Glitch Art @ The Intersection (and beyond!)
January 12, 2022 Jamey Alea 0 Comments
Glitch art is something that I’ve been doing as a hobby… for quite a long time, actually, but I’ve come back to it in a really big way the past year or so. It’s a really fun way to do some interesting art that feels like it ties into what I do for a living as a programmer. That is to say, all of the glitch effects in my art are generated programmatically: not intentionally designed by me in a photo editing program, but created by directly altering the source code of the image file and seeing the interesting (but often unpredictable) ways that it affects the image visually.
I used to do this extremely manually, which was awfully tedious. It’s hard to know how you’ll be affecting the final image while you’re tinkering with the source code, so creating glitch art that looks nice is often a process of trial and error: change something, see how it changed the image, and then either undo it or continue changing it in new ways. So when you have to save and reload the image file every time you touch the source code to even see what you’ve done, that process is slow, tedious and frustrating.
Now I use a program called ImageGlitch to make that step easier. (It’s a mac-only program, I believe.) Unlike some glitch apps, it doesn’t give me more control over how the glitches happen in a literal way, which I actually like because the element of programmatic randomness is part of what I really appreciate about glitch art. But it does show the source code and image side by side so I can see how I’m affecting it in real time, which ultimately makes it a lot easier and quicker to make and undo changes, which lets me get my art closer to the vision I have in my mind.
Since I’ve been doing glitch art again, I’ve had my pieces featured in quite a few online lit mags. (The two pieces above were made from the same original image and are titled equilibrium and wine-dark sea, respectively. They were featured in Pareidolia Lit, Vol 2: Wunderkammer.) I’ve also been the cover artist for a few anthologies at the Daily Drunk, which is really cool. It has been really gratifying to see that people are interested in what I’m doing, and that’s happening in a big way locally, as I’m currently January’s featured artist at the Intersection Cafe on Elmwood Ave!
I even did a couple new pieces special for the art show that I’m really happy with. One is a self-portrait, and the other was based on a piece of astrophotography that I did over the summer when I took an astrophotography class in Denver.
So yeah, you’ll be able to peruse my art (and buy prints!) at the Intersection for the entire month of January, but if you wanted to say hi to me directly and get some treats, we’re having a reception on the morning of Saturday, January 15th. There will be cookies and I’d love to see you there!
