LL: What was the catalyst?

AMJ: A few years ago, I’d also started experimenting a lot with my own appearance - the Bay Area and the Burner scene in particular have a lot of costume parties, and I’d started playing with what it felt like to look more feminine, or masculine, or gentle, or fierce. And I’m not talking subtle experiments - I mean, like wearing dresses, flowers and feathers in my hair, playing with eyeliner and eyeshadow, going to fabric stores and throwing together my own garments. I’ve always had a decent eye for aesthetics, but up until then I’d always followed this sort of rigid engineer identity in which that was frivolous. I’ve had a lot of experiences since that have made me realize just how much altering my appearance opened up the range of how I felt and how people perceived me. And the snowball’s just kept rolling.

I come from a handful of communities in the Bay Area that are really into making subversive and often highly technical art - I spent a couple of years leading parts of Dr. Brainlove, which was this giant art car that was a huge climbable brain on the back of an old school bus. It was covered in something like 20,000 individually programmable LEDs, where you could put on an EEG and your brainwaves would feed into the patterns of the lights. It also had a dance floor and usually had a completely unreasonable pile of subwoofers on it. That experience taught me that just how big the difference was between working on something you cared about with your friends versus working in a corporate office, and it also taught me that hardcore nerds and theater folks throw better and more interesting parties than anyone else I’ve ever met. A lot of the cultural archetypes around STEM are socially inept and are sort of insulting, and I want to build culture in which nerdery is badass and beautiful and in which being smart and weird and curious is something to fiercely embrace and be proud of.

I’ll also add that I’ve been really lucky in that my friends have been super into my experimentation, and some of them have been on their own parallel journeys that we’ve gotten to share with each other. I’ve gotten a ton of encouragement and support, and I’m extremely grateful for that.

LL: Is there a story behind the name, Spirit and Glitch?

AMJ: I deliberately chose a name that felt like an invocation to explore broad and deep. Art, for me, is a process for working through my feelings and thoughts and experiences, and it’s also easy for it to stray from that when it’s technical. Choosing two words that meant something to me was sort of deliberate so that whenever I stray from that, the name acts as a call back to the depths.

Spirit to me is about seeking the nature of being alive and human. It’s about finding and breathing on your own fire, in ways that feel right to you. It’s about the insane beauty and subtlety and complexity of biological life and existence in general. It’s also a word and a territory that organized religion seems to want to have a monopoly on, and I like chipping away at that.

Glitch, to me, is a sense of being “other”. In a personal sense, it’s our differences and uniqueness that makes us who we are, and to me that’s something to be explored and celebrated rather than suppressed. I want to encourage people to be themselves, even if it’s something incompatible with the societies and systems around them. It’s also a pretty dark - I personally believe it’s important to make art that goes into that territory and talks about it rather than shying away from it.

I like the duality of the two words together and exploring what they both mean and where and how they meet. Something that feels like Spirit can be Glitch to someone else, and vice versa. I find that beautiful and worth exploring.

LL: In my experience, many people think of artificial intelligence and fashion as disparate topics that have little in common. How did you bring these two worlds together and what made you start this project?

AMJ: The AI side of it came from spending a lot of time playing with style transfer algorithms (in a nutshell - you give the AI a picture of Starry Night and it’ll paint you any other picture you give it in the style of Starry Night). At some point this sort of light bulb went off in my head that you could apply it in more ways than the authors originally intended. I started experimenting with having it paint with things in nature - flowers, bark, microscopy, fractal art - and realized that there was a crazy surreal amount that you could do with it.