Glitch Art manipulates and corrupts working technologies in various ways to meet all kinds of aesthetic, social, and emotional ends. It is an art form of rebellion against traditional digital software. They pull the fractures of existing software and try to show it in a corrupted and unfiltered light. This type of art isn't limited to digital images; they also create glitches in audio and video files.
The process of creating Glitch art is really straight forward. For example, you could take an audio file (copy it first) and rename the mp3 file to a .raw. Then open up the image in Photoshop and voilà, madness:
This looks kind of bland, but what is happening here is the computer is reading the song in an image format, bit by bit. Essentially, what you have here is a visual representation of an audio file.
Or you could open an image file in a text editor and delete some of the text. Now that you have some missing code, you save it and attempt to reopen the image. Then you get some really messed up pictures:
What is interesting here is that anyone can do it and while doing it you also start to learn the inside of a system. You start to see that random text and symbols that looks like indecipherable chaos actually does have meaning. And you when remove something it changes the whole. These artists seem to have an understanding of what to delete or manipulate to achieve their desired result. Keep in mind that if you delete too much or the wrong piece of code you can break the file to the point that it is unreadable.
As I mentioned, there are videos of glitch art. Some videos incorporate glitch art. The most famous one might be Kanye West's "Welcome to Heartbreak" featuring Kid Cudi:
This is glitch art mainstreamed. The video is full of glitch'd images and videos that have been stitched together to become a music video.
By virtue of existing as an art form, glitch art really demonstrates the importance of 'what is under the hood'. It effectively shows the malleability of code and software forms. This is a case where the content of the file is intentionally blurred. Very often the container is altogether changed. A quick Google search will show glitch'd software has taken new forms in fashion and on canvas. The point to glitch art, as far as I can tell, is to pull out the guts of the software to show its inner workings. As an art form it shows the extent to which a file can be changed to become something entirely new. These are people who are essentially, reverse engineering files. The files and their containers come different - audio files become digital images in Photoshop. What does your favourite song look like an image?
This is a link to Dazed Digital which has a lot of images and videos about glitch art and "noise art". Check it out if you're interested. This is a link to Glitch Safari, which is a tumblr site of videos and pictures of "True Glitches" found out in the world.
If you're interested in making your own Glitch Art, this is a link to a Glitch Art Generator
This reminds me a bit of the work by the composer, John Cage. He was known for “prepared pianos,” which have objects inserted between the strings or elsewhere to ultimately manipulate the sound. I think these objects might be performing the same function as the glitches that manipulate a picture. Here’s a youtube link to one of his composition (and also has a picture of a prepared piano):
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUTXNxFvjDw