One of our new media professors recently mentioned a movement called Glitch Art. It caught my interest and I wrote it down in my sketchbook, but then forgot about it until my friend Hugh started researching more into it.

I looked it up on wikipedia, saw the image examples and fell in love immediately. Glitch art is defined as:

the aestheticization of digital or analog errors, such as artifacts and other “bugs”, by either corrupting digital code/data or by physically manipulating electronic devices

Hugh and I set out to try our own hand at Glitch art by editing jpg files in text editors. He managed to get it to work right away using a mac, while my windows laptop just would not open the corrupted jpgs (I searched online and other people have gotten it to work on windows..).

So after a couple hours of trying to force windows to make glitch art, I tried it on a mac during my next class and got it to work. The corrupted image you see above was originally this photo of my Sin Kitten shirt.

How to make Glitch Art (one way to do it at least):

• open the image file in a text editor (bmp and tif are supposed to work best, though mine was a jpg)
• edit/add/delete/ctrlC/ctrlX/ctrlV the text
• save the file
• open it in an image viewer and it should (but might not) look a little different
• repeat until you’re happy with the results :]

There’s just something about the aesthetic of digital corruption the I love.. I think found a something to keep me busy for awhile.. :]