To get a sense of how I could visualise my chosen theme a little more, I decided to research glitch art and take a look at some work from artists within the style. I started by examining what glitch art meant – deliberately creating errors and malfunctions on a piece of media for aesthetic purposes. This could include both physical and digital alterations to a piece.
An early example of glitch art is the short film A Colour Box, created by British artist Len Lye in 1935. The short animation is a series of visuals created by Lye painting patterns on the film stock, creating a distorted yet visually pleasing series of images. The film embraces the idea of finding beauty or aesthetic value in a deliberate distortion, and this idea underpins the entire basis of glitch art. Playful patterns and contrasting colours bounce around the image space to create a visually pleasing and fun animation, a perfect example of how glitch art could be used to incite joy.
Ferrucio Laviani’s work with glitch art exists in the medium of interior design, in a series of designs called Good Vibrations. Laviani demonstrates an example of glitch art by bending normal, intricate furniture into chaotic distortion – contrasting the idea of intricacy with simplicity to create humour.
Soleil Zumbrunn, in Coded Cards, uses glitch art in a similar way by taking a normal object with an intricate design and warping it with glitch effects. These glitch effects use an aesthetic that many have come to associate with ‘glitches’ – dissected RGB tones with shifted sections of the image to create a distorted look reminiscent of film.
Whilst my conceptual response to the brief isn’t necessarily joyful, certain elements of glitch art could still be used within my deliverables to embrace the theme. I’m particularly fond of the classic glitch effect, using shifted RGB tones and distortion to create a modern aesthetic grounded in technological semantics. This would work really well with the idea of a digital exhibition space, which I intend my brand to inhabit.
SOURCES:
A Colour Box – Len Lye (1933) – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iejpYzNDuAE
Good Vibrations – Ferrucio Laviani – http://www.laviani.com/#!fratelli-boffi-product/ctnk
Coded Cards – Soleil Zumbrunn – https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/457846685/glitch-20-art-playing-cards-0
BA (Hons) Graphic Communication - Journal 