Glitch Art Inspired by Fallout New Vegas
To blow off steam during exam season I’ve started playing Fallout New Vegas in honor of the popular TV show airing today. Traveling the Mojave Wasteland I’ve been inspired in the most unexpected ways.
The aesthetics and its absurdities are a staple and in this case a muse. However, the occasional glitches natural in the fifteen-year-old game have been my largest inspiration.
The glitches in the video game speak to the frustrations we have in our system. The benign battles we face on a day-to-day basis. When your bus is twenty minutes late or when you follow the wrong directions, you are faced with a glitch in the system. You can order an Uber or search new directions to bypass the glitch. However, like downloading a mod to fix a bug, the glitch doesn’t truly go away, it just gets buried beneath the new code.
Modding over a glitch removes the problem from the domain of the senses but it remains there intellectually. Just because we can’t immediately feel its repercussions doesn’t mean we can ignore its existence. Calling an Uber immediately fixes the bus situation, but we know we have to account for twenty-minute delays in the future.
Besides, no matter how fast we adapt, the more we live life the more prone we are to future glitches. From this perspective, glitches are like wounds and the mods we deploy to fix them are our battle scars.
Though there are only so many ways to get a “battle scar”, each scar is inherently unique. Such a uniqueness is celebrated in popular culture. We see war veterans celebrated in the media for their battle scars. We also see fictional characters like Harry Potter and the Joker both revered and despised for such features.
Repurposing these glitches in Fallout New Vegas illustrates similar feelings. The frustration involved in stumbling across a glitch and having to comb through paragraphs of tutorials to find the solution reminds me of the times my bus was twenty minutes late and I had to call an Uber to avoid being late for work. At the same time, the absurd aesthetics of these glitches are a unique feature that can be celebrated with the proper perspective. When I’m in the Uber instead of the bus, I see architecture in neighborhoods I’m less familiar with. There’s a sense of beauty in the new.
Like a battle scar, an artist couldn’t recreate these glitches if they tried. They’re the result of a hitch in the system, a system far more complex than any one mind can understand. When the bus is twenty minutes late we can claim to know its cause, I.E. construction. However, that cause only calls into question further causes until we’re left with an inadequate explanation.
Instead of frustrating oneself by searching for the root cause of these glitches, it’s possible to recognize their existence as serene. They are natural phenomena amidst the artificial landscape of the hyperreal, a terrific consequence of the system.
