3. Camera Glitches as Electronic Art | PetaPixel
glitch (n) [glich]
1. A defect or malfunction in a machine or plan
2. Any error, malfunction, or problem
3. A brief or sudden interruption or surge in voltage in an electric
circuit
4. art (n) [ahrt]
1. the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to
aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more
than ordinary significance.
2. the class of objects subject to aesthetic criteria; works of art
collectively, as paintings, sculptures, or drawings: a museum of
art;
3. an art collection.
4. a field, genre, or category of art:
5. Dance is an art.
6. the fine arts collectively, often excluding architecture:
7. art and architecture.
8. any field using the skills or techniques of art: advertising art;
9. industrial art.
10. a branch of learning or university study, especially one of the fine
arts or the humanities, as music, philosophy, or literature: She
was adept at the arts of music and painting;
11. I've always felt an affinity towards the visual arts, though I
studied art of philosophy.
12. arts.
13. (used with a singular verb) the humanities, as distinguished from
8. IT’S EXPLORATORY
“[Glitch is discovered] at a thousand points
simultaneously. The nascent glitch artist is seduced
by a chance encounter: one witnesses, perhaps for
the first time, the momentary failure of a digitally
transcoded text—a fractured JPEG image, for
instance, or a compressed video file losing traction
with itself. The error is perceived as provocative,
strange and beautiful.”
Daniel Temkin, Notes on Glitch
32. SONIFICATION
The act of manipulating pictures and
videos by importing them as raw
data in an audio editor and applying
sound effects to them.
More simply… editing images as
sound.
Here’s What Happens When You Edit Photos Like Music
95. WHERE I WANT TO SEE
GLITCH ART GO
• Larger community
• Standardized language
• Sharing of tools and techniques
• Discovery of new formats and tools
• Teach people about art through computers
and vice versa
97. LINKS AND RESOURCES
• Glitchet: Art Resources
• A Beginner’s Guide to Glitch Art
• Tutorial on Databending and Glitch Art
• The Long and Twisted History of Glitch Art
• Daniel Temkin on Glitch and
Computer/Human Interaction
SOME FAVORITE ARTISTS
• PFunkus
• Clara Luzian
• pynchy
• James Usill
• Mauro Caldas
• Rodrigo Garzon
• Collageno
• Filippo Nesci
• Tomasz Sulej
• Jamie Boulton
So, whatever art is, I don’t know. To be honest, I don’t really care. I just like making cool stuff, and I know it when I see it.
[read quote] You’ve probably had an encounter with glitch art, but didn’t recognize it as anything other than an annoying glitch – a cracked phone, a dying GPU, a bizarrely formatted photo file. But if you stop to get over the frustration of the thing breaking on you, the glitches have a strange beauty to them that you can’t really find in any other artform. Glitch artists are sort of weird in that they’re the only people I know who rejoice when their stuff breaks.
There are tons of different techniques to create glitch art. Every file format is unique and every tool has its own quirks that allow you to corrupt data.
That’s all there is to this one. It’s really cool
The community is really active, with people posting to Facebook and reddit groups very frequently throughout the day. Members of the community exchange tips, tricks, and are generally really friendly. It’s also a strong remix culture.
Remember this picture from the beginning?
Here’s a remix. The online glitch community is a mixture of artists, tech people, who span the range from very internet and technology savvy programmers to people who are really interested in the artform but don’t participate yet.
Glitch isn’t “new”, but it is PRETTY new.
John Cage, 20th century avante garde musician. You might know him for his famous 1952 composition 4’33” where the pianist sits down at a piano and does nothing for exactly 4 minutes and 33 seconds.
One of John Cage’s earlier works is his “prepared piano” compositions which came about by his needing to compose a piece of music that had percussive elements but no room in the hall for the percussion group. So John Cage, in a way, misinterpreted or “glitched” a piano’s normal usage by putting different objects between the strings to get them to sound differently.
Nam June Paik was one of the earliest video artists and constructed tons of wild sculptures out of television screens and gear of all kinds. His work in the recontextualizing analogue electronics was a major precursor to modern day form of glitch art. This piece, MagnetTV, used a gigantic magnet on a TV to cause the cathode-ray tube to create geometric shapes.
This piece by Nam June Paik, “Electronic Superhighway”, was created right at the cusp of the internet’s emergence. He was actually the first to use the phrase. The sculpture seems to emphasize the vastness and overwhelming media focus of the internet through its physical scale – this thing is about 40 feet long and has flashing neon images in each television screen, along with audio clips from The Wizard of Oz, Oklahoma, and other American classics.
Cory Arcangel is a Brooklyn-based fine artist and entrepreneur. His early claim to glitch fame was when he hacked an NES cartridge of Super Mario Brothers to remove everything in the game except clouds. Also pretty glitchy, and one of the first instances of a purely data-oriented glitch.
But anyways, now we’re in 2015! There’s tons and tons and tons of different ways to glitch things out, and we’ll look at some of them.
At the highest level, there are roughly two large genres of glitch art: “pure” glitch and intentional glitch.
“Pure” or “found” glitch art is glitch art that was found “in the wild”, so to speak – unintentional glitches that resulted in something cool, interesting, or beautiful. For instance, this picture is the result of someone’s printer running out of black ink as it was printing a picture from a concert.
These are glitches found in iOS Maps in 3d mode.
“Intentional”, or “glitch-alike” work (the latter of which is usually used in a derogatory way) is art that’s been purposefully modified to look glitchy, but didn’t result from an accident. For example, this image was probably pixelsorted to achieve this affect. I’ll go over different ways you can glitch images intentionally and what pixel sorting is soon.
This image was probably generated with Photoshop through clever use of displacement maps.
This one was probably done with a mixture of a pixelsorting script and masking layers in Photoshop.
So you might be wondering, which is better? There are purists who think that only “pure” glitch art is real glitch art, but this is my answer.
Seriously, who cares? It’s pretty cool either way.
The thing I love about glitch art is that literally anyone can make it if they have a computer. Most of the tools needed to do it are free, and there are tons of different techniques, with probably an infinite number of ways to manipulate data yet to be discovered.
One of the most interesting and unpredictable ways to make glitch art is by misinterpreting data. Generally this takes the format of programs trying to read files that they’re not supposed to read, or formatting data to work with programs they shouldn’t work with ordinarily.
This is a glitch that you can only make by finding an old version of WordPad and opening an uncompressed bitmap file, then just saving it. Because of the way that WordPad formats its text files when it saves them, it’ll add formatting to the new bitmap file that causes it to stretch and warp.
Source image!
Post WordPad!
Combine with some tasteful photoshop and you can get some pretty cool effects!
I wrote a Node.js command line tool that allows you to turn any data file into a simple BMP file by appending a BMP header to the file’s data. The benefit of this is that you can then open up the file in an image viewer and see what it “looks like”.
Here’s the entirety of the text to the book The Battle of Gettysburg.
Here’s a personal journal entry of mine. I have no idea what those bright spots are!
This is the Eve Online game installer, a 4.6mb file. No idea what the black things towards the bottom are, but it looks cool!
This is a 10.6mb MPEG file. The resulting bitmap file is really, really big.
Of course, there’s several implications to this.
If we can turn any file into a bitmap, and open it in an image editor, can’t we then edit that image?
If we turn a file into a bitmap by adding a BMP header to its data, can’t we turn it back by removing the header?
Yes, and yes.
OK, so the unicorn filter doesn’t sound so great. There’s a ton of room for experimentation here, though!
The other way to make glitch art is by straight up breaking stuff.
This one’s a little too complicated to really demo in-depth here, but be aware that it exists. I have links in the resources section that show you how you would do this, but here’s a quick summary:
Most video compression works by predicting what changes will happen to individual pixels in each subsequent frame. Some frames, like cuts between shots, are completely different from the previous frame and so require a full new set of pixels. If you remove or destroy these frames, the video player thinks that the next frame is the predicted “next move” of the previous frame, resulting in these strange artifacts from the previous clip in the next clip.
I wrote a Node.js tool that takes your files and then destroys them by replacing random bytes with random values. It’s easy to use and is great for glitching files in unpredictable ways. Of course, it’s also just as likely to completely break your files, so be careful and make sure to keep backups!
You can also create glitch art by just programming things to make glitchy effects. Some of these things definitely don’t strictly fall under the category of glitch art, but really – who cares?
Processing is a general-purpose visual coding language aimed at artists and hobbyists who want to learn to use code to create digital art. It’s a subset of Java, but it can also create some really crazy results in the hands of a competent programmer.
Here’s a script that uses Delaunay triangulations to animate the clouds. A strong strength of Processing is that it gives you the ability to animate images or edit video very easily.
This is an animated pixel sort, which is a technique that involves taking all the rows or columns of an image and then sorting the pixels in that row or column by some value, such as the brightness, saturation, luminosity, amount of red, green, blue, etc. This has to be done programmatically and is a really popular technique in the glitch art community. It’s frequently done with Processing.
There are also tons of Twitter image bots that you can tweet an image at for an easy effect. I made one of the first ones, @pixelsorter. A really cool thing about Twitter bots is that they can actually get stuck in an infinite loop with each other and consistently tweet back and forth to one another forever.
There are tons of cool web toys across the net that let you simulate glitch effects as well, often in your browser!
There are tons of cool web toys across the net that let you simulate glitch effects as well, often in your browser!
One of the coolest types of glitch art has to be 3d glitch art. I have no idea how to make it, really.
This is pynchy. He’s amazing and I love his work.
And of course, some good old pure glitch resulting from actual 3d printing.
I can assure you that the glitch art community went crazy for this sculpture.
And of course, you can’t go wrong with Photoshopping something to simulate the glitch aesthetic.
This was done by using a glitched out JPEG as a displacement map, which causes the image laid on top of it to try and displace itself onto the image.
Here’s a visualization of the technique.
There are TONS of different ways to use Photoshop to simulate glitch effects, but those are a little bit less fascinating so I’ll just move on.
Here’s some general principles I’ve found that apply while making glitch art.
Data is in the eye of the beholder – by this I mean, data is just data. One way to reliably find glitch art is by purposefully trying to misinterpret data by feeding it to different software and seeing if it’ll take it or not, and whether or not it creates any interesting results.
Try out a variety of software, especially obscure projects. Some professional software is way too finnicky – and by finnicky I mean programmed correctly. Badly programmed software can result in excellent glitches, and some versions of software are known in the community as being the tools you have to use to generate certain effects, such as the WordPad effect.
When editing files destructively with a hex editor or some other file, no matter what you do, make sure not to break the header which is generally the first 50 to 200 bytes of a file. This varies a lot between file formats, so if you want to be absolutely sure, read up on your file formats! If you break the header, you won’t be able to open your files anymore.
You’re going to break a lot of things. Make sure you back them up.
The more compressed a file, the more unpredictable it is. For instance, Google’s webp is HIGHLY compressed, which means changing even one byte creates really cool effects. PNG is also very compressed but in a lossless way, which means changing one byte can often render it unopenable to many programs. This rule particularly applies to MP3s and video files.