"It's a pleasure to meet you! Could you tell us a little more about yourself?"

My name is Justen. I’m from Salt Lake City, Utah. I work in credit card services, as a balance transfer specialist, it’s a neat opportunity to speak to people all over the county and help them out! I have always been creative, constantly experimenting with different mediums. I’ve been doing digital art for 9 years! Slowly evolving my style and exploring how to distort an image. In the last 3 years I’ve really gotten a solid feel for my intentions and how to execute them.

"What kind of artist do you consider yourself to be? Would you define yourself as a 'Glitch Artist'?"

I don’t necessarily consider myself a “glitch artist”. Distortion and glitch are a big part of my technique, however. For me, it’s more about the altered emotional context when you distort an image than the idea of having a broken digital artifact. I like to spin a new world with a skewed perspective in my images. Glitch isn’t my only tool for creation, but one thread is similar in all my art, and that’s fabricating something new out of an existing image.

"You define your work as a 'study in impermanence'. Could you elaborate more on what that means?"

A Study in Impermanence is my largest series. It’s kind of a nexus as I’m nearing almost 200 pieces! The evolution of this series has been really cathartic for me, I didn’t necessarily start with a goal in mind. As I started collecting pieces, the theme presented itself to me. It’s a study in fleeting moments, emotions, passing connections captured and frozen in time. The pixel sorting process literally rearranges an image, creating a new emotional context and adds this fragile movement. Like moments that pass in the blink of an eye, ranging from soft and subtle and sometimes theatrical. I’ve become captivated in creating these little expressions of time and humanity.

"What do you try to convey with your work? What does distortion in this way mean to you?"

Much like sampling sounds to create a new atmosphere, I drawing references from the world and people around me and inverting and turning the world on its head, or rearranging and weaving a new perspective. Distortion is a lens, like looking through a seeing glass or a portal into something new, and unexplored. I love the idea of using photography as a glimpse of this new reality.

"What are your thoughts on the future of Photography?"

Photography is such a rich medium, and it continues to become more intricate. The digital advance of photography opens us to altered states and a new sense of emotional context. It’s an extension of our lives and it’s only going to grow as we push and develop the medium. There is no limit where we can go with photography!