The Brazilian artist Sabato creates glitch photography,video game ROM corruption,and 3D-rendered scenes that push rendering software to glitch.Born Sabato Visconti in São Paulo, he immigrated to the United States as a baby and grew up in Miami,before graduating from Amherst College in 2009.He began working with glitch processes in 2011, after a friend's memory card began randomly corrupting JPEG files.
As an undocumented immigrant, he struggled to find work after graduating from Amherst, and turned to photography and video production instead. He then taught himself to reproduce the corrupted-JPEG effect using a hexadecimal code editor.Sabato treats digital images as material objects, manipulating their byte order, pixel structure, compression, and software errors, and draws source material from catalog clippings, classic video games, literary texts, 3D models, film stills, and paintings.He describes his practice as an inquiry into how digital imaging, hybrid media, online networks, and machine intelligence have become tools of social conditioning, mass surveillance, and necropolitics.,Describing his approach, Sabato has said glitch-based work “casts a wide net”, letting him produce work in many different formats.
In 2014, his work appeared in “BP Loud Tate 2014: Code” at Tate Britain in Londonand in “Message (Not) Received”, a group show of international glitch artists at the University of Texas at Dallas.He was also included in “Border Control” at the University of Michigan's Stamps Gallery in 2019 and in “La Frontera: A New Latinx Lexicon” at the Humble Arts Foundation in 2020. His work has also been profiled by The New York Times and WIRED.
In 2024, Sabato released Barbie World: The Breakdown Sessions, a solo drop on objktone consisting of eight works that blend nostalgia, glitch art, and social commentary. The series paired unique 1/1 pieces with limited editions of ten, the latter selling out.That year, the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, New York, let visitors collect an NFT edition of his work Easel Engine.In 2025, his series Angelcores & Heavenly Sprites appeared in “Console Spirituality”, a group exhibition curated by LAN Party for the platform Feral File.
