Media Diary: Glitch Art

After a long pause Faig Ahmed's glitch rug art popped on my dashboard and that also reminded me that Vaasa Kuntsi Museum has this glitch art exhibition until 13.1.2019. I haven't had the opportunity to go there yet, but maybe soon during the winter break. Overall I didn't know much about the glitch art scene so I read a few articles.

    

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2015/11/faig-ahmed-glitched-rugs/

According to Wikipedia the short definition for glitch art is the practice of using digital or analog errors for aesthetic purposes by either corrupting digital data or physically manipulating electronic devices. One of the first examples is "Digital TV Dinner" made in 1978 that was achieved by manipulating a Bally video game console.

There are 5 categories for different types of glitch art methods.

1. Data manipulation that changes information in a file.
2. Misalignment where you open a file designed for a certain program in a different program.
3. Hardware failure, such as short-circuiting.
4. Misregistration when physical things are done to a media recording, like scratches.
5. Distortion with things like magnets.

I didn't know it was such a big thing as an art form. Most of the time you see glitch art as colourful flickers and glitch-like effects in gifs and illustrations on the internet. Just like the above picture I did using a fun little tutorial I found by googling. It's been trending for some time now and is sometimes really overused in my opinion. But I mean, it still looks pretty cool most of the time.

It's often more interesting to me when people mix traditional and digital. This article by Tales of Art gallery has some neat examples of mixing this glitch aesthetic with contemporary painting.

Kuntsi's Glitch Art is curated by a "game" professor Tanja Sihvonen. The very base idea seems to be to combine art and science and to increase discussion about how those themes link together. The exhibition has included workshops for both adults and children and also open seminars with researchers from the technology field.

  

Nandita Kumar: pOLymORpHic hUMansCApe & Maija Närhinen: Matonpiiskaus.

The piece on the right is like the Finnish version of the Faig Ahmed's rugs.