Dawnia Darkstone (American, b. 1990), who works under the alias Letsglitchit, is a glitch artist who manipulates video, sound, print, embroidery and other media through deliberate digital and analog breakdown.,She lives and works in Mississippi,and has developed a technique she calls chemicalbending, pouring harsh chemicals onto layered magazines so the inks melt and bleed into new patterns.
Darkstone began working in glitch art in the early 2010s after a series of accidents made the physically demanding work of concert and event photography unsustainable.,She first became known in the community by sharing glitch techniques and tutorials on Tumblr,and has been a leader within the Glitch Artists Collective, having served as its co-administrator on Facebook and as a founding member of the Web3-focused collective Glitch Alpha Force.,Since around 2015 she has incorporated AI into her practice, training models on her own output and running the results back through AI and glitch processes to create a feedback loop of destruction. Her work has been released on platforms including SuperRare, MakersPlace and KnownOrigin, and exhibited in London, Paris and Tokyo.
In 2023 Sotheby's appointed Darkstone and the curator Dina Chang to co-curate its “Glitch: Beyond Binary” auction, after criticism of an earlier show the auction house had curated entirely with male artists,and that year she also curated a glitch art exhibition for SuperChiefNFT at NFT Rome.Her debut print edition, Digital Chemicals, released with Avant Arte, paired the chemicalbending process with an AI model she trained on her own patterns, finished with a glow-in-the-dark silkscreen layer and a matching animated NFT.She has also collaborated with other artists in the CryptoArt community, including Ina Vareand Max Capacity.
Her work has been exhibited internationally and auctioned through Sotheby's and Christie's,and she created the photography-based alternate reality project @cryptowebcams as a commentary on mass surveillance.
