Glitch Art: History of Glitch Art

Glitch art is a type of media art where video and image files are already or intentionally corrupted to include glitches, creating a stylized viewing experience. What may look like an imperfection is the end goal and a result of the visual artist’s pixel sorting. The glitch aesthetic includes elongated images, pixelization, color degradation, and double exposure.

Artists can use digital or analog modifications to create this type of modern art. To produce glitch videos, artists distort pixels by placing large magnets near the screen or artificially create glitches in Photoshop. Famous glitch artists include Len Lye, Daniel Temkin, Nam June Paik, and Rosa Menkman.

In technology, a digital glitch refers to a malfunction, often in video games or software development.

• Intentional glitches: As technology evolved, artists harnessed the creative opportunities glitches presented and began deliberately incorporating them into various formats in the 1970s, popularizing an intentional glitch aesthetic. The Cubist movement influenced many glitch artists.
• JODI: In 1994, Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans started the highly generative art collective JODI, which purposefully coded errors into website pages to display underlying error messages. The movement weny by the name “net.art.”
• Global conventions: The glitch moment gained traction in the 2000s. The tech-art collective Motherboard hosted an international symposium for this new media style in 2002 in Oslo, Norway. In 2010, Nick Briz, Evan Meaney, Rosa Menkman, and Jon Satrom led the GLI.TC/H convention in Chicago with tutorials, performances, and screenings.
• GIFs: Over the years, conventions have taken place in Minnesota, Croatia, and Iran, showing how popular the art form has become. Today, GIFS (.gifs), in many ways, echo some of the elements of early glitch art, where a single file repeats its media in a cyclical pattern.

Since glitch art is often not static, it takes forms outside of still .jpegs or .jpgs. Some forms include:

1. 1. Glitch music: Glitch music involves the playing of distorted records, CDs, cassettes, or sound files that feature glitches, which may include skips or missing moments of music.
2. 2. Glitch videos: Glitch videos are the most common type of glitch art, and you can create them by damaging e-files or hard media such as DVDs or video tapes. Artists can also warp videos by toying with a VHS or using magnets to distort pixels on the screen.
3. 3. Glitch websites: These websites with errors coded within can make for more interactive pieces. Glitches spread throughout the website enhance the user experience and operate as a form of art.

Consider the following ways to create this unique form of visual art:

• Digitally engineer glitches. Video editing software or apps can let you safely play with your hardware without damaging it. You can play with databending in video files in a photo or video editor and add in manufactured, intentional glitches.
• Use magnets on screens. You can also play a video on a screen and employ a heavy-duty magnet, holding it close to the front to warp the pixels on the screen. Note that this has the potential to have long-lasting effects on the quality of your screen, so use this tactic wisely.
• Work with broken devices. Damaged devices can yield the glitches that glitch artists seek in their media. Busted but still usable DVD and VHS players can warp the presentation of the video.

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