Ground Control Touring

The Glitch Princess, Nat Ćmiel, was born 16 December 1997 in Singapore, Singapore. Nat Ćmiel is a non-binary painter, musician, performance artist and cyborg entity.

In Ćmiel’s adolescent years, they developed a strangely deep connection to the internet. This is where Cmiel found people who understood them more so than their real life peers. This powerful nature of digi-empathy was solidified when Cmiel’s life experiences and unusual interests lead them to connect to a niche community of like-minded cyborgs who found each other on both the dark web and through MMORPG gaming.

Ćmiel began to develop traits of a “hikikomori” in the winter of 2012. While abstracted from their contemporaries, online personas allowed for neon, spectral dreams and overflowing imagination. Other times the digital sphere left them stifled, blurring the lines between fabricated realities and corporeal life. Their digital immersion and social isolation from a young age led to an interest in the augmented virtual, the dystopian aesthete, and a fascination with the psychology behind digital intimacies. Ćmiel’s inclination towards the digital in lieu of reality translates particularly in the poetic and visual concept of “Pixel Affection”.

Via an affinity to noise music and its subculture, Ćmiel crafted a genre specific style which yeule is known for — glitch and distortion. During this period, they wrote their first EP “yeule” (2014). The pixel dimension was a portal of escape for Ćmiel, and these online spaces created a false sense of security.

At university, Ćmiel was accepted to Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London, United Kingdom. Their programme of study included a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts, specialising in painting, video, coding, and materialising dystopian sonic installation pieces. Because of the social nature of academia, Ćmiel struggled to deconstruct the hikkikomori mentality and had to re-learn the skills to socialise and integrate back into normal 3D life. During this period, the push and pull between a digital vs. enfleshed self resulted in a friction that bore some of their deepest works — including the visual performance series titled ‘Nuclear War Post X’, a collection of noise and distortion works, as well as independently producing and songwriting their debut full length record, “Serotonin II”. Ćmiel graduated from Saint Martins College in July 2020.

The yeule project was fabricated by Ćmiel to act as a portal or rift which allowed them to communicate their art to the outside world, while still being protected within their inner shell. yeule was constructed as a manifesto of Ćmiel’s own identity, where they have always had access to multiple avatars and the freedom to change or contort at will — solace through embodying a mutable, chameleon-like multiplicity. The yeule project exists to store fragments of their reality, dreams, and emotional states — an external memory device, a brain or emotional centre that exists independently of its creator. yeule is inviting us to transcend into a post-human world where expression is no longer bound by identity, but rather we are free to assemble ourselves along lines of affinity. A future where our assigned gender is no longer relevant, where we can congregate with whoever we are drawn to, regardless of our assigned human forms.