What is the nature of a glitch? For as long as computers and televisions have been around, there have been inevitable malfunctions that cause the machines to go haywire sometimes. These situations often lead to a preponderance of digital artifacts skewed across the screen, distorting images and preventing them from culminating into their intended appearance.Although their manifestation is random, unprompted, initially undesirable, and often fleeting, glitches are an inevitability of the imperfections inherent in our digital devices. Chaotic though they may seem, there is a formalist aspect to them. What we’re seeing is the coded design of a system contending with an unintended effect, and as much as they are in contention with something unexpected, the code is still manifested in very strict parameters. The ensuing patterns deal with these unknown factors in a visually structured, formalist manner.
In a new project called asdfbitmap (Asendorf Bitmap), recent GIF entrepreneur Kim Asendorf, took it upon himself to explore the “combination of structure and chaos” producing these geometric appropriations of self-generated mistakes in the system. Many of the images are abstract expressions of visual data that take on the appearance of skylines, car traffic, or even the circuitry of a computer, giving it a physical or material aesthetic that is disharmonious with its original ephemeral nature.Portraits of people and landscapes are also featured, seeming to comment on how the glitches in our computers could be folded back into the real world, affecting our perceptions of reality. In Kevin Slavin’s brilliant TED talk on algorithms, he mentions how we are terraforming our world to achieve better, faster algorithmic results, also citing a series of photographs that manipulated mountains into representations of data. So, what if that reliance on algorithms leads to glitches in the system that not only skew our perception of reality by distorting photographs, but actually affect the world itself?Glitch straddles the line between randomness and inevitability, since glitches are bound to happen, but how they manifest themselves is technically unpredictable. To appropriate the visual aspects of a glitch is to impose an aspect of control upon how the computer chooses to handle mistakes. Not only is there structure insofar as the computer is handling a problem in a formalist way, but the artist is also exercising control so as not to be at the mercy of the computer and its inevitabilities. Glitches are no longer diversions, but provocations.