What does a glitch look like?

Glitches produce distinctive visual characteristics that form a recognizable aesthetic vocabulary. Understanding these elements helps identify glitch art and informs your own creative practice.

Color artifacts: RGB channel separation creates red, green, and blue fringing around edges. Color banding produces stepped gradients instead of smooth transitions. Oversaturation and unexpected color shifts appear when data corrupts color values.

Geometric distortion: Horizontal slice displacement shifts portions of the image left or right. Pixel blocks appear where compression fails. Wave-like warping bends straight lines. Fragmentation breaks images into scattered pieces.

Noise and texture: Static and grain overlay clean imagery. Scan lines create horizontal stripe patterns. Compression artifacts produce blocky, pixelated areas. VHS-style tracking errors add horizontal bands of distortion.

Motion artifacts (in video): Datamoshing creates smearing and melting between frames. Frame stuttering and repetition. Ghosting leaves trails of previous frames. Temporal glitches jump or freeze unexpectedly.

Structural breaks: Missing sections where data is lost entirely. Repeated elements where data loops. Complete image collapse in severe corruption. The specific appearance depends on file format, corruption method, and degree of manipulation. Browse our glitch gallery for visual examples across styles.