American Glitch // Andrea Orejarena & Caleb Stein

PHROOM

ANDREA OREJARENA & CALEB STEIN

American Glitch

published by: Gnomic Book
text by: Matteo Cremonesi

artist’s galleries: Vin Gallery and Palo Gallery

The Epistemology of the Glitch: Fiction, Landscape, and Photography in Contemporary America On American Glitch by Andrea Orejarena & Caleb Stein

In an era defined by the overproduction of images and the crisis of evidence, American Glitch by Andrea Orejarena and Caleb Stein presents itself as a visual investigation into the contemporary forms of belief, suspicion, and the collective construction of reality. The volume intertwines vernacular archives harvested online with original photographs taken at sites associated with conspiracy narratives and environmental “anomalies,” constructing a topography of uncertainty that probes the post-photographic condition. The concept of the glitch is employed not merely as a visual distortion, but as an epistemological figure of our time—a symptom of eroding trust in institutions, the media, and the images themselves.

The project begins with a continuously expanding online archive populated by images of objects and infrastructures that forum and social media users identify as signs that something is amiss: camouflaged towers and antennas, buried bunkers, dimensional portals, inexplicable environmental occurrences. These scenarios encapsulate the tension between the visible and the invisible, presence and suspicion, territory and imagination. Orejarena and Stein embarked on road trips to some of these locations to re-photograph them. Their analog camera images depict landscapes that are often ordinary, peripheral, and understated. Yet it is precisely within this almost neutral aesthetic that doubt insinuates itself most effectively: each shot seems to ask, “What are we really looking at?” Photography here does not merely document; it operates in an ambiguous regime oscillating between evidence and hallucination.

Traditionally associated with technical error or transient malfunction, the glitch is redefined in this work as a symbolic category: a perceptual and cognitive short-circuit, a fissure in common sense. It is not a spectacular visual effect but a latent discrepancy, a subtle vibration between layers of the image. The photographs do not depict an error—they are the error, or rather, they occupy the threshold of the recognizable, where the image interrogates rather than confirms. As David Campany suggests in his accompanying essay, “the glitch is in us”—the error lies not within the system but in our compulsion for coherence, in our desire to impose immediate meaning on what we see.

courtesy of the artists and Gnomic Book

American Glitch thus situates itself within the genealogy of American photography that stretches from Walker Evans and Robert Frank to The New Topographics, while simultaneously deconstructing its premises. The landscape is no longer the stage of modernity or its crisis but a psychological and ideological projection field. It is a mediated landscape where the appearance of a tower or a sealed door is always a narrative event, a meme, a conjecture.

From an editorial perspective, the book functions as a complex device. The main volume is accompanied by a 52-page insert featuring contributions from 36 authors—artists, curators, and scholars—invited to reflect on the concept of the glitch. This textual mosaic offers no singular interpretation but multiplies vectors of meaning. The perforated cover, reminiscent of old IBM punch cards, alludes to archiving, error, memory, and loss. Every formal choice is designed to convey structural uncertainty: the book itself behaves like a glitch, eluding linear reading and subverting reader expectations.

However, American Glitch is more than a photographic book; it is a critical apparatus that questions the ways in which truth is constructed today. In a world where disinformation has aesthetic value and belief is a collective act, photography can no longer be relegated to representation alone—it must deconstruct, disrupt, and generate friction. Orejarena and Stein do not dictate what to think but confront us with landscapes of ambiguity where every image is a threshold, an enigma.
American Glitch thus offers a cartography of thresholds, fissures, and apparitions—a atlas of the invisible that does not seek to unveil the truth behind myths but to show how myths deposit themselves in images, manifest in places, and transmit visually. In this respect, the glitch also becomes a form of resistance to transparency, simplification, and the rapid consumption of images.

In a time when everything is visible but little is credible, American Glitch builds a pedagogy of doubt. Its power lies in offering no answers, but in laying bare the complexity of a gaze that has lost its capacity for unquestioning trust.

courtesy of the artists, Palo Gallery in New York, and Vin Gallery in Shanghai & Ho Chi Minh City.

Selected Bibliography

Campany, David. The Open Road: Photography and the American Road Trip. Aperture, 2014.
Fontcuberta, Joan. The Fury of Images: Notes on Post-Photography. Einaudi, 2017.
Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Zero Books, 2014.
Steyerl, Hito. The Wretched of the Screen. Sternberg Press, 2012.
Mitchell, W.J.T. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Paglen, Trevor. Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World. Dutton, 2009.

courtesy of Deichtorhallen, Hamburg

Orejarena & Stein (b. Colombia, 1994 & UK, 1994) are a multimedia artist duo currently based in NY.
Their conceptual, documentary work employs the intersection of technology, memory, and desire to explore American mythologies and narratives. Orejarena & Stein are fascinated with the emergent property that comes with making each photograph together with a single camera. Their work often involves extensive research into how their images relate to collective image making and the ocean of images surrounding us.

Orejarena & Stein’s work has been exhibited internationally, including a current solo museum show at Deichtorhallen in Hamburg that brings together large scale, site-specific sculptural installations, video work, and large scalephotographic prints curated by Nadine Isabelle Heinrich. They have an upcoming solo show PhotoForum Pasquart, Switzerland, and a group show at Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation in Frankfurt. Past exhibitions include The Curator’s Room in Amsterdam in conversation with a selection of Goya’s ‘Caprichos’ engravings, the FOAM Talent exhibition in Amsterdam, solo shows at Palo Gallery in NY, Vin Gallery in HCMC, Jiazazhi in Shanghai, Belfast Photo Festival, and group shows at Vincom Center for Contemporary Art in Hanoi, Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, Arles Photo Festival, Encontros da Imagem, among others. Orejarena & Stein’s work is in a number of public & private collections, including The J. Paul Getty Museum, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Nguyen Art Foundation, The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, New York State Museum, and The Ann Tenenbaum & Thomas H. Lee Family Collection. Their first book, Long Time No See, was published by Jiazazhi Press in 2022 with texts by Do Tuong Linh and Forensic Architecture. Their second book, American Glitch, was published by Gnomic Book in 2024 with an introduction by David Campany and a booklet of texts from 36 artists, writers, and curators on conceptions of glitch in contemporary society. Their artist books are included in several library collections such as MoMA, NY, The Met, NY, Princeton, Yale, Harvard, Stanford, The RijksMuseum and Center for book arts amongst other places. Their work has been featured in publications including the New York Times, Vogue Italia, British Journal of Photography, Vanity Fair, Vice, KunstForum international, and Die Zeit amongst other places. They have lectured at ICP, Christie’s Education, Sotheby’s Art Institute, and Vassar College, amongst others.