A Glitch in the Network

By: Posted on August 30, 2012 by Gary Devreede
From: http://blog.reformcreative.co.uk/?p=1269

I’ve been interested in this subject for quite sometime, ever since 2005 when I first laid eyes on Nine Inch Nails “With Teeth” cover artwork. I was fascinated by the look of digital corruption that was perfect for the music contained within the package and just as importantly fascinated by the process it took to create images like this.

Glitch Art is the aestheticization of digital or analog errors that is inspired by or the direct result of computer data corruption. The word glitch comes from the German glitschen, that means ‘to slip’. Considered as a very short fault, the term is used in the computing and electronics industries, as well as in video games, and circuit bending.

Many people see glitch art as a subversion of the digital age. Consumer electronics are marketed with an expectation of perfection yet it is inevitable that mistakes will happen. Through glitch art, an amalgamation of distortions, flaws, pixels, errors and manipulations reflect the corruption of raw data and show beauty in the unexpected.

More recently a form of glitch art that involves adding and removing raw code to the image data was used by artist and designer Rob Sheridan, for the Social Network Soundtrack package design. Sheridan, also responsible for the aforementioned Nine Inch Nails package explains the process as “very experimental, trial-and-error process – I tried different file types, different rendering methods (for example, damaged Photoshop files render much more interestingly in OSX’s Preview than in Photoshop itself), and different types of text injected into the image files (I grabbed random paragraphs of text from around the web – ridiculous fan-fiction sites were a fun source). The results are what you see below – these images were distorted through manual editing of the image files in a text editor, not through intricate Photoshop work.”

This process is also explained here at the computer arts tutorial page. The focus of the tutorial is  how to deconstruct an image into its most basic form, before breaking that form and fixing it back together again. Although, for the final stages there is a touch of Photoshop work, the intial “glitch” aspect is still there.

Check it out here.

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