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A Glitch Art PrimerFriday, September 27, 2013 | Categories: Blog 0

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A short introduction to glitch art, as featured on Spark 226.

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This week on Spark, Nora interviewed the glitch artist Phillip Stearns. Glitch is a genre of art

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This week on Spark, Nora interviewed the glitch artist Phillip Stearns. Glitch is a genre of art

based around digital artefacts. A digital artefact is the unexpected result of when a technology

breaks. An artefact could be sound of a CD skipping or pixilation on a highly compressed

Youtube video. Stearn quoted Rosa Menkman, saying the glitch is about the “art of the artefact”

and stretching the intended use of a device or file.

In spite of its relative youth, glitch art is more common than one might imagine. In 2007, digital

artist Nabil Elderkin directed the music video for the Kanye West song, “Welcome to Heartbreak.”

Elderkin “datamoshed” the video - essentially made the video look like it was poorly rendered by

editing software at a very low quality.

NABIL ELDERKIN · 3 MONTHS AGO

KANYE WEST [Welcome to Heartbreak]

A more recent example is from the popular children’s TV show, Adventure Time. In the episode,

“A Glitch is a Glitch,” the main characters Finn and his talking dog, Jake, are forced to fight a

computer virus that is deleting the planet. Glitch artist David O’Reilly directed and datamoshed

the episode.

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12/13/13 A Glitch Art Primer | Spark with Nora Young | CBC Radio

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TECNOCKICKEN57 · 8 MONTHS AGO

Compared to the weird and wonderful world of high concept glitch art however, these examples

are but heraldry.

Glitch art generally can take one of three forms, separated by the method used to make the

glitch. The first type is the one most people have unwillingly encountered. These are glitches

found in the wild. A discovered glitch could be as simple as a broken billboard in Times Square,

New York City.

11SAMMY11 · 6 MONTHS AGO

Broken Billboard in Times Square Creates Beautiful Glitch Art - June 9th, 2013

Or the art could come from the limitations of everyday machines. For instance, the image below

was created by scanning a Jesus action figure.

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YEAROFTHEGLITCH · 3 MONTHS AGO

Year of the Glitch

The second type is intentional. A glitch artist will take a device, a program or a file and break it.

The following is art from Hugh Manon. He took screenshots from the 1947 film Nora Prentiss and

then corrupted the data so that the characters appear like psychedelic phantoms.

EAUBSCENE · 3 YEARS AGO

Glitch Art: I shall never forget the weekend Laura died.

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Stearns describes the process of “databending” a file to achieve the effect.

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Phillip Stearns explains Databending by sparkcbc

Databending’s hardware cousin is circuit bending. Instead of manipulating a file or program, the

artist breaks down the actual machine. The image below comes from Stearns’ Year of the Glitch

blog, where he posts a new piece of glitch art almost every day. He made it by circuit bending an

Olympus digital camera.

12/13/13 A Glitch Art Primer | Spark with Nora Young | CBC Radio

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YEAROFTHEGLITCH · 3 MONTHS AGO

Year of the Glitch

Lastly, there’s the aesthetic of glitch art, where the glitch is only surface deep. Occasionally this

type can appear like an Instagram sepia filter of glitch art, an artificial recreation of the glitch look

without going through the process of databending or circuitbending. But it can also become

much weirder. Take, for example, these Good Vibrations cabinets designed by Ferruccio Lavani.

ARTINFO

Design Rewind: Ferruccio Laviani's New Wave in the

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MILAN - "I didn't imagine it would be so successful, but

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Laviani told ARTINFO...

ARTINFO · 3 MONTHS AGO

Lavani created these for Italian furniture manufacturer Fratteli Boffi. In an interview with Artinfo

Lavani explained, “When you watched a VHS cassette, you’d see this when you’d rewind or fast

forward.”

12/13/13 A Glitch Art Primer | Spark with Nora Young | CBC Radio

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forward.”

This form of glitch art also crosses over into the art movement, new aesthetic. New aesthetic

seeks to bring computerized art, like 1980s 8-bit graphics, into the real world.

For more examples of glitch art, take a look at Phillip Stearns’s list of glitch artists and tutorials on

how to make your own glitch art.