Glitch art

movement aesthetic 1990s-present Worldwide Europe

Glitch art turns technological error into raw material. Rather than hiding the failures of digital media, artists provoke them - corrupting image and video files, opening data in the wrong software, circuit-bending hardware, or forcing compression and feedback systems to break - and treat the fractured result as art. The approach is associated with new media art, but its lineage has been retrospectively traced through twentieth-century video and chance-based practice, and it took shape as a named movement in the 1990s and 2000s around net-art collectives such as Jodi and online communities of practitioners. Artists and theorists like Rosa Menkman gave it a vocabulary, studying how file formats and resolution shape what we see. Glitch art matters because it makes the hidden fragility of everyday technology visible, exposing the seams that polished interfaces conceal.

this is a glitch sample of my movie Kodak Moment (2013) The actress is Mae Murray, and the source film is a Kodachrome test from 1922.
this is a glitch sample of my movie Kodak Moment (2013) The actress is Mae Murray, and the source film is a Kodachrome test from 1922.CC BY-SA 3.0 (credit: Michaelbetancourt) · source

Defining characteristics

  • Pixel-level damage: sorting, smearing, and displaced color blocks where data has been corrupted
  • Visible compression artifacts and datamoshing - frames torn apart by broken inter-frame data
  • Harsh, saturated color shifts and scan-line noise inherited from analog video failure
  • Fragmented layers in which the underlying file or signal structure breaks the picture surface
  • Aesthetics discovered by experiment (databending, circuit bending) rather than drawn by hand
  • Glitches staged across screens, prints, video, sound, and the web alike

Key figures

  • Rosa Menkman (b. 1983) — Dutch theorist, curator and artist whose writing on glitches and resolution defined the field
  • Jodi (Joan Heemskerk & Dirk Paesmans) (founded 1994) — Net-art collective whose deliberately broken software aesthetics anticipated glitch art
  • Cory Arcangel (b. 1978) — American artist who hacked obsolete games and media, as in Super Mario Clouds (2002)

Example works

  • wwwwwwwwww.jodi.org — Jodi (1995)
  • Super Mario Clouds — Cory Arcangel (2002)
  • Kodak Moment — Michael Betancourt (2013)

Sources

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