CategoriesMedium and Techniques
Glitch Aesthetic
Art that uses or imitates technical failure, such as corrupted files, compression blocks, torn video signals and colour channels sliding apart.
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About
Glitch art makes a feature of technical failure: the torn signal, the frozen frame, the corrupted file. Its look comes from blocky compression artefacts, colour channels sliding out of register, horizontal tears and streaks of pixels dragged across an image.
Nam June Paik got there early, distorting television pictures with a large magnet in Magnet TV (1965). In the 1990s the duo JODI built websites that looked broken on purpose. Artists later began 'datamoshing', deleting key frames from compressed video so that one scene melts into the next; Takeshi Murata's Monster Movie (2005) dissolves an old B-movie into pulsing colour. Rosa Menkman's Glitch Studies Manifesto (2010) argued that errors expose the hidden workings of media. Other methods include editing image files as text or rewiring cheap electronics. Painters also recreate glitches by hand, as Andy Denzler does with horizontal smears that recall a paused video.
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