What is Glitch /Art ?

However, anyone who starts to deal with the topic of Glitch Art soon encounters  a world wide spread group of Glitch Activists: Artists, theorists and coders exchange their ideas at a very high technical level, meet at international festivals and on digital platforms. A great deal of fascination emanates from the phenomenon of disturbances which are not under control: on part of the artists AND the audience.
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The technological definition of glitch describes a transient failure or interruption of an expected operational flow within a digital system. In art, it includes the metaphorical, conceptual/tactical, or aesthetic use of technological glitches. Glitch can be used to criticize the medium's inherent politics, in genre, interface, norms and expectations. As a community it is decentralized. As a theory moment/um, it is a theory of change, with a meaningful stylization and its own 'language'. Glitches can show any media in a critical state of hypertrophy: ruined, unwanted, unrecognized, random and terrible.
(QUOTE: Rosa Menkman, Definitions of Glitch, March 22nd, Lecture, Digitalvilla, 2023)
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The programmed and intentional glitches in the aesthetics of GLITCH ART seem like random accidents, but they aren't. The artistic manipulation programs are described by the actors as Databending, Datamoshing, Misalignment, Misregistration & Distortion, among other things, are constantly being further developed and shared in online tutorials, at festivals and conferences. Playing with the GLITCH software opens exciting back doors for artists in the spirit of Feminism and away from established marketing mechanisms. The perception of the GLITCH ART was promoted by the possibilities of the NFT. In 2022, after the NFT-Hype of 2021, the limits of the new marketing platforms became visible. In 2023, with the first GLITCH ART auction at Sotheby's in New York GLITCH: BEYOND BINARY, it became clear that the GLITCH had arrived in the traditional art market; and that a sensitive GLITCH COMMUNITY is able to sanction the exclusion of female artists.

The beginnings of digital art and the critical variety, GLITCH ART, date back to 1990. In art history, the deconstruction of visuality is part of critical artistic practice. When image files are disassembled, destroyed or damaged in the GLITCH, a tradition is continued here using digital means. The results are programmed disorders, often of the highest aesthetic quality. The GLITCH oscillates between politics & protest, deconstruction & identity. In particular, the international political upheavals (2010-12-13) and democracy movements find a new visuality and a digital shelter for hidden messages in these deconstructions. Anyone who embarks on a research journey into the art of glitch is confronted with the rapid pace of the glitch community - a disjointed, far-flung, eclectic crowd of decentralized and disorganized activists. The PLATFORM GLITCH AESTHETICS tries to create an international anchor point in the Brandenburg, Potsdam, Berlin region in order to be able to take effect from here.

Our political engagement is rooted in a manifesto GLITCH FEMINSM published in 2020 by New York-based Autor, Activist & Curator Legacy Russell. In 2021 the text was translated into German by Ann Cotten, Franziska Füchsl, Mark Kanak, Barbara Eder, Bradley Williams Cohen, Claire Palzer, Lotta Thießen, Jacob Kraner and Tiona Sironic and published by Merve Verlag Leipzig.