Glitch art

Glitch art is an art movement centering around the practice of using digital or analog errors, more so glitches, for aesthetic purposes by either corrupting digital data or physically manipulating electronic devices. It has also been regarded as an increasing trend in new media art, with it retroactively being described as developing over the course of the 20th century onward.

As a technical word, a glitch is the unexpected result of a malfunction, especially occurring in software, video games, images, videos, audio, and other digital artefacts. The term came to be associated with music in the mid 90s to describe a genre of experimental electronic music, glitch music. Shortly after, as VJs and other visual artists began to embrace glitch as an aesthetic of the digital age, glitch art came to refer to a whole assembly of visual arts. One such early movement was later dubbed net.art, including early work by the art collective JODI, which was started by artists Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans. JODI's experiments on glitch art included purposely causing layout errors in their website in order to display underlying code and error messages. The explorations of JODI and other net.art members would later influence visual distortion practices like databending and datamoshing. The history of glitch art has been regarded as ranging from crafted artworks such as the film A Colour Box (1935) by Len Lye and the video sculpture TV Magnet (1965) by Nam June Paik, as well as Digital TV Dinner (1978) created by Jamie Fenton and Raul Zaritsky, with audio by Dick Ainsworth—made by manipulating the Bally video game console and recording the results on videotape—to more process-based contemporary work such as Panasonic TH-42PWD8UK Plasma Screen Burn (2007) by Cory Arcangel.

What is called "glitch art" typically means visual glitches, either in a still or moving image. It is made by either "capturing" an image of a glitch as it randomly happens, or more often by artists/designers manipulating their digital files, software or hardware to produce these "errors." Artists have posted a variety of tutorials online explaining how to make glitch art. There are many approaches to making these glitches happen on demand, ranging from physical changes to the hardware to direct alterations of the digital files themselves. Artist Michael Betancourt identified five areas of manipulation that are used to create "glitchart." Betancourt notes that "glitch art" is defined by a broad range of technical approaches that can be identified with changes made to the digital file, its generative display, or the technologies used to show it (such as a video screen). He includes within this range changes made to analog technologies such as television (in video art) or the physical film strip in motion pictures.

Data manipulation (or databending) changes the information inside the digital file to create glitches. Databending involves editing and changing the file data. There are a variety of tutorials explaining how to make these changes using programs such as HexFiend. Adam Woodall explains in his tutorial:

Like all files, image files (.jpg .bmp .gif etc) are all made up of text. Unlike some other files, like .svg (vectors) or .html (web pages), when an image is opened in a text editor all that comes up is gobbldygook!

Related processes such as datamoshing changes the data in a video or picture file. Datamoshing with software such as Avidemux is a common method for creating glitch art by manipulating different frame types in compressed digital video:

Datamoshing involves the removal of an encoded video’s I-frames (intra-coded picture, also known as key frames—a frame that does not require any information regarding another frame to be decoded), leaving only the P- (predicted picture) or B- (bi-predictive picture) frames. P-frames contain information predicting the changes in the image between the current frame and the previous one, and B-frames contain information predicting the image differences between the previous, current and subsequent frames. Because P- and B-frames use data from previous and forward frames, they are more compressed than I-Frames.

This process of direct manipulation of the digital data is not restricted to files that only appear on digital screens. "3D model glitching" refers to the purposeful corruption of the code in 3D animation programs resulting in distorted and abstract images of 3D virtual worlds, models and even 3D printed objects.