Google ‘glitch,’ and you’ll find music, hacks, software faults, and videography methods—Wikipedia calls it a brief system fault.
Glitches like TV static or system errors are familiar disruptions, often leaving us uneasy in unfamiliar digital territory. Here, we glimpse machine fallibility—rare breaks in flawless code and moments of mechanical imperfection.
The foundation of the Glitch Art movement embraced by visual artists, coders, and hackers in the digital age. This art involves intentional digital errors, creating fascinating, unpredictable results that transform media into captivating visual experiences.


The Glitch Aesthetic:
“You’re trying to find a balance where something breaks just enough to be visible,” says artist Sabato Visconti.

The glitch aesthetic evolved from video game culture, where players exploit flaws to achieve unintended outcomes. This act of utilizing an unintended mistake led to users exploring the wide arena of opportunities presented by a glitch. Musicians like Aphex Twin, Flying Lotus, and Skrillex pioneer glitch art, using samples and spontaneous glitches for unique sound patterns.
Artist/mathematician Ant Scott, using glitchy images since the ’80s, still favors art with straight lines, color blocks, and patterns. Artist/mathematician Ant Scott, using glitchy images since the ’80s, still favors art with straight lines, color blocks, and patterns.
This Kanye west music video is an efficient example of the techniques used by various glitch artists. It is sharp and edgy, creating stark visual contrasts and often painful to look at for too long. The glitch visuals create a sense of lack of control and dissociation from the original image and its context.
The Philosophy of Glitch Art:
Artists have cited various theoretical influences in the aesthetics of glitch, the most popular being that of Deconstructionism. Pioneered by Derrida, “deconstructionism is not a dismantling of the structure of a text, but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself. Its apparently-solid ground is no rock, but thin air.”
“Deconstruction seeks neither to reframe art with some perfect, apt and truthful new frame, nor simply to maintain the illusion of some pure and simple absence of a frame. Rather it shows that the frame is, in a sense, also inside the painting. For the frame is what “produces” the object of art, is what sets it off as an object of art—an aesthetic object.” ― James N. Powell
Hence, in this sense the art explores the medium of digital images itself; the natural state of these digital files, i.e. their underlying codes. It enables and forces us to think about the structure of all digital media, how combinations of binary code make up our favourite images, music and video and how these codes behave, when manipulated independently.
This Art also exposes us to the imperfections in a system we often mistake to be infallible and how these imperfections create a beautiful juxtaposition of intentional and unintentional art.
The visual imagery of a glitch takes most of us back to the old days, when glitches in digital systems were more frequent to come upon. We attach a sense of nostalgia with these strange distortions of colour and digital space. In this view, Glitch is a reminiscence of the past and it’s reinvention in the future, it presents to us the contradictions of the modern age through this dialogue between old mistakes and new ideas.
How to glitch:
If you are interested in the philosophical dimensions or if you just like the idea of glitchy visual effects, here’s a basic guide to adding glitch into an image.
Artists use techniques like databending, circuit bending, Hex editing, text edits and audio editing to introduce aesthetic glitches into an image. Here’s a few ways to do one of your own:
The Wordpad Edit– This involves the use of programs not originally intended to run image files to create distortions through formatting of the code
1. Open the image you want to glitch in MS Paint and save it as a .bmp file
2. Right click on this .bmp and change the extension manually to .txt
3. Now, right click on this .txt file and select Open with -> Word pad (Not NOTEPAD)
4. Wait for a few seconds and allow word pad to convert the image code into rich text and introduce formatting and then save the file
5. Change the extension back to .bmp and revel in the glitchy goodness you just created
Text Editing usually corrupts data heavily so don’t worry if you glitch doesn’t open or ends up like this:
If it interests you, various tutorials for audio and hex glitches can be found on the web.
However, here is an easy way: PIXELDRIFTER is software that sorts and swaps pixels in an image, creating images that look like they’ve been smeared or shaken apart. It’s taking the logic of digital media and turning it on its head, basically.
So as we upload our lives in pictures, storing them on the cloud instead of our head, we should know that there’s no guarantee and that the digital system is as capable of creating beautiful mistakes as well as our minds.