Glitch art

Motherboard, a tech-art collective, held the first glitch art symposium in Oslo, 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."[5][4]

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.[6] In November 2011, the second GLI.TC/H event traveled from Chicago to Amsterdam and lastly to Birmingham, UK.[7] It included workshops, screenings, lectures, performance, panel discussions and a gallery show over the course of seven days at the three cities.[8]

Run Computer, Run at GLITCH 2013 arts festival at RuaRed, South Dublin Arts Centre - Dublin, curated by Nora O Murchú.[9]

/'fu:bar/ 2015[10]

Glitch Art is Dead at Teatr Barakah in Krakow, Poland. Curated by Ras Alhague and Aleksandra Pienkosz.[11]

reFrag: glitch at La Gaïté Lyrique in Paris, France. Organized by the School Art Institute of Chicago and Parsons Paris.

/'fu:bar/ 2016[12]

/'fu:bar/ 2017[13]

Glitch Art is Dead 2 at Gamut Gallery, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. Curated by Miles Taylor, Ras Alhague and Aleksandra Pienkosz.[14]

/'fu:bar/ 2018[15]

Blue\x80 & Nuit Blanche at Villette Makerz in Paris, France. Curated by Ras Alhague and Kaspar Ravel.[16]

Refrag #4 Cradle-to-Grave at Espace en cours in Paris, France. Curated by Benjamin Gaulon.[17]

/'fu:bar/ 2019[18]

Communication Noise exhibition, Media Mediterranea 21 festival, Pula, Croatia.[19]

/'fu:bar/ 2020[20]

An Exercise of Meaning in a Glitch Season an exhibition in National Gallery Singapore. Curated By: Syaheedah Iskandar.[21]

Posthumanism, Epidigital, and Glitch Feminism an exhibition at Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts in Japan. Curated By: Ryota Matsumoto.[22]

/'fu:bar/ 2021[23]

Glitch Art: Pixel Language, the first glitch art exhibition in Iran.[24]

Glitch Art in Iran. La prima mostra artistica collettiva.[25]

Glitch Art in Iran. La prima mostra artistica collettiva.[26]

Glitch: Aesthetic of the Pixels, the second glitch video art group exhibit in Iran.[27]

Glitch Art is Dead: The 3rd Expo, September 2-4 in Granite Falls, MN [28]

/'fu:bar/ 2022[29]

Glitch Art International Online Exhibition - the third glitch.art.br edition shown via an online platform (scheduled to start December 1 2022).

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.[33] Adam Woodall explains in his tutorial:[34]

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.[35][36] Datamoshing with software such as Avidemux is a common method for creating glitch art by manipulating different frame types in compressed digital video:[37]

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 worlds, models and even 3D printed objects.[38]

Misalignment glitches are produced by opening a digital file of one type with a program designed for a different type of file,[36] 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.[39] 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:[40]

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.[41] For example, by damaging internal pieces of something like a VHS player, one can achieve different colorful visual images. Video artist Tom DeFanti 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:[2]

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:[2]

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 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 explained in 2002:[42]

"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 was one of the earliest types of glitch art to be produced, such as in the work of video artist Nam June Paik, who created video distortions by placing powerful magnets in close proximity to the television screen, resulting in the appearance of abstract patterns.[43] Paik's addition of physical interference to a TV set created new kinds of imagery that changed how the broadcast image was displayed:[44]

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 images, audio, and video) caused by the application of lossy compression. They can be intentionally used as a visual style in glitch art. Rosa Menkman's work makes use of compression artifacts,[45] particularly the discrete cosine transform blocks (DCT blocks) found in most digital media data compression formats such as JPEG digital images and MP3 digital audio.[46] Another example is Jpegs by German photographer Thomas Ruff, which uses intentional JPEG artifacts as the basis of the picture's style.[47][48]