There is a particular archetype emerging in contemporary feminist art — a hybrid creature who moves between analogue and digital realms, dragging her history behind her like a comet tail of pink wires, broken code, erotic defiance and uncompromising critique.
I call her the glitch-witch.
She is not a technologist. She is not a programmer. She does not arrive with Silicon Valley swagger or the naïve libertarian optimism of early internet utopians. Instead, she appears like a system error in the machinery of digital order. She disrupts, distorts, corrupts and re-enchants the screen.
The glitch-witch is not simply a feminist artist using technology.
She is a feminist force haunting the technology that surveils her.
In this sense, glitch feminism is not a style but a methodology — a way of rupturing the false stability of digital identity. Where the platform demands perfection, she inserts distortion. Where algorithms demand legibility, she offers misbehaviour. Where facial recognition wants symmetry, she gives it warpaint, blur, fragmentation, a refusal to be neatly diagrammed.
My own digital moving-image work sits within this lineage, even if I didn’t always language it this way. When I began corrupting visual files, bending pixels into disobedient geometries, or slicing and shattering the digital frame, I was following instinct: a desire to break the gaze, to escape categorisation, to survive the claustrophobia of online femininity.
But instinct, in the hands of a feminist artist, often turns out to be theory.
Glitches are not mistakes.
They are revelations.
A glitch exposes the systems that were hiding underneath the aesthetic surface — the compression, the code, the skeleton of the machine. Feminist glitch art exposes the structures that discipline women: beauty filters, desirability metrics, data harvesting, the relentless pressure to create a quantifiable, marketable self.
The glitch-witch refuses quantification.
She refuses optimisation.
She refuses to be good UX.
Instead, she makes work that feels like a disturbance in the digital weather.
There is something delightfully witchy about this.
Witches have always been women who refused categorisation — too sexual, too independent, too defiant, too educated, too strange.
Algorithms, like patriarchal institutions, fear what they cannot classify.
Which is why glitch is a particularly potent feminist aesthetic: it resists classification at its core. It makes femininity unreadable in the best possible way — a tangle of colours, impulses, errors, erotic shadows, bright noise and ungovernable signals.
The witch metaphor is not accidental. Women who made their own images, stories, healing practices and identities have historically been disciplined by state and church structures. Digital-age witches — feminist glitch artists, queer cyberfeminists, digital punk auteurs — are disciplined by recommendation algorithms, shadowbanning, de-ranking, community guidelines, and the surveillance architectures of social media.
To practice digital feminist art today is to flirt with digital heresy.
The glitch-witch does not seek to “fix” the system.
She seeks to reveal its absurdity.
She makes beauty out of malfunction.
She celebrates the unruly.
She creates mythologies from the error codes.
In my own practice, glitch has never felt like a failure. It has felt like electricity — the crackling moment where the system cannot contain me. A brief mutiny. A visual stutter that says: I am here, but not in the way you want me to be.
Glitch is a feminist refusal of digital obedience.
It is the scream inside the pixel.
It is the witch’s cackle hidden in the machine.
And when we embrace it — when we choose error over compliance — we remind ourselves of a very old truth:
The world has always feared women who generate their own power.
