“Glitch” Artists Compose with Software Crashes and Corrupted Files

A the­o­ry: one of the dri­vers of our cur­rent wave of nostalgia—lo-fi ana­log hiss and pop in music and ready­made vin­tage fil­ters in dig­i­tal photography—is the loss of imper­fec­tion. Increas­ing­ly pow­er­ful tech­nolo­gies ren­der sound and vision too slick­ly pris­tine, glossy, hyper­re­al, and thus imper­son­al and alien. The lat­est episode of PBS Arts’ “Off Book” series (above) fea­tures a trend toward dis­rupt­ing dig­i­tal over­pro­duc­tion by delib­er­ate­ly exploit­ing the weak­ness­es in new tech­nolo­gies. Glitch artists makes use of “nat­u­ral­ly occur­ring” (so to speak) cor­rup­tions of soft­ware, or cre­ate their own cor­rup­tions in a process called “data­bend­ing”—open­ing images as text files, for exam­ple, and adding and/or delet­ing infor­ma­tion from the image.

Unlike punk rock, to which glitch is com­pared by one of the artists above, some glitch art requires a fair­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed under­stand­ing of dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies. For exam­ple, video artist Anton Mari­ni describes how he writes his own soft­ware to pro­duce glitch effects. But since vir­tu­al­ly any­one can access a pc and stan­dard text and image-edit­ing soft­ware, it remains a fair­ly demo­c­ra­t­ic aes­thet­ic, sim­i­lar to the bed­room tech­nolo­gies that enable almost any­one to pro­duce and dis­trib­ute their own musi­cal com­po­si­tions. There are sites offer­ing tuto­ri­als on how to cre­ate your own glitch art and even a Flickr account called Glitch­bot that will auto­mat­i­cal­ly gen­er­ate glitch images for you, like Hip­sta­mat­ic or Insta­gram will con­vert your care­less snap­shots into intrigu­ing vin­tage arti­facts. Sound too easy? Maybe, but so was Duchamp’s uri­nal. Con­text, as always, mat­ters, and whether glitch art is “art” may ulti­mate­ly become a his­tor­i­cal ques­tion. At the moment, glitch images, video and music offer a way to human­ize all-too-inhu­man cor­po­rate prod­ucts and tech­nolo­gies.

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.