Don’t panic. Your computer is not bugging out. It’s art. Glitch art, to be precise, which is made by corrupting files, rewiring digital cameras, repurposing obsolete electronics, or otherwise screwing things up. Glitch art seizes the means for production, smashes them to bits, and then re-arranges them to create something haphazard. The results can be trippy, weird, and jarringly beautiful.
One of the most common methods is circuit-bending, rewiring electronics to make psychedelic visuals and sounds. It is a form of creative chaos, with tinkerers poking and prodding and rewriting code to provoke a digital reaction. Destruction, chaos, creativity—a punk rock response to our hyperconnected world and an attempt to exert control over the electronics that control us. “If you can’t hack it,” says artist Phillip David Stearns, “you don’t own it, it owns you.”
words by alyssa mercante
DESIGN BY Lanie Nowak and martin flores
How a common computer mishap inspired an art form.
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“It’s really about curiosity and a willingness to get your hands dirty. You need to rethink thinking.”
After a year of exploring glitches in all forms (analog, digital, found, et al.) Stearns decided to create textiles from photographs he had produced by circuit-bending digital cameras.
“I’m not modifying the source of the image, I’m modifying the surface of the image,” he told Vice in 2013.
Berlin-based artist David Szauder reaches backwards into history and pulls it into the future by distorting the faces of subjects in vintage photographs with image editing software. Szauder has claimed all the photographs are of family members, which only adds to the intrigue, as many of their faces
are indecipherable.
Created by glitch artist and coder Way Spurr-Chen, Pixel Sorter was a crowd-sourced glitch generator that lived on Twitter before it was suspended this past July. Users could tweet a picture to @pixelsorter, a bot would rearrange the image’s rows based on random criteria (hue, brightness, etc.), and send the remixed image back. The results were a kaleidoscopic Twitter feed that explored the power of computers to destroy and create. But don't fret, the experiment lives on here, far from the long arm of Twitter law.
“Glitch is chaos and randomness, there's no secret to it...It’s all about understanding the language of electronics and linking that up with your creative mind.” -Logan Owlbeemoth
Logan Owlbeemoth and Omebi Velouria rework analog video gear for experimental visual artists by modifying obsolete devices from the ‘80s and ‘90s (like video equalizers and decoders). These hacked devices have been used to create psychedelic music videos, experimental concert visualizations (for the likes of Tame Impala), and interactive installations.
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