Glitch Aesthetic

Glitch art is categorized as art that depicts technical errors for aesthetic purposes. Artists recreate 'bugs' through a range of recognizable digital imagery, such as static, pixelated, spliced or distorted images and viruses. 

This recent phenomena's arrival on the art scene has been met by a range of responses. Since its debut in the early 2000s, the art form has developed from somewhat of a novelty to a commercialized and popularized art trend. Some artists compare glitch art to cubism, drawing parallels between the cubist theory of reducing forms to their basic geometric shapes and glitch art's attempts to convert basic digital sequences into an aesthetic form. Some also compare it to pop art in the way it depicts popular culture, such as film, television, video games and advertisements. Examples can be found everywhere, from popular music videos like Kanye West's Welcome to Heartbreak, to Paranormal Activity and The New York Times Magazine's 2016 cover of Edward Snowden.

Glitch art is also interesting in the way it purposefully takes the abnormalities and errors, which we would consider defects, and makes them the focal point of the art itself. In the age of photoshop and digitized perfection, glitch art stands out as a defender of the defective. Furthermore, the idea of destroying a former image in the effort to create a new one, by purposefully adding something that would otherwise be unwanted and visually unappealing, makes it in essence a conceptual artwork. 

Though it may seem futuristic and modern, the term glitch art has been around since the 1960s and the trend is not going away any time soon. In fact, glitch art is becoming more and more commonplace in the art world. 

Discover this new and intriguing art style on Artsper with our wide selection of glitch aesthetic artworks.