Transcendent Malfunction, 2018

Digital collage and glitch-based image processing, archival pigment print on paper – 723 x 1058 mm

Bónyai Barbara’s Transcendent Malfunction is a radical reimagining of the digital self-portrait that, through the aesthetics of glitch, explores questions of feminine identity, corporeal representation, and spiritual self-transformation. At the center of the work is a digitally manipulated visage in which the artist depicts herself as a geisha-avatar – deconstructing and reassembling the iconography of traditional female roles and stereotypes within a sacred/profane symbolic field.

The image originates from a digital collage, where Bónyai places her own portrait behind a symbolic, geisha-like mask. The geisha, as a cultural topos, embodies a refined, controlled, and ornamented representation of womanhood – both objectified and exalted. Bónyai fuses this archetype with a deeply personal, self-reflexive symbol: the “Sacred Whore”, a persona that unites two polar aspects of feminine existence – spiritual devotion (as a tantric renunciant) and embodied sexuality (as a self-objectified erotic figure) – within a singular avatar.

Glitch serves not only as a formal strategy, but also as a semantic and philosophical foundation of the work. The distortions, corrupted image layers, and dislocated color channels generate an ontological rupture where subjectivity and identity are no longer stable but continuously reconfigured. The error here is not an aesthetic accident, but a transformative force – echoing tantric understandings of desire and impurity not as flaws to be suppressed, but as energies to be transmuted into spiritual insight.

The very title Transcendent Malfunction encapsulates the work’s internal dialectic: malfunction as an ascent rather than a breakdown; rupture not as defacement, but as initiation. In this sense, the self-portrait becomes not merely a visual representation, but a ritual gesture – an act of avatar creation, wherein the female body is not a passive object but an active, spiritual medium.

Bónyai’s work thus extends the visual language of glitch art while opening a new discursive space at the intersection of digital imagery and the sacred body. Through a radical rethinking of the boundaries between the personal and the political, the technological and the spiritual, the aesthetic and the metaphysical, Transcendent Malfunction may be read as a form of feminist autonomy in practice – one that turns error into virtue, distortion into light, and silence into revelation.