Glitch art is a creative movement that uses errors and anomalies as aesthetic elements in the digital context. These include bugs, corrupted files, failed software and hardware, visual distortions, digital noise, internet glitches, missing pixels and many more.

Glitch art is an emerging artistic practice that takes familiar digital imagery and transforms it via errors from transmission or faulty data storage. The process of creating glitch art is often described as “hacking.” It is also referred to as databending because image files are often edited using programs designed for other purposes like editing text documents. Glitch art’s abstract aesthetic lends itself to almost any subject matter, from corporate logos to pop culture icons to abstract geometric designs and beyond.

Glitch art can be found in many places on the web including Tumblr, Flickr, DeviantArt, LiveJournal and Pinterest. There are also several dedicated glitch art blogs and websites like Glitchet or Error Art that curate collections of works by various artists.”

Glitch art is a term for art created by accident. The artist finds beauty in the error message, using it as a jumping off point for creation.

Glitch art explores the beauty in mistakes, just like coding does. A programmer knows that a bug is not really a mistake – it’s an opportunity to make something new, something better than what was there before. The same goes for artists who are willing to take chances, who are willing to push boundaries and explore new territory, and who are willing to get messy in the process.

Trying to make interesting art can be risky and draining, but glitch artists find satisfaction in pushing the limits of their work and themselves. That’s how they create art that makes other people say “WTF?” but immediately want to see more.”

Glitch art is a new art form that started about 10 years ago, in the early 2000s. It involves taking media files and modifying them in some way that causes an error, or “glitches” to appear.

The most common form of glitch art is to take a JPEG image and convert it into a sound file then modify the sound file until it plays back as an image.

There are also videos made using this method. The most well known of these videos is called “The Glitch Mob – Beauty of the Unseen”. It features three men dressed in black performing a live action glitch video using laptop computers to create images with glitches. This video has gained notoriety around the globe due to its popularity and has even been used in many music videos by other artists.

This art form was created by accident, but there are now many websites where glitch art can be bought legally for commercial purposes. Some of these websites include

Glitch art is an emerging genre of art that focuses on the glitches of media or technology. Glitches are what happens when something goes wrong in a computer program or video recording. They can be caused by a number of factors, but the effect is always a distorted image that appears to be broken and out of place.

Glitch art began as a way for programmers to vent their frustrations with having to find bugs—errors in code—in the programs they were writing. Many young programmers enjoy using “debuggers” on their own programs, and will intentionally cause errors in order to see what happens when the computer runs into them. Some become so obsessed with this process that they devote all their time to it, and develop a new appreciation for the aesthetic qualities of working with computers.

The idea of glitching as an artistic medium was popularized by Canadian artist Cory Arcangel in his 2003 work “Glitch Manifesto”. Arcangel’s manifesto proclaimed his love for glitches, and encouraged artists to start incorporating them into their work.

Glitch art is an art movement focused on the aestheticization of digital error and system failure. Glitches are produced by malfunctioning hardware or software and manifest as visually interesting distortions in video, images, sound and text.

Towards the end of the 20th century, the Internet became increasingly accessible to the general public. The Web became a medium for worldwide communication and data transfer. Internet infrastructure grew from academic and military institutions into a global network available to anyone with a computer and access to telephone lines. People could exchange information in real time without regard to physical location. The virtual realm became intertwined with the physical one, blurring the distinction between online and offline reality.

Glitch art arises out of this hybrid environment in which technology both augments and limits our experience of reality. Glitch art offers a critique of this relationship by revealing the artificiality embedded in our systems of information storage, transmission, and display. It exposes the invisible structures that dictate our understanding of the world while also creating new aesthetic forms that are contingent upon these structures.

Whereas glitch art is a bit of an amorphous term, it’s possible to draw certain lines for what it isn’t. The most obvious and important thing is that glitch art isn’t photoshopping. If you’ve ever seen one of those “horrors” galleries where someone has tweaked the contrast on a picture, added some noise, and then run it through a few filters, you’ve seen what I’m talking about. Glitch art takes these techniques as a starting point and pushes them further: raw data is modified, not just aesthetically but often logically.

Glitch art can be functional or non-functional (although the line between the two is blurry). Functional glitches are things like corrupted JPEGs that show random characters when opened in an image viewer or small programs that do something unexpected when executed by image editors. Non-functional glitches are images or audio files that trigger errors or crash programs when opened.

Glitch art can be found in many places and at many levels of scale; from tiny snippets of code that cause video players to pause for no apparent reason to corrupted videos that appear on your television screen while you’re watching TV.

Glitch art is a subset of computer art; in particular, generative art.* So if you’re interested in

The more we rely on technology, the more it seems to fail us. From failed computer chips to corrupt databases, glitches are everywhere. But the failures are not random; they are systematic, and by studying them we can learn something fundamental about how computers work.

The field of study is called “software studies,” and it is as interdisciplinary as it sounds: its practitioners include programmers, computer scientists, artists, curators and critics. One of the leaders of the movement is a New York artist called Jason Scott, who runs a blog called textfiles.com.

While some computer error messages are deliberately designed to be cryptic or cute (remember Microsoft’s famous “Blue Screen of Death”?), Mr. Scott’s work gives an unvarnished look at what can go wrong with our machines — often in ways that seem random or intentionally mysterious. And he finds these errors both amusing and troubling.

In one post he writes about “the thrill I get from a well-made popup,” but notes that most users find them annoying. In another he describes how he bought a set of software tools for $300, but was unable to use them because his computer could not handle their file format. In yet another, he says that when he changes computers “I feel like