Breaking Things on Purpose: Glitch art’s pixel-mixing algorithms
“You’re trying to find this really fine balance where something doesn’t break fully, but breaks just to the point that you can see it breaking,” says Sabato Visconti, a photographer and visual artist who specializes in the so-called glitch aesthetic.
Images can be “broken” in countless ways — their colors skewed, whole sections moved and mismatched, grids and lines shattering the picture into jagged blasts of color and line that look exactly like what you’d expect to come from the imagination of a machine.
People seem increasingly to be taking to these distortions, whether from their novelty and unpredictability, their association with the modern digital age, or just nostalgia over the 8-bit graphics of the 80s and 90s.
“It kind of carries on from childhood,” says Visconti of his own work. “Like when you’re a kid and you see snow on an analog TV and you’re fascinated by it. I was that kid.”