a glitch art primer _ spark with nora young _ cbc radio
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A primer on the world of glitch art, meant to accompany episode 226 of Spark.TRANSCRIPT
12/13/13 A Glitch Art Primer | Spark with Nora Young | CBC Radio
www.cbc.ca/spark/blog/2013/09/27/a-glitch-art-primer/ 1/9
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A Glitch Art PrimerFriday, September 27, 2013 | Categories: Blog 0
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A short introduction to glitch art, as featured on Spark 226.
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This week on Spark, Nora interviewed the glitch artist Phillip Stearns. Glitch is a genre of art
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12/13/13 A Glitch Art Primer | Spark with Nora Young | CBC Radio
www.cbc.ca/spark/blog/2013/09/27/a-glitch-art-primer/ 2/9
This week on Spark, Nora interviewed the glitch artist Phillip Stearns. Glitch is a genre of art
based around digital artefacts. A digital artefact is the unexpected result of when a technology
breaks. An artefact could be sound of a CD skipping or pixilation on a highly compressed
Youtube video. Stearn quoted Rosa Menkman, saying the glitch is about the “art of the artefact”
and stretching the intended use of a device or file.
In spite of its relative youth, glitch art is more common than one might imagine. In 2007, digital
artist Nabil Elderkin directed the music video for the Kanye West song, “Welcome to Heartbreak.”
Elderkin “datamoshed” the video - essentially made the video look like it was poorly rendered by
editing software at a very low quality.
NABIL ELDERKIN · 3 MONTHS AGO
KANYE WEST [Welcome to Heartbreak]
A more recent example is from the popular children’s TV show, Adventure Time. In the episode,
“A Glitch is a Glitch,” the main characters Finn and his talking dog, Jake, are forced to fight a
computer virus that is deleting the planet. Glitch artist David O’Reilly directed and datamoshed
the episode.
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12/13/13 A Glitch Art Primer | Spark with Nora Young | CBC Radio
www.cbc.ca/spark/blog/2013/09/27/a-glitch-art-primer/ 3/9
TECNOCKICKEN57 · 8 MONTHS AGO
Compared to the weird and wonderful world of high concept glitch art however, these examples
are but heraldry.
Glitch art generally can take one of three forms, separated by the method used to make the
glitch. The first type is the one most people have unwillingly encountered. These are glitches
found in the wild. A discovered glitch could be as simple as a broken billboard in Times Square,
New York City.
11SAMMY11 · 6 MONTHS AGO
Broken Billboard in Times Square Creates Beautiful Glitch Art - June 9th, 2013
Or the art could come from the limitations of everyday machines. For instance, the image below
was created by scanning a Jesus action figure.
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12/13/13 A Glitch Art Primer | Spark with Nora Young | CBC Radio
www.cbc.ca/spark/blog/2013/09/27/a-glitch-art-primer/ 4/9
YEAROFTHEGLITCH · 3 MONTHS AGO
Year of the Glitch
The second type is intentional. A glitch artist will take a device, a program or a file and break it.
The following is art from Hugh Manon. He took screenshots from the 1947 film Nora Prentiss and
then corrupted the data so that the characters appear like psychedelic phantoms.
EAUBSCENE · 3 YEARS AGO
Glitch Art: I shall never forget the weekend Laura died.
12/13/13 A Glitch Art Primer | Spark with Nora Young | CBC Radio
www.cbc.ca/spark/blog/2013/09/27/a-glitch-art-primer/ 5/9
Stearns describes the process of “databending” a file to achieve the effect.
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Phillip Stearns explains Databending by sparkcbc
Databending’s hardware cousin is circuit bending. Instead of manipulating a file or program, the
artist breaks down the actual machine. The image below comes from Stearns’ Year of the Glitch
blog, where he posts a new piece of glitch art almost every day. He made it by circuit bending an
Olympus digital camera.
12/13/13 A Glitch Art Primer | Spark with Nora Young | CBC Radio
www.cbc.ca/spark/blog/2013/09/27/a-glitch-art-primer/ 6/9
YEAROFTHEGLITCH · 3 MONTHS AGO
Year of the Glitch
Lastly, there’s the aesthetic of glitch art, where the glitch is only surface deep. Occasionally this
type can appear like an Instagram sepia filter of glitch art, an artificial recreation of the glitch look
without going through the process of databending or circuitbending. But it can also become
much weirder. Take, for example, these Good Vibrations cabinets designed by Ferruccio Lavani.
ARTINFO
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ARTINFO · 3 MONTHS AGO
Lavani created these for Italian furniture manufacturer Fratteli Boffi. In an interview with Artinfo
Lavani explained, “When you watched a VHS cassette, you’d see this when you’d rewind or fast
forward.”
12/13/13 A Glitch Art Primer | Spark with Nora Young | CBC Radio
www.cbc.ca/spark/blog/2013/09/27/a-glitch-art-primer/ 7/9
forward.”
This form of glitch art also crosses over into the art movement, new aesthetic. New aesthetic
seeks to bring computerized art, like 1980s 8-bit graphics, into the real world.
For more examples of glitch art, take a look at Phillip Stearns’s list of glitch artists and tutorials on
how to make your own glitch art.