Chaos Village is an emerging pluridisciplinary Brussels-based collective consisting of Marion Laser (transdisciplinary artist, researcher, she/he), Simlo (multidisciplinary digital artist he/him), NMSS (DJ, music producer, they/ them) and STELLIUM (DJ, researcher, she/they) with ties to different local scenes in Brussels. Blending the members’ individual artistic practices and backgrounds on issues touching upon the tensions and potentialities between utopia, dystopia, and technology, Chaos Village thrives in a large spectrum of mediums to articulate notions of glitch and in intimate contexts and collective narratives. In this experimental and pluridisciplinary process, the collective tries to create a community of hackers in its broader sense: hackers as a network of brains making abstraction, twisting fictions while being aware of their agency. 

Chaos Village takes over two different spaces at Pilar in an experimental and eclectic curation blending live music, djing, pluridisciplinary installations into a shape shifting yet gentle mix between care, party, mediums and genres, intimate and collective stories/ practices and longings. The glitch, in its largest definition, is what draws the link in this organized chaos, building singular and underground narratives.

Defined as a minor dysfunction of an electronic system, the glitch symbolizes the error in late stage capitalism through its artifacts, artifacts that try to hide their conditions of production through polished images, sounds or objects. The glitch unveils the fragility of these artifacts, their materiality and their potential failure. By twisting them we look for speculative ways out of a technocratic system.

The glitch, as developed by the researcher Legacy Russel, and its aesthetic of failure is inherently intertwined with marginalized identities and communities, and draws a link between both an artistic and technical angle, and our relationship to our own identities, as individuals and as a collective. Glitched identities are identities that can’t be grasped by the norm: this failure to function within the standards is a necessary refusal, and this glitch creates for us a space in which new possibilities of being, individually and collectively can thrive.

Glitch demystifies objects, sounds and images. It steps away from standardization, formats, material fetish: in clear opposition to high tech, high definition, hi-fi we turn towards pixels, broken images, parasites, distorsions, interferences as artistic tools.

Through hacking of existing objects, and by bending technologies, genres, and approaches between the analog and digital, we attempt to break the fetishism linked to technological aspirations, objects and their uses, as they play a role in new shapes of domination. With small acts of hacking, we refuse an “expert” approach to tech, art and music, often synonymous with domination dynamics: to technical prowesses we prefer playful experimentation and errors, and joyful hijacking of tools and genres, be they fictional, analog or digital.

Glitch refuses standards, norms, classifications, it creates a temporary utopian space in dystopia’s gaps.