What is glitch art?

Glitch art is a visual art form that embraces digital or analog errors as aesthetic elements. Artists intentionally corrupt, manipulate, or exploit technological malfunctions to create striking visual effects. These “glitches” can include distorted pixels, color shifts, fragmented imagery, and data corruption artifacts.

The practice emerged from our increasingly digital world, where technology occasionally fails in visually interesting ways. Glitch artists take this further by deliberately inducing these errors through techniques like datamoshing, pixel sorting, and hex editing. The results challenge our expectations of polished digital media and reveal the hidden structures underlying our screens.

Glitch art represents a philosophical stance as much as an aesthetic one. By celebrating imperfection and embracing chaos, it questions our relationship with technology and the nature of digital imagery itself.