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How to Catch a Glitch (or: How to Glitch Like a Pro) – from Ant Scott
September 21, 2009
Before Glitch: Designing Imperfection was a book, it was an experiment; a collection; a thesis. The contributors and authors spent years perfecting the study of the “Glitch” aesthetic, and duly learned how to create their own.
Here are Ant Scott’s instructions on catching and amplifying a glitch for art’s sake (via Beflix.com):
1) Wait for something to go wrong, or force something to go wrong if you’re a busy full-time glitch professional:
- Some software goes tits-up and draws crud all over the screen. Computer programmers often see a lot of these, due to writing shonky code.
- Load an invalid binary file into an arcade emulator and hope it
dies in an interesting way as it executes garbage code.
- Convert the raw data bytes in any file into 8-bit colours and display them in a rectangle.
2) Congratulations, you now have some glitch raw material. Now you need to capture it before it decays. Some glitches have a very short half-life. The easiest way to do this is press the [PRINT SCREEN] key on a PC, or hold down [CMD]+[SHIFT]+[3] on a Mac. This copies the entire screen to the clipboard. Open you favourite graphics editor, paste the picture in, and save it.
Here’s one I made earlier. I was working on a bit of software when the screen stopped redrawing properly. This image is a snapshot of part of the screen.
[3] This is where the artistic bit comes in…
Want to learn more? Check out Ant’s blog here for steps to create your own Glitch-y perfection.
