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Glitch art is the practice of using digital or analog errors for aesthetic purposes by either corrupting digital data or physically manipulating electronic devices.
Glitch A glitch is a short-lived fault in a system, such as a transient fault that corrects itself, making it difficult to troubleshoot. The term is particularly common in the computing and electronics industries, in circuit bending, as well as among ...
es appear in visual art such as the film ''
A Colour Box ''A Colour Box'' is a 1935 British experimental animated film by Len Lye. Commissioned to promote the General Post Office, it was Lye's first direct animation to receive a public release. Production In mid 1935, Lye struck a deal with John Grie ...
'' (1935) by
Len Lye Leonard Charles Huia Lye (; 5 July 1901 – 15 May 1980) was a New Zealand artist known primarily for his experimental films and kinetic sculpture. His films are held in archives including the New Zealand Film Archive, British Film Institute, Mu ...
, the video sculpture ''TV Magnet'' (1965) by
Nam June Paik Nam June Paik (; July 20, 1932 – January 29, 2006) was a Korean American artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the founder of video art. He is credited with the first use (1974) of the term "electronic super hi ...
and more contemporary work such as ''Panasonic TH-42PWD8UK Plasma Screen Burn'' (2007) by Cory Arcangel.


History of the term

As a technical word, a
glitch A glitch is a short-lived fault in a system, such as a transient fault that corrects itself, making it difficult to troubleshoot. The term is particularly common in the computing and electronics industries, in circuit bending, as well as among ...
is the unexpected result of a malfunction, especially occurring in software, video games, images, videos, audio, and other digital artefacts. Early examples of glitches used in media art include ''Digital TV Dinner'' (1978) created by Jamie Fenton and Raul Zaritsky, with glitch audio done by Dick Ainsworth. This video was made by manipulating the Bally video game console and recording the results on videotape.Betancourt, Michael. (2015
The Invention of Glitch Video: Digital TV Dinner (1978) (preview)
/ref> The term glitch came to be associated with music in the mid 90s to describe a genre of experimental/noise/electronica (see
glitch music Glitch is a genre of electronic music that emerged in the 1990s. It is distinguished by the deliberate use of glitch-based audio media and other sonic artifacts. The glitching sounds featured in glitch tracks usually come from audio recording de ...
). Shortly after, as VJs and other visual artist began to embrace the 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 (see below).


Glitch art events


2002

Motherboard, a tech-art collective, held the first glitch art symposium in
Oslo Oslo ( , , or ; sma, Oslove) is the capital and most populous city of Norway. It constitutes both a county and a municipality. The municipality of Oslo had a population of in 2022, while the city's greater urban area had a population of ...
, Norway during January, to "bring together international artists, academics and other Glitch practitioners for a short space of time to share their work and ideas with the public and with each other."


2010

On September 29 thru October 3, Chicago played host to the first GLI.TC/H, a five-day conference in Chicago organized by Nick Briz, Evan Meaney, Rosa Menkman and Jon Satrom that included workshops, lectures, performances, installations and screenings. In November 2011, the second GLI.TC/H event traveled from Chicago to Amsterdam and lastly to
Birmingham Birmingham ( ) is a city and metropolitan borough in the metropolitan county of West Midlands in England. It is the second-largest city in the United Kingdom with a population of 1.145 million in the city proper, 2.92 million in the West ...
, UK. It included workshops, screenings, lectures, performance, panel discussions and a gallery show over the course of seven days at the three cities.


2013

Run Computer, Run at ''GLITCH 2013'' ''arts festival'' at RuaRed, South Dublin Arts Centre - Dublin, curated by Nora O Murchú.


2015

/'fu:bar/ 2015 Glitch Art is Dead at Teatr Barakah in Warsaw, Poland. Curated by Ras Alhague and Aleksandra Pienkosz. reFrag: glitch at La Gaïté Lyrique in Paris, France. Organized by the School Art Institute of Chicago and Parsons Paris.


2016

/'fu:bar/ 2016


2017

/'fu:bar/ 2017 Glitch Art is Dead 2 at Gamut Gallery, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. Curated by Miles Taylor, Ras Alhague and Aleksandra Pienkosz.


2018

/'fu:bar/ 2018 Blue\x80 & Nuit Blanche at Villette Makerz in Paris, France. Curated by Ras Alhague and Kaspar Ravel. Refrag #4 Cradle-to-Grave at Espace en cours in Paris, France. Curated by Benjamin Gaulon.


2019

/'fu:bar/ 2019 ''Communication Noise'' exhibition, Media Mediterranea 21 festival,
Pula Pula (; also known as Pola, it, Pola , hu, Pòla, Venetian; ''Pola''; Istriot: ''Puola'', Slovene: ''Pulj'') is the largest city in Istria County, Croatia, and the seventh-largest city in the country, situated at the southern tip of the ...
, Croatia.


2020

/'fu:bar/ 2020 ''An Exercise of Meaning in a Glitch Season'' an exhibition in National Gallery Singapore. Curated By: Syaheedah Iskandar.


2021

/'fu:bar/ 2021 Glitch Art: Pixel Language, the first glitch art exhibition in Iran. Glitch Art in Iran. La prima mostra artistica collettiva.


2022

Glitch Art in Iran. La prima mostra artistica collettiva. Glitch: Aesthetic of the Pixels, the second glitch video art group exhibit in Iran. Glitch Art is Dead: The 3rd Expo, September 2-4 in Granite Falls, MN /'fu:bar/ 2022 Glitch Art International Online Exhibition - the third glitch.art.br edition shown via an online platform (scheduled to start December 1 2022).


Methods

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

Data manipulation (aka '' 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 Avidemux is a free and open-source software application for non-linear video editing and transcoding multimedia files. The developers intend it as "a simple tool for simple video processing tasks" and to allow users "to do elementary things in a ...
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 world A virtual world (also called a virtual space) is a computer-simulated environment which may be populated by many users who can create a personal avatar, and simultaneously and independently explore the virtual world, participate in its activities ...
s, models and even 3D printed objects.


Misalignment

Misalignment glitches are produced by opening a digital file of one type with a program designed for a different type of file, such as opening a video file as a sound file, or using the wrong codec to decompress a file. Tools commonly used to create glitches of this type include Audacity and
WordPad WordPad is the basic word processor that has been included with almost all versions of Microsoft Windows from Windows 95 onwards. It is more advanced than Windows Notepad, and simpler than Microsoft Word and Microsoft Works (last updated in 2007 ...
. Artist Jamie Boulton explains the process and the glitches it produces, noting that these glitches depend on how Audacity handles files, even when they are not audio-encoded:
The easiest way to manipulate a file in Audacity is to select a section of the file and apply one of the built in sound effects to it. Now, I’m no computing whizz kid, but the way I see it, when you apply a sound effect to a sound file, the program takes that file and alters the file data in the manner which it’s been told will achieve that effect. So, for example, if you were to apply an echo effect then it would repeat parts of the file, diminishing the repetition after each iteration. The wonderful thing is that it will do this regardless of what the file actually is, Audacity doesn’t know or care whether the file is a sound or not, it will alter it in the manner instructed.


Hardware failure

Hardware failure happens by altering the physical wiring or other internal connections of the machine itself, such as a short circuit, in a process called " circuit bending" causes the machine to create glitches that produce new sounds and visuals. For example, by damaging internal pieces of something like a VHS player, one can achieve different colorful visual images. Video artist
Tom DeFanti Thomas Albert "Tom" DeFanti (born September 18, 1948) is an American computer graphics researcher and pioneer. His work has ranged from early computer animation, to scientific visualization, virtual reality, and grid computing. He is a distinguishe ...
explained the role of hardware failure in a voice-over for Jamie Fenton's early glitch video ''Digital TV Dinner'' that used the Bally video game console system:
This piece represents the absolute cheapest one can go in home computer art. This involves taking a $300 video game system, pounding it with your fist so the cartridge pops out while its trying to write the menu. The music here is done by Dick Ainsworth using the same system, but pounding it with your fingers instead of your fist.
Physically beating the case of the game system would cause the game cartridge to pop out, interrupting the computer's operation. The glitches that resulted from this failure were a result of how the machine was set up:
There was ROM memory in the cartridge and ROM memory built into the console. Popping out the cartridge while executing code in the console ROM created garbage references in the stack frames and invalid pointers, which caused the strange patterns to be drawn. ... The Bally Astrocade was unique among cartridge games in that it was designed to allow users to change game cartridges with power-on. When pressing the reset button, it was possible to remove the cartridge from the system and induce various memory dump pattern sequences. Digital TV Dinner is a collection of these curious states of silicon epilepsy set to music composed and generated upon this same platform.


Misregistration

Misregistration is produced by the physical noise of historically analog media such as motion picture film. It includes dirt, scratches, smudges and markings that can distort physical media also impact the playback of digital recordings on media such as CDs and DVDs, as electronic music composer
Kim Cascone Kim Cascone (December 21, 1955) is an Italian American composer of electronic music who is known for his releases in the ambient, drone, industrial and electro-acoustic genre on his own record label, Silent Records. Biography In 1989 Casc ...
explained in 2002:
"There are many types of digital audio ‘failure.' Sometimes, it results in horrible noise, while other times it can produce wondrous tapestries of sound. (To more adventurous ears, these are quite often the same.) When the German sound experimenters known as Oval started creating music in the early 1990s by painting small images on the underside of CDs to make them skip, they were using an aspect of ‘failure' in their work that revealed a subtextual layer embedded in the compact disc. Oval's investigation of ‘failure' is not new. Much work had previously been done in this area such as the optical soundtrack work of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Oskar Fischinger, as well as the vinyl record manipulations of John Cage and Christian Marclay, to name a few. What is new is that ideas now travel at the speed of light and can spawn entire musical genres in a relatively short period of time."


Distortion

Distortion was one of the earliest types of glitch art to be produced, such as in the work of video artist
Nam June Paik Nam June Paik (; July 20, 1932 – January 29, 2006) was a Korean American artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the founder of video art. He is credited with the first use (1974) of the term "electronic super hi ...
, who created video distortions by placing powerful magnets in close proximity to the television screen, resulting in the appearance of abstract patterns. Paik's addition of physical interference to a TV set created new kinds of imagery that changed how the broadcast image was displayed:
The magnetic field interferes with the television’s electronic signals, distorting the broadcast image into an abstract form that changes when the magnet is moved.
By recording the resulting analog distortions with a camera, they can then be shown without the need for the magnet. Compression artifacts is a noticeable distortion of media (including
image An image is a visual representation of something. It can be two-dimensional, three-dimensional, or somehow otherwise feed into the visual system to convey information. An image can be an artifact, such as a photograph or other two-dimensiona ...
s,
audio Audio most commonly refers to sound, as it is transmitted in signal form. It may also refer to: Sound *Audio signal, an electrical representation of sound *Audio frequency, a frequency in the audio spectrum *Digital audio, representation of sound ...
, and
video Video is an electronic medium for the recording, copying, playback, broadcasting, and display of moving visual media. Video was first developed for mechanical television systems, which were quickly replaced by cathode-ray tube (CRT) syste ...
) caused by the application of
lossy compression In information technology, lossy compression or irreversible compression is the class of data compression methods that uses inexact approximations and partial data discarding to represent the content. These techniques are used to reduce data size ...
. They can be intentionally used as a visual style in glitch art. Rosa Menkman's work makes use of compression artifacts, particularly the discrete cosine transform blocks (DCT blocks) found in most
digital media Digital media is any communication media that operate in conjunction with various encoded machine-readable data formats. Digital media can be created, viewed, distributed, modified, listened to, and preserved on a digital electronics device. ' ...
data compression In information theory, data compression, source coding, or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation. Any particular compression is either lossy or lossless. Lossless compression ...
formats such as
JPEG JPEG ( ) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image ...
digital images A digital image is an image composed of picture elements, also known as ''pixels'', each with ''finite'', '' discrete quantities'' of numeric representation for its intensity or gray level that is an output from its two-dimensional functions f ...
and
MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...
digital audio Digital audio is a representation of sound recorded in, or converted into, digital form. In digital audio, the sound wave of the audio signal is typically encoded as numerical samples in a continuous sequence. For example, in CD audio, sam ...
. Another example is ''Jpegs'' by German photographer Thomas Ruff, which uses intentional JPEG artifacts as the basis of the picture's style.Review: jpegs by Thomas Ruff
by Jörg Colberg, April 17, 2009


See also

* Databending *
Distortion (optics) In geometric optics, distortion is a deviation from rectilinear projection; a projection in which straight lines in a scene remain straight in an image. It is a form of optical aberration. Radial distortion Although distortion can be irre ...
*
Electronic art Electronic art is a form of art that makes use of electronic media. More broadly, it refers to technology and/or electronic media. It is related to information art, new media art, video art, digital art, interactive art, internet art, and elect ...
*
Glitch (music) Glitch is a genre of electronic music that emerged in the 1990s. It is distinguished by the deliberate use of glitch-based audio media and other sonic artifacts. The glitching sounds featured in glitch tracks usually come from audio recording de ...
*
Glitching Glitching is an activity in which a person finds and exploits flaws or glitches in video games to achieve something that was not intended by the game designers. Players who engage in this practice are known as glitchers. Some glitches can be ea ...
*
Internet art upright=1.3, "Simple Net Art Diagram", a 1997 work by Michael Sarff and Tim Whidden Internet art (also known as net art) is a form of new media art distributed via the Internet. This form of art circumvents the traditional dominance of the phys ...
* List of glitch artists * Net.art *
New media art New media art includes artworks designed and produced by means of electronic media technologies, comprising virtual art, computer graphics, computer animation, digital art, interactive art, sound art, Internet art, video games, robotics, 3D prin ...
* Postdigital *
VJing VJing (pronounced: ''VEE-JAY-ing'') is a broad designation for realtime visual performance. Characteristics of VJing are the creation or manipulation of imagery in realtime through technological mediation and for an audience, in synchronization ...
*
Wabi-sabi In traditional Japanese aesthetics, is a world view centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of appreciating beauty that is "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete" in nature. I ...


References


Further reading

* Almond, Richard.
Fading Mnemonics and Digital Decay
, 2009 * Baker-Smith, Ben.
Flickr Glitch Artists
, 2010 * Betancourt, Michael
"Welcome to Cyberia"
''Miami Art Exchange,'' September 19, 2003. * Betancourt, Michael.

, 2014 * * Bosma, Josephine.
Interview with Jodi
, 1997 * Briz, Nick.'
Thoughts on Glitch(Art)v2.0
', 2015 * Briz, Nick.
Glitch & Art
', 2009 * Donaldson, Jeff.
gLossing over Thoughts on Glitch: A Poetry of Error
. ''Artpulse Magazine'' Vol. 2, No. 3 (Spring 2011) * Downey, Jonas.
Glitch Art
. ''Ninth Letter'' (2012). Retrieved February 23, 2013. * Gaulon, Benjamin.
DeFunct / ReFunct Publication
', exhibition catalogue, 2011 * * Germen, Murat. "Inadvertent – Ars accidentalis." International Symposium on Computational Aesthetics in Graphics, Visualization, and Imaging (CAe 2008), Lisbon, Portugal. * Goriunova, Olga and Alexei Shulgin. "Glitch," in ''Software Studies: A Lexicon,'' ed. Matthew Fuller (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008) * Grenzfurthner, Johannes.
Interview with Phil Stearns
'. Pixel Form, 2010 * Krapp, Peter. ''Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture,'' Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press The University of Minnesota Press is a university press that is part of the University of Minnesota. It had annual revenues of just over $8 million in fiscal year 2018. Founded in 1925, the University of Minnesota Press is best known for its book ...
2011. * Manon, Hugh S and Daniel Temkin,
Notes on Glitch
, 2011 * Menkman, Rosa.
The Glitch Moment(um)
', Network Notebooks 04, Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam., 2011. * Moradi, Iman.

''Vector (e-zine)'' 6 (July 2008). Retrieved July 15, 2011 * * Poremba, Cindy. "Point and Shoot: Remediating Photography in Gamespace." ''
Games and Culture ''Games and Culture'' is a peer-reviewed academic journal that covers the field of culture and media studies, specializing on the socio-cultural, political, and economic dimensions of gaming. The editor-in-chief is Tanya Krzywinska (Falmouth Unive ...
'' Volume 2, Number 1 (January 2007): 49–58. * Russel, Legacy. "Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto."
Verso ' is the "right" or "front" side and ''verso'' is the "left" or "back" side when text is written or printed on a leaf of paper () in a bound item such as a codex, book, broadsheet, or pamphlet. Etymology The terms are shortened from Latin ...
2020.


External links


Glitch Art
Documentary produced by the web series '' Off Book''
Glitch Theory wiki at archive.org
{{DEFAULTSORT:Glitch Art Film and video technology Video art Digital art Digital electronics Software bugs Software anomalies Computer errors Computer art New media New media art Interactive art Visual arts genres Artistic techniques Mass media technology