Glitch art
[3] The history of glitch art has been regarded as ranging from crafted artworks such as the film A Colour Box (1935) by Len Lye and the video sculpture TV Magnet (1965) by Nam June Paik, as well as Digital TV Dinner (1978) created by Jamie Fenton and Raul Zaritsky, with audio by Dick Ainsworth—made by manipulating the Bally video game console and recording the results on videotape[4]—to more process-based contemporary work such as Panasonic TH-42PWD8UK Plasma Screen Burn (2007) by Cory Arcangel.
[7] It included workshops, screenings, lectures, performance, panel discussions and a gallery show over the course of seven days at the three cities.
[21] Posthumanism, Epidigital, and Glitch Feminism an exhibition at Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts in Japan.
It is made by either "capturing" an image of a glitch as it randomly happens, or more often by artists/designers manipulating their digital files, software or hardware to produce these "errors."
[30][31] There are many approaches to making these glitches happen on demand, ranging from physical changes to the hardware to direct alterations of the digital files themselves.
"[32] Betancourt notes that "glitch art" is defined by a broad range of technical approaches that can be identified with changes made to the digital file, its generative display, or the technologies used to show it (such as a video screen).
He includes within this range changes made to analog technologies such as television (in video art) or the physical film strip in motion pictures.
Data manipulation (aka databending) changes the information inside the digital file to create glitches.
This involves taking a $300 video game system, pounding it with your fist so the cartridge pops out while its trying to write the menu.
Popping out the cartridge while executing code in the console ROM created garbage references in the stack frames and invalid pointers, which caused the strange patterns to be drawn.
When pressing the reset button, it was possible to remove the cartridge from the system and induce various memory dump pattern sequences.
Digital TV Dinner is a collection of these curious states of silicon epilepsy set to music composed and generated upon this same platform.
When the German sound experimenters known as Oval started creating music in the early 1990s by painting small images on the underside of CDs to make them skip, they were using an aspect of ‘failure' in their work that revealed a subtextual layer embedded in the compact disc.
What is new is that ideas now travel at the speed of light and can spawn entire musical genres in a relatively short period of time."
Distortion was one of the earliest types of glitch art to be produced, such as in the work of video artist Nam June Paik, who created video distortions by placing powerful magnets in close proximity to the television screen, resulting in the appearance of abstract patterns.
[43] Paik's addition of physical interference to a TV set created new kinds of imagery that changed how the broadcast image was displayed:[44] The magnetic field interferes with the television’s electronic signals, distorting the broadcast image into an abstract form that changes when the magnet is moved.
