Clutch Anderson

That tactile sense that exists

​​In the last three years, depression has had a tremendous impact on my life. It caused something inside me to change. This change was so drastic that at times I understand it better as a removal.

What left me was a combination of my identity, personality, creativity, expression, and imagination—something affected the way I think, exist, and create in the world. Often I feel separate. Less like myself, and more like a wandering spectator without the power or control to take initiative. In these moments, it feels like there are layers which distance me from my experiences. These moments of distancing and layering become the inspiration for my artwork. In my artistic process, I let go of my agency, or rather channel it through something else—the programs, the sounds, or the viewer. I let the software create, relying on dithering, granular synthesis, and digital artifacts in sound and video to represent the moments of distancing and layering I feel. I am driven by resampling and experimentation. I start with a simple sketch, often done in the method of surrealist automatism, then use effects and post-processing to sculpt the work into something new. This iterative process allows me to create things I have never seen or heard before. It takes me to dreamlike, unknown, and ethereal spaces.

While the spaces I investigate are achieved, on a technical and conceptual level, through approaching and obsessing over the unknown, they often reveal the opposite. In these strange visual and sonic spaces I hope to shed light on certain immediacies of human experiences, of nascency, of dynamism, of change. In this way, abstraction and dissociation become natural understandings.

vimeo.com/clutcha