Stylogenyin the style of Glitch Art & Datamosh Graphics

Digital native · 2001–present · Global / networked, Western Europe, Central Europe, Northern Europe, North America

Glitch Art & Datamosh Graphics

Also known as Glitch art, Glitch aesthetic, Glitch design

An art and design practice that makes digital failure the picture. Artists deliberately corrupt image and video files or short-circuit hardware: they edit a JPEG's bytes (databending), delete a video's keyframes so one shot smears into the next (datamoshing) or sort pixels into streaks. Compression blocks, torn scanlines, shifted colour channels and raw code replace drawing, and the colour comes from the fault. Rosa Menkman and GLI.TC/H framed it as a critique of seamless technology; designers took it onto record sleeves and fonts, music videos onto MTV in 2009, and it became a stock filter.

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A grainy monochrome close-up of a face looking upward is repeated and overlapped beneath dense neon pink, green, cyan and orange digital interference. Large distressed lettering across the top reads “SIGNAL.”
AI-generated by Stylogeny from the style’s design choices. Not a real or historical work.

Use it with care

Glitch video and animated glitch effects often flicker: keep flashes to three or fewer in any one second, and be stricter with saturated red, to meet WCAG 2.3.1 and protect people with photosensitive epilepsy. Datamoshing and databending usually start from someone else's footage or photographs, so clear the rights before corrupting them for commercial work. When a datamosh or pixel-sort look follows a particular artist's process, credit it; the 2009 music videos overtook the artists who developed the technique.

01

How it works

  • Make the error the whole picture: break the file itself (edit an image's bytes, open it as sound or text, delete a video's keyframes) or the machine (circuit-bent consoles and cameras) instead of painting damage on top.
  • Let the codec's own structure show: 8×8 DCT blocks and macroblocks, interlaced lines, horizontally torn slices, pixels sorted into streaks.
  • Take colour from the fault, not a swatch: shifted RGB channels, magenta and green chroma blocks, posterised and quantised tones.
  • Start from someone else's image (a found photo, film still or downloaded clip) and enlarge or corrupt it until its subject half dissolves.
  • Expose the machine: show code, raw data, error messages and broken interface windows as content, to question the promise of a noiseless, transparent medium.
  • Keep it a break, not a preset: when an effect has become a filter, change the file format or the process.

Net art and new-media scenes of the early 2000s: Ant Scott (beflix) called his work 'glitch art' from July 2001 and performed at a glitch festival in Norway in 2002; Iman Moradi's Huddersfield dissertation Glitch Aesthetics (2004) used 'glitch art' and 'glitch design' interchangeably. The word came from the glitch music of the 1990s (Oval's deliberately skipping CDs; Kim Cascone, 'The Aesthetics of Failure', 2000), and the practice has analogue precursors in Len Lye's hand-painted film A Colour Box (1935) and Nam June Paik's Magnet TV (1965). The GLI.TC/H festival (Nick Briz, Evan Meaney, Rosa Menkman & Jon Satrom; Chicago 2010, then Chicago, Amsterdam and Birmingham 2011) gathered the scene, and datamoshing reached MTV music videos in 2009

02

Its design choices

From Stylogeny’s vocabulary of design choices: defining choices make the style, characteristic ones are usual, occasional ones turn up now and then.

Layout & composition
Space & hierarchy
Typography
Colour
Form & shape
Surface & texture
Ornament
Imagery
Medium & production
Tone & intent
Avoids
Gloss & highlights, Frosted glass, Soft extrusion, Paper & letterpress bite, Pen, brush & ink, Rational & objective, Chrome & 3D render, Generous white space

Palette

  • #0a0a0a
  • #ff00ff
  • #00ff41
  • #00e5ff
  • #ff2a00
  • #c8c8c8

Typefaces

  • Raw file bytes opened as text (databending in a text editor)

    garbled characters and code in system monospace

  • Operating-system interface fonts caught in error messages and cascading windows, as in JODI's My%Desktop

    2002

  • Ordinary system sans and grotesque type put through the image's corruption

    sliced into displaced bands, split into offset RGB channels, pixel-sorted or smeared by a datamosh

  • Fonts made by corrupting a font's own outlines, as in Antonio Roberts's Dataface (2010), built from glitched SVG glyphs of the Liberation font

Known for

  • JODI (Joan Heemskerk & Dirk Paesmans)

    untitled game (1996–2001), a set of Quake modifications that strip the game's graphics and alter its code until it renders black-and-white abstraction, and My%Desktop (2002), Mac OS 9 screens of cascading windows and error messages

  • Fehler (Chris Murphy, Northern Ireland) and alorenz (Angela Lorenz, Berlin)

    sleeves for glitch and laptop music, among them packaging for Murphy's Fällt label (Ian Andrews, Ceremonial, 2002) and Lorenz's cover for Stephan Mathieu's Full Swing EP, 'an abstract pixel landscape' left by a failed file conversion; Eye 49 (2003) named them designers who 'make a virtue of the digital glitch'

  • Ant Scott (beflix), glitch series (2007)

    renders of computer crashes, software errors, hacked games and raw data turned into coloured pixels; with Iman Moradi & Dimitre Lima he ran glitchbrowser (2005–2008), which re-encoded a web page's JPEGs and GIFs and returned them as damaged pictures

  • Thomas Ruff, jpegs (2004 onward), found online images enlarged until the compression blocks show; jpeg ny02 (2004) is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art; book, Aperture 2009

  • Sven König, aPpRoPiRaTe! (2005)

    complete films found on file-sharing networks, datamoshed with the free Xvid codec, with an open-source script to trigger the effect live; followed by download finished! (2007). Bertrand Planes & Christian Jacquemin's DivXPrime (2006) is another early datamosh work

  • Takeshi Murata, Monster Movie (2005)

    footage from the 1981 film Caveman broken apart and re-formed about thirty times a second, datamoshing used as animation

  • Kanye West, 'Welcome to Heartbreak'

    (dir. Nabil Elderkin, 2009) and Chairlift, 'Evident Utensil' (dir. Ray Tintori, 2009), the music videos that took datamoshing to MTV just before Paul B. Davis opened his datamosh show at Seventeen Gallery, London ('Define Your Terms (Or Kanye West Fucked Up My Solo Show)', 2009)

  • Iman Moradi, Ant Scott, Joe Gilmore & Christopher Murphy, Glitch

    Designing Imperfection (Mark Batty Publisher, 2009), more than 200 glitch images with interviews including Angela Lorenz and Kim Cascone

03

Make something in this style

Say what you need, and Stylogeny’s image studio draws it from Glitch Art & Datamosh Graphics’s design choices and checks it against them. It takes about a minute, and you get a link to share.

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04

Where it comes from, and what it’s close to

Before it

The style it grew out of, and the styles it borrowed from.

This styleGlitch Art & Datamosh Graphics2001–present · Global / networked, Western Europe, Central Europe, Northern Europe, North America

After it

The styles that grew out of it.

Alike in its design choices

Styles that make many of the same choices, related or not, besides those above.

05

Sources

  1. Rosa Menkman, The Glitch Moment(um), Network Notebooks 04 (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2011), ISBN 978-90-816021-6-7; networkcultures.org/blog/publication/no-04-the-glitch-momentum-rosa-menkman/ (Ant Scott 2001, Norway 2002, Moradi 2004, glitchbrowser, JODI, Lye and Paik p. 33, circuit bending: Gieskes and glitchNES, König's aPpRoPiRaTe! and download finished!, Davis at Seventeen Gallery, datamoshing history pp. 53–55, GLI.TC/H 2010)
  2. Rosa Menkman, 'Glitch Studies Manifesto', in Geert Lovink & Rachel Somers Miles (eds), Video Vortex Reader II: Moving Images Beyond YouTube (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2011), pp. 336–347
  3. Rosa Menkman, A Vernacular of File Formats (2010), beyondresolution.info/VERNACULAR
  4. Kim Cascone, 'The Aesthetics of Failure: "Post-Digital" Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music', Computer Music Journal 24(4), Winter 2000, pp. 12–18, doi:10.1162/014892600559489 (Oval, glitch music)
  5. Adrian Shaughnessy, 'Laptop aesthetics' and 'Angela Lorenz', Eye no. 49, vol. 13 (Autumn 2003), eyemagazine.com (Fehler, alorenz, Fällt packaging, Full Swing)
  6. Iman Moradi, Ant Scott, Joe Gilmore & Christopher Murphy, Glitch: Designing Imperfection (New York: Mark Batty Publisher, 2009), ISBN 978-0-9799666-6-8 (Open Library record); reviewed in Eye no. 75 (Spring 2010) and Wallpaper*
  7. Wikipedia: 'Christopher Murphy (designer)' (Fehler, Fällt)
  8. Electronic Arts Intermix: JODI, Untitled Game (1996–2001), eai.org/titles/9872; Takeshi Murata, Monster Movie (2005), eai.org/titles/monster-movie
  9. The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Thomas Ruff, jpeg ny02 (2004), chromogenic print, metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/287237; Thomas Ruff, jpegs (New York: Aperture, 2009), ISBN 978-1-59711-093-8
  10. Antonio Roberts (hellocatfood), 'Dataface' (29 June 2010) and 'Create your own glitch typeface' (16 July 2010), hellocatfood.com; Open Font Library, 'Dataface' (SIL Open Font License)
  11. Fonts In Use: 'Error – The Art of Imperfection, Ars Electronica Berlin' (MOOI Design, 2018), fontsinuse.com/uses/24056
  12. Whitney Museum of American Art: Nam June Paik, Magnet TV (1965), whitney.org/collection/works/6139; Len Lye Foundation: A Colour Box (1935), lenlyefoundation.com/films/21/
  13. Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich: GLITCH. The Art of Interference (1 December 2023 – 17 March 2024), curated by Franziska Kunze
  14. Kim Asendorf, ASDFPixelSort (2010), github.com/kimasendorf/ASDFPixelSort
  15. Glitch Textiles (Phillip David Stearns), glitchtextiles.com
  16. W3C, Understanding WCAG 2.2: Success Criterion 2.3.1 Three Flashes or Below Threshold
  17. Wikipedia: 'Glitch art', 'Datamoshing', 'Welcome to Heartbreak', 'Jodi (art collective)'

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