Marta Timmer is a Polish-born multidisciplinary visual artist, graphic designer and illustrator based in Calgary, Canada. She blends glitching, digital collage, photo-manipulation and compositing, with selective use of AI tools, to explore beauty, emotion, memory, decay and transformation. Classically trained in painting, drawing and photography, she began experimenting with glitch around 2011.
Her process has shifted from finding and provoking glitches in the wild — on screens, signage and scrambled files — to constructing digital collages that only simulate the look of a glitch. She builds these images by layering fragments of old works, stock imagery, AI-generated subjects and textures, and both true and simulated glitches, in a controlled and meticulous process. The human face is a recurring motif in her work. Applying the glitch aesthetic to a portrait, she has said, offers a way of capturing a subject's instability and potential to fracture. She also draws on her own old photographs and film scans as source material, using glitch artifacts to comment on how time distorts the accuracy and emotion of memory.
