[Glitch: a space_man s worrd for irr tating _disdisdisturbance]
One of my favorite elements to incorporate into music and graphics is glitch. Generally accepted as unwanted artifacts or distortion, glitches are the faults or misrepresented data you might experience in a poorly transmitted or received television broadcast, an incomplete download of an audio recording, or an electronic device that is not functioning properly. Though glitch has become a thing of modern interest, it certainly is not new. As long as there have been electronics, there have been glitches. One could even postulate that various diseases, especially mental ailments and random physical anomalies, could be considered glitches.
![[this_crusades_a_charade] mm444 remix glitch cover](https://mopestarmedia.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/mm444_charade_sc.jpg "mm444_charade_sc")
I have been manually creating glitches and glitch elements in my graphic work for a while now and it is something that helps to make my current aesthetic. I find beauty in mistakes, repetition, and imperfection. For similar reasons, I often enjoy using less than ideal equipment to get source imagery. The biggest issue then is experimenting long enough to discover the right glitch; that one moment when the sun sets, its rays fill the horizon with color, and, in this case, the equipment capturing the image malfunctions for a brief second.
Inevitably, apps such as Decim8, Glitché, and iGlitch have brought the glitch aesthetic into the mainstream; allowing candid shots and Instagram photos to be “glitched” on properly working smart phones. I would venture to say, however, that the beauty of those accidental moments, in my opinion as someone who has spent more than a second tapping a button, has been pushed one step toward effortless irrelevance.
That being said, I strongly believe the outcome of spending more time creating glitches manually or finding them in a real world situation and sampling them is far greater than using a filter in an app. And so I leave this post with a similar sentiment from a recent interview with Rob Sheridan, art director for Nine Inch Nails, conducted by Jill Krajewski.
“I know there’s a tendency for people to grumble when something they love and feel a certain degree of ownership over gets adopted by the mainstream, but I like to look at it as a validation of sorts that it’s resonating with a lot of people. And the only thing you can do is accept it and embrace it, or push yourself further into territories the mainstream hasn’t picked up on yet. My only complaint is that the glitch “look” is becoming so commonplace, and is often poorly faked with software, that people tend to assume everything is a Photoshop plugin, even when it’s actually a laborious manual process.”
