This article was created from a conversation between Rudolf Amaral and Matthias Röder at the Sonophilia Salon in Salzburg in March 2026. It reflects on Amaral’s work with glitch, flicker, AI-generated imagery, skateboarding, and the way artistic practice can open a wider way of seeing.
Everything is polished now.
Faces are polished. Careers are polished. Identities are polished. Even rebellion often arrives with perfect lighting, a clean surface, and the soft assurance that nothing has gone wrong.
The glitch matters because it refuses that smoothness. It is not just an error, and not just an aesthetic. A broken image can expose the assumptions behind a polished one. It can reveal how much contemporary visual culture depends on hiding its own construction.
That is what makes the glitch more than a digital accident. It becomes a method for reading the world. The surface is never just a surface; it is a claim about order, control, desirability, and the kind of human being culture wants to present.
To interrupt the surface is to interrupt that claim.
This is also why flicker is more than a visual device. A flickering image can be unsettling, but it can also be strangely meditative. Light passing through a rotating patterned cylinder can create a field that feels physical before it becomes conceptual. It touches perception directly. It reminds us that seeing is not passive. The body is always involved.
That tension is important. The same visual language can unsettle a polished image and calm the nervous system. The same flicker can be interruption and meditation at once.
The work becomes sharper when AI enters the frame. AI-generated imagery is often discussed as a question of realism: does the image look true, or can we still detect the machine? But realism is not the only question. The more interesting question is what kind of power an image normalizes.
Militarized figures, dystopian atmospheres, anonymous faces of command: these are not neutral motifs. They are a visual vocabulary of authority. When AI produces them, it does not simply make an image. It recombines cultural memory. It shows us how quickly power can become a style, and how easily a style can start to feel inevitable.
AI, in that sense, is not only a tool. It becomes a surface of authority.
Technology is never just technical. It reorganizes feeling, hierarchy, and the imagination of what counts as a future.
Then skateboarding changes the whole picture.
At first, skateboarding can look like a release from the heavy material around it. Against militarized imagery and state power, it introduces lightness, speed, risk, and friction. But it is not an escape from the social field. It is a way of reading it differently.
A ledge becomes an obstacle. A plaza becomes a line. A city designed for tourism becomes a field of surfaces and uses. Salzburg, seen through skateboarding, is no longer only a postcard city of architecture and heritage. It becomes terrain.
A tourist sees architecture; a skateboarder sees terrain.
That is an anthropological insight as much as an artistic one. Different communities, different uses, different meanings can occupy the same physical space without collapsing into each other. The skill is not to flatten those differences, but to hold them in view.
Authenticity runs through all of this. Glitch aesthetics are about authenticity because they reject the false certainty of perfection. Skateboarding is about authenticity because it lives between DIY culture, counterculture, commercialization, and sport. Documentary work is about authenticity because it asks what it means to meet someone, place them, and represent them without turning them into an abstraction.
Authenticity is not a decorative quality added at the end. It has to do with source, context, and relation. Where does an image come from? What world gives an object meaning? What is lost when a person, practice, or ritual is removed from the conditions that made it intelligible?
This becomes especially clear when indigenous objects and human remains enter museum, art, or commercial contexts. A ritual object does not simply become an artwork because a gallery treats it that way. Meaning travels badly when power decides the route.
The same is true, in a different register, for digital culture. In technical systems, source can sometimes be proven with cryptographic certainty. With people and cultures, the source is more unstable: intention, belief, history, pressure, fear, desire. You cannot hash a motive. But you can still ask where something comes from, and whether the context that gave it meaning is being respected.
This is why Amaral’s work belongs in Sonophilia’s field of inquiry. Not because it fits neatly into one category, but because it refuses the categories. The glitch is not just an art style. The flicker machine is not just a device. AI imagery is not just a workflow. Skateboarding is not just a subculture. Each becomes a way of asking who gets to define reality, and how easily that definition can be broken open.
Culture becomes visible when perception changes. Sometimes that change comes from a broken image. Sometimes from a flickering light. Sometimes from a skateboarder seeing an obstacle where everyone else sees a bench. Sometimes from an AI-generated figure that makes the aesthetics of authority feel too familiar to ignore.
The point is not to romanticize brokenness. It is to notice that polish can be a political technology too.
The tools we use shape how we see.
So do the errors.
