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.
