Digital America interviewed Rudy Paganini in April 2026 on their work on Trail³r.
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Digital America: Trail³r (2025) is a browser-based artwork that allows users to change images with real-time effects, creating results that are messy, surprising, and never exactly repeatable. What inspired you to create a work where glitch, error, and instability are central to the experience?
Rudy Paganini: My inspiration comes from the tactical play between human expectation and algorithmic reality. We are currently submerged by “input-based” aesthetics where the user is mostly a passive spectator to a sanitized and meditated output. Trail³r functions as an antidote to this sterility by shifting the focus back to the physical gesture. Rather than a “black box” that delivers a finished result, I wanted to build an invitation to play, a space where the user is forced to get their hands dirty. The “instability” here isn’t just a technical glitch, it’s the unpredictability of manual, personal interaction. It’s about the joy of the messy process,
where the user becomes a performer navigating a canvas that rewards curiosity, touch and subjectivity over-optimization.
DigA: In Trail³r, the user can control the image, but not fully. The work always seems to do something unexpected. Can you talk about how you approach the relationship between the user and the system in the piece?
Rudy Paganini: It is a struggle for agency. In modern UI, the system is designed to disappear and obey, invisible servant to human intent; in this app, the system is temperamental and demands that you engage with its structure. The user isn’t just “ordering” an image; they are wrestling with an uncertain process. It’s a collaboration where the loss of total control is exactly where the creativity resides. The art doesn’t live in the user’s initial intent or the code’s final output, but in the struggle of that interaction, transforming the act of creation from a delegated performance into a territorial dispute between human desire and algorithmic autonomy and its limits
DigA: You state, “In an ever-decaying reality, only in errors true perfection can be found.” That idea feels very connected to Trail³r. What does the glitch mean to you, and what can it show that a clean digital image cannot?
Rudy Paganini: To me, the glitch is a raw generative event. It is the moment the machine speaks for itself, ideally freed by human intent, ego, or the needs and projections of a user, and that is the place to discover unexpected art.
While we spend our lives trying to force technology to mirror our desires, the glitch is an autonomous act of digital nature. It doesn’t care about being “good” or “useful”; it simply is, and I see this as a pure generative event worthy of exploration and study, rather than a failure. What it shows that a clean digital image cannot is the medium’s pulse. A clean image is a mask, it is a closed simulation that hides the process behind. The glitch performs a forensic reveal of the system’s actual reality: the memory leaks and the raw logic of the silicon. A clean output is a static surface, but the error is a moment of absolute ontological honesty. It captures a singular, unrepeatable “perfection” because it is the only time the medium escapes human control and behaves with its own wild, entropic agency.
DigA: Trail³r uses simple web tools like HTML5 canvas and JavaScript, and it runs directly in the browser. Why was it important for you to make this work on the web itself, and what does that say about the internet as a creative space?
Rudy Paganini: Using HTML5 and JavaScript is about site-specificity. The browser is the most controlled, standardized environment in our daily lives, a space built entirely for personal utility, consumption, and predictable behavior. By hosting Trail³r there, I am turning a functional tool into a volatile material. It is a direct intervention in a space where users expect things to work “correctly”. The web, as a creative space, has become overly centralized and curated. Making the work run in the browser using basic web languages is an act of reclaiming that territory (while not asking for a login nor a subscription). It asserts that the internet isn’t just a delivery stream for finished assets or social media feeds; it is a raw, performative space. In Trail³r, the code is actively processing an image in the same window where you do your banking or read the news. It forces a moment of poetic instability into the heart of the digital everyday and invites you to mess with it
DigA: Beyond Trail³r, your other works bring together projects across net art, artware, videography, audio, VR/AR, and other experimental formats. How does Trail³r fit into your larger practice, and what are you working on now?
Rudy Paganini: While the app is a net art experiment rather than one of the “artware” projects; it shares a similar DNA: the drive to build something interactive that a user actually operates to generate an output or live an experience. Whether it’s VR or a browser window, I want the audience to be involved with the piece, not just a viewer. Nothing unseen in the new media field but to translate a concept through these different realms, each with their own characteristics, that is what I find to be enriching.
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With studies in Design and Philosophy, Rudy Paganini (b.1980, Mantova, Italy) is a new media artist based in Miami, Florida.Since launching forevermidi.com in 2011, his practice has explored glitches and computational randomness as de-personalizing generative forces.Working in a postmedial approach that blends contemporary and obsolete technologies, he has exhibited internationally both on and off-line.
