Marcello Mercado

FHLR

42 pages, artist´s book

2010

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This experimental artist’s book (2010) operates at the intersection of software failure, visual noise and procedural abstraction. Rather than treating glitch as an aesthetic effect, the work approaches error as a structural condition: a state in which digital systems expose their internal logic, limits and residual behaviors.

The images gathered in the book originate from disrupted interfaces, corrupted files and unstable rendering processes. These visual fields are not illustrations of malfunction, but material records of computational stress. Interfaces collapse into grids, fragments repeat obsessively, and legibility dissolves into dense strata of code, pixels and temporal residue. The screen ceases to function as a window and becomes a surface of inscription.

Positioned within Marcello Mercado’s broader practice—spanning drawing, performance, bio-art and algorithmic systems—this book anticipates his sustained engagement with translation, decomposition and archival instability. As in his later works, systems are not used to produce clarity or control, but to generate friction, delay and semantic drift.

Seen from a contemporary curatorial perspective, the book belongs to an early generation of soft-art practices that understood digital media not as a neutral tool, but as a material ecology prone to entropy. The work resists narrative closure and technological optimism, proposing instead a poetics of breakdown in which software reveals itself as fragile, contingent and historically situated.

Here, error is not a deviation to be corrected, but a productive state—one that exposes the invisible infrastructures shaping perception, memory and visual culture in the early twenty-first century.