Glitch Artists

Glitch art has developed through a loose constellation of artists working across code, video, sound, photography, and installation. Below is a focused guide to some of the most influential practitioners and why their work matters to the field.

Rosa Menkman

Dutch artist and theorist Rosa Menkman is arguably glitch art’s most important critical voice. Her work focuses on noise artifacts from accidents in analog and digital media, treating glitches as tools to reveal the “alchemy” of standards, formats, and resolutions rather than just visual decoration.

Key contributions:

Pioneered a deeply conceptual approach to glitch, linking technical errors to issues of power, standardization, and visibility in digital systems.
Her writing and curatorial work (including exhibitions and texts like “The Glitch Moment(um)”) helped define glitch art as a serious artistic and critical practice, not a niche visual style.
Menkman’s projects often foreground failed or obsolete technologies, rooting glitch in media archaeology and critical theory.

Influence: Many contemporary glitch artists borrow not only her aesthetics of compression artifacts and signal interference, but also her framing of glitch as an opportunity to question how images and systems are constructed.

JODI (Joan Heemskerk & Dirk Paesmans)

JODI are early net art pioneers whose work predates and prefigures much of what we now call glitch. They are known for aggressively breaking interfaces, websites, and games.

Key contributions:

Introduced a confrontational practice of software and interface disruption, where the system itself becomes unreadable or unstable.
Early works such as browser-based pieces and game modifications use intentional “errors” to expose the underlying code, logic, and fragility of digital environments.
Demonstrated that glitch is not only a visual result, but also an interaction: the user becomes lost, confused, or forced to confront the system’s inner workings.

Influence: JODI’s legacy is visible wherever glitch artists manipulate game engines, UIs, and web platforms, treating software misbehavior as both medium and message.

Phillip Stearns

Phillip Stearns works with hardware hacking, custom electronics, and experimental imaging systems. His practice often bridges glitch, textiles, and data sonification.

Key contributions:

Known for physically modifying cameras, sensors, and circuits to create hardware-born glitches rather than purely software-based errors.
Translates digital noise into woven textiles and other material forms, emphasizing that glitch has a place in physical artifacts as well as screens.
His open sharing of methods and tools has influenced a DIY culture around circuit-bending, custom glitch gear, and experimental image capture.

Influence: Stearns expanded glitch art beyond the JPEG and the screen, inspiring practitioners to work at the intersection of electronics, craft, and image-making.

Sabato Visconti

Brazilian-born, US-based artist Sabato Visconti is widely recognized for his sophisticated databending and data corruption techniques.

Key contributions:

Popularized JPEG, raw file, and video corruption workflows that produce richly textured, color-smeared images while remaining technically grounded.
Uses glitches to address surveillance, identity, and networked culture, pushing beyond pure abstraction into conceptual territory.
Shares processes, scripts, and tutorials, helping codify a practical vocabulary for contemporary digital glitch artists.

Influence: Visconti’s work sits at the overlap of social media visibility and critical inquiry, shaping how many photographers and visual designers approach glitch as both style and discourse.

jrdsctt

Minneapolis-based artist jrdsctt (Jarid Scott) exemplifies the integration of glitch into digital illustration and commercial-adjacent work.

Key contributions:

Combines photography, 3D, typography, and databent textures into highly polished, poster-like compositions.
Demonstrates how glitch techniques can be systematized into a coherent visual brand, bridging experimental art and design practice.
His prints and digital releases have circulated widely in online glitch communities, serving as accessible reference points for emerging artists.

Influence: jrdsctt shows how glitch can function inside graphic design and visual identity, influencing a generation of artists working for print, merch, and album art.

Polygon

Paris-based artist Polygon (often referenced under the moniker Polygon1993) focuses on analog glitch portraiture using CRTs and vintage video hardware.

Key contributions:

Works with 80s and 90s analog gear and cathode ray tube monitors to produce real-time signal distortion and corrupted portraiture.
His approach emphasizes performance and the materiality of the signal: patch cables, mixers, sync failures, and scanline interference shape the final image.
Helps keep analog video glitch visible in a digital-dominated scene, showing how hardware limitations and errors have their own unique aesthetics.

Influence: Polygon reinforces the importance of live, hardware-based workflows and has influenced artists exploring VHS feedback, video mixers, and CRT installations.

Glitch Musicians: Venetian Snares & Tim Hecker

While glitch art is often visual, sound has been a parallel laboratory of error.

Venetian Snares pushes rhythmic structures to the edge of collapse, using chopped, stuttering, and constantly mutating drums as a pure exercise in glitch. His maximalist, chaotic approach mirrors visual fragmentation.
Tim Hecker uses glitch more subtly as ambient texture, incorporating digital artifacts as languid bursts of static that erode or veil melodic material. This demonstrates a slower, atmospheric side of glitch.

Influence: These musicians helped cement glitch as a cross-media sensibility: an aesthetic of interruption, fragmentation, and failure that can inform how visual artists think about pacing, layering, and rhythm.

These figures only represent a slice of the field, but together they outline glitch art’s major trajectories: from conceptual theory and net art, through databending and hardware hacking, to music and design. For practitioners, their work offers both technical blueprints and critical frameworks for pushing errors beyond novelty and into meaningful artistic inquiry.