truth in the same manner as American Glitch, albeit before the internet and social media began complicating this even further. 

The project continues the string of intriguing photographic-artistic views on the United States, stepping into this venerable tradition. One telling image in American Glitch shows a pattern of roads in the desert in the shape of some Martian computer motherboard, as seen from the sky. Here, real estate speculation went awry, as the prospected suburbs never got built, and perhaps never will. The artists call it ‘the perfect suburban cul-de-sac’. I’m left to wonder as to what constitutes the glitches here? 

This text is an excerpt of an article written by Taco Hidde Bakker about Andrea Orejarena & Caleb Stein’s project American Glitch, originally published in Foam Magazine 65, Talent, in 2024.

ANDREA OREJARENA & CALEB STEIN are a New York-based artist duo working across photography, video, and installation. Their practice explores American mythologies through the lens of technology, memory, and desire. Working collaboratively with a single camera, they are drawn to the emergent quality of shared image-making and its relationship to collective visual culture. Their work has been exhibited internationally, including solo museum shows at Deichtorhallen Hamburg and PhotoForum Pasquart, and various group shows including at the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation, FOAM, Nguyen Art Foundation, Vincom Center for Contemporary Art, and Arles. Their photographs are held in public and private collections including the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center. Their artist duo books include Long Time No See (Jiazazhi, 2022) with texts by Do Tuong Linh and Forensic Architecture, American Glitch (Gnomic Book, 2024) with text by David Campany, and Glitch Typologies (Palo Press, 2025) with text by Nadine Isabelle Henrich. They are 2024–25 FOAM Talents and recipients of the 2024 Center for Photographic Art Grant. Their work is represented by Palo Gallery in New York and Vin Gallery in Shanghai/HCMC. 

TACO HIDDE BAKKER is a writer, teacher, and curator in the field of the arts, specialising in photography. He studied at two art schools and obtained an MA in Photographic Studies at Leiden University. He has contributed writing to numerous artists’ books, catalogues, and magazines, amongst which Camera Austria, Foam Magazine, the British Journal of Photography, and Trigger. He is the author of The Photograph That Took the Place of a Mountain (Fw:Books, 2018), a collection of essays and other writings on photography and visual art. Taco teaches Theory at the Utrecht University of the Arts (HKU Media).