Glitch Art of the Modern Day
Glitch art is a modern day form of expression that deviates from the traditional techniques of ‘art-making’. I found this process to be both extremely satisfying to do, as well as interesting during the manipulation of the coding aspect of making glitch art, since technology and coding is in my realm of interest. Before I began to make my glitch art, I planned to manipulate famous paintings that are the iconic images associated with famous art movements such as Post-Impressionism and the American Art movement of the 1940s.
The manipulation of classical art pieces with a modern day technologic art process brings together both the ‘traditional’ ways of making art along with a more revolutionary process. Most people believe that art is simply categorized into very finite techniques of painting, drawing, sculpture, and film…but they fail to realize that with society becoming more integrated with technology, the processes of making art has also changed dramatically into a digital age.
A few of the glitch art that I made were done myself by manipulating the code via TextEdit, which I found to be the most frustrating due to the fact that I couldn’t manipulate the image to produce something I wanted to the exact detail. My goal, however, was to ‘glitch’ out the image of the paintings in a way that you could definitely tell it was messed with, but not so much so that you couldn’t immediately recognize the famous painting. I focused on the middle part of the code of each image and simply copy and pasted it throughout the rest of the text. By doing this, the image didn’t necessarily distort, but blocks of color popped up, which I felt was appropriate since I was manipulating works of art that have careful consideration for color.
After experimenting with the code of the images, I used a glitch art generator that allowed me to successfully manipulate certain aspects of the ‘glitch’ to my liking and I had much more control of the outcome of the image. One of my favorite glitch art results was the painting of the American Gothic by Grant Wood; this painting summarizes ‘tradition’ in both an artistic definition as well as a cultural one as it depicts the life of America in the 1930s and is regarded famously for the regionalist style of the art work. With the original image of the painting next to the ‘glitched’ out version, it displays two different eras of art making, both of which are completely valid in their processes.
Despite the fact that many may regard art solely based on more traditional processes such as painting, with this new age of digitalization of everything, it only makes sense that glitch art would eventually transform into the new, ‘innovative’, process of making art that would generally be accepted in society. Though there is still a divide from ‘tradition’ and ‘modernism’, I could definitely see this process of making art being the norm 10 to 20 years from now as society grows more and more toward the digital age and leaves behind the analog era.
