Nic Tisdale

trylla- (old norse verb) ‘to enchant, to turn into a troll’

For a large part of history, art has been a tool of communication that has been used to influence the viewer. Whether through basic emotional appeals, mass visual education programs, or transmitting complex political narratives. In my work, I distort the subjects from historical propaganda prints to examine how their messaging still exists in our contemporary digital age. In this series, I glitch political imagery by inserting the text from various social media posts directly into the hexadecimal code of the images. Further, all of the text used in these pieces are derived from online disinformation campaigns of foreign internet trolls targeting US voters.

These trolls establish fake profiles and engage with an online community by uploading images, retweeting hashtags, and posting comments. These initial interactions have no seeming connection to their intended goal. However, these curated personas make the divisive messages they eventually peddle more palatable to other online users, who in turn help spread the propaganda to new users. These online troll personas have an innocuous surface with an underlying subversive presence. My work pulls at the relationship between the figures depicted in the troll’s campaigns and the coded messages they convey to the viewer. Ultimately, by altering imagery that has an overt political message or meaning, I highlight the fabricated and untrustworthy nature inherent in visual communication.

Nic Tisdale is an artist and educator whose work investigates the trust and legitimacy associated with images, specifically how information can be distorted through digital mediums. He received a MFA and MA in Printmaking from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Nic has taught at multiple institutions across the state and is teaching currently at the University of Montevallo. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently at the Artist Image Resource in Pittsburgh, the Gittins Gallery at the University of Utah, and the CICA museum in South Korea. He is currently the Arts Education Coordinator at the Space One Eleven Arts Center in Birmingham, AL.