by Emily Kindermann

Somewhere between flesh and code examines the shifting relationship between corporeality and digitality through the intertwined aesthetics of the grotesque and the glitch.

Tracing a lineage from the excessive, transgressive bodies of Hieronymus Bosch and Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque to the fractured digital identities of contemporary artists such as SOPHIE and Arca, the essay argues that both aesthetics operate as forms of boundary dissolution. The grotesque, grounded in material distortion and bodily excess, exposes the instability of social and moral hierarchies through exaggerated corporeal forms. The glitch, emerging from technological error, extends this transgressive impulse into digital space—destabilising the seamless surfaces of contemporary visual culture and revealing the constructedness of online identity. Yet while the grotesque remains bound to organic embodiment, glitch aesthetics move beyond the corporeal, interrogating the infrastructures of code and interface that mediate digital existence. In doing so, the glitch becomes not merely a site of disruption but of generative transformation, producing new hybrid forms of subjectivity.

The essay uncovers the dialogue between grotesque and glitch aesthetics, revealing our ongoing negotiation of the porous boundaries between flesh and code, between human and machine, and between the organic and the artificial.

This video essay was produced 2024/25 in the context of a course on „Video Essays“ taught by Prof. Dr. Brigitte Weingart at the University of Arts Berlin (UdK).