“Glitch art is a genre of art based around digital artefacts. A digital artefact is the unexpected result of when a technology breaks. An artefact could be sound of a CD skipping or pixilation on a highly compressed Youtube video. Glitch has been called the “art of the artefact” and stretching the intended use of a device or file.” 

ds106 Assignments: Glitch Art

I was going to grab some photos of glitches and try to do some visual mixed media, similar to how other people have previously completed this assignment. But when I googled glitches, so many cool pictures came up that I wanted to use all of them.

So I picked my favorites and put them in what I think is a semi-aesthetical order, and uploaded them to an online gif maker.

And of course, I couldn’t help but put a little bit of story into it. The two frames that are quicker than the others are a glitchy inhuman face and a circle. There is also a sliver of a more human-like face in one of the other photos and I didn’t realize it until after I made the gif. Another piece of the puzzle! I don’t know their story, and I don’t know how actually noticible it is, but I like it.

Another way to put a {sort of } narrative into a piece of digital visual media! Add it to the list, Mary!

For this visual assignment, I did Glitch Art (three stars). I’ve had some minor previous experience with this genre of digital art, so I partially chose this assignment because I already knew what my method for glitching up my photos would be. I also decided I would take photos from my past that captured memories and experiences from versions of myself that I no longer relate to. Thus, the glitch effect would become an embodiment of my own memory and how remembering past events is not always a pleasant experience.

The programs I used for this glitch art were Photoshop and Audacity. First, I opened my photos in Photoshop and saved them as .tif files that Audacity could read. Next, I imported the .tif files as raw data into Audacity so that I could edit the image data as though it were audio data. Then, it was simply a matter of experimenting with different effects to change the shape of the data. Some of the effects I used included reverb, phaser, distortion, echo, reverse, invert, and so on. Once I was done manipulating the files, I exported them as .pngs and appreciated my work.

Here is the first photo, in its original state:

And here it is as glitch art:

Here’s the next photo, unadulterated:

And here’s the glitched-out version:

? Puttin’ on the-
Puttin’ on the-
Puttin’ on the-
Puttin’ on the-
on-
on-
on- ?
Taco Melody

Excuse the skipping record, but things got a little glitch-y with the Visual Assignment, Glitch Art. “Glitch art is a genre of art based around digital artefacts. A digital artefact is the unexpected result of when a technology breaks. An artefact could be sound of a CD skipping or pixilation on a highly compressed Youtube video. Glitch has been called the “art of the artefact” and stretching the intended use of a device or file.”

Glitches are usually a bad thing, signifying a corrupted file and data loss. (I started photography class with a corrupted SD card, resulting in the loss of photos. It was tragic). They can be good or funny glitches though, such as those that occur in video games. (I think we all took advantage of Pokemon Red/Blue’s Missingno glitch). But glitches are by no means a phenomenon of modern media. CD’s, VHS’s, cassette tapes, album records, and pretty much anything that produces sound or image has the possibility of becoming flawed to the point of unusable. In this assignment, I wanted to explore the 80’s VHS glitch.

Originally, I had thumbed through all of the visual assignments for this week and had skipped over the glitch assignment (pun intended). I hadn’t planned on creating glitch art, but then something unexpected happened- a glitched photo appeared in my phone.

I have notoriously bad luck with phone cords. (Or any cord, really). They usually become frayed and bent with harsh use. My current phone cord does not stay plugged into my phone. I often move photos from my phone to my computer. To recap: phone cord connects/disconnects a dangerous amount of times. Computer: boops and beeps at me that something keeps disconnecting. And this is probably how my glitch happened. Normally, I would be freaking out, but the glitch happened to a copy of a photo, and it actually made some really cool art.

Original glitch:

Now, as cool as this glitch is, I didn’t actually make it, so I decided to take this naturally occurring phone glitch and turn it into a VHS glitch. (Funny thing: I couldn’t even bring this photo into Photoshop. It yelled at me because it is a corrupted file. So I brought up the image in ‘photos’ and took a screenshot of it. Hopefully, none of my other files get corrupted in my attempt to play with a buggy photo! I’m not too smart sometimes).

For this task, I used the guide, How to Create VHS Glitch Art in Adobe Photoshop to glitch out my glitched photo to the max!

Re-mixed glitch:

I brought in the original (uncorrupted) photo and erased the top portion so that my final image would have both faces and bodies to match. I added some sweet RGB distortions, noise, static, and VHS lines to the already existing glitch lines. And of course, my photo needed a play button. I imagine this is what a VHS glitch might look like if you paused on the part that you taped over. This was a great glitch tutorial, and I’m excited that I can now make any image look like it came straight from a messed up 80’s vid-vid-video!

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(Warning: Long post, lots of images)

I was flipping through the Visual Assignments in the Assignment Bank, and found an assignment about glitch art that seemed pretty neat. So I downloaded this image of the Mona Lisa from Wikipedia and opened up the image in Notepad++. I decided to see what would happen if I removed all instances of a number from the file, and got some really cool glitched versions. The versions below are missing the number stated before:

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Out of all of them, the one without 2s looks the most like the original Mona Lisa. It’s really interesting how drastically they change just from removing a single set of numbers in the file. In addition, I tried removing every number except for a single number. As might be assumed, they ended up way more glitchy. For example, here’s the version with every number except 6s removed:

Since these are way more glitchy, I won’t put them all here. They’re all in this album on Flickr, though. Another thing I tried was replacing all numbers with their spelled out versions (e.g. “1” > “one”), which gave me this:

Which reminds me, some of the images appear differently depending on where you view them. You can probably see all those artifacts in the above image. However, on my computer it looks like this (I took a screenshot):

It has the same general pattern, but none of the artifacts. I think this shows how different browsers and computers deal with the loss of data from my removing lots of information from the file. Lastly, instead of just removing or renaming numbers, I tried shuffling around some of the blocks of data inside the file, giving me:

Just a few tiny edits to the image’s file and it becomes entirely different. It’s especially cool that this is a form of art that simply couldn’t exist before digital images. It reminds me of art like L.H.O.O.Q. where earlier works of art are modified to create a new work of art. For the sake of fairness, I decided to glitch L.H.O.O.Q., too (removed 0s):

Tools used:

• Wikipedia for the art
• Notepad++ for glitching