

So naturally, most of the population didn’t encounter glitches until computers became more accessible in the second half of the 20th century.Īs computer-generated graphics became part of the media landscapes in the 1970s, three pioneering artists, Raul Zaritsky, Jamie Fenton, and Dick Ainsworth, saw the potential glitching pixels could have to get their work into art galleries worldwide. If you do anything with it I’d love to see it!Įdit: The script was used to make this music video.A glitch is a brief interruption or error in digital files that display films, videos, music, and images. It shouldn’t be too hard to use, details are in REAMDE.md.


The pixels in each interval are rearranged so as to sort them with respect to some property, say, lightness.The rows/columns of the image are split into ‘intervals’ (more on this later).They propose using it as a technique for unsupervised classification, to be applied to images from remote sensing satellites. Neat! The earliest reference to pixel sorting I could find on the internet is this paper ( PDF) by scientists from Iraq’s Scientific Research Council. The processing script was cryptic and not very hackable, and I felt like something more lightweight was needed, so I wrote my own version in python – more info on GitHub. It was popularized (possibly invented) by artist Kim Asendorf (processing source code here). Pixel sorting is an interesting, glitchy effect which selectively orders the pixels in the rows/columns of an image.

Pixel Sorting Introducing order in a disordered way can make for some great glitch art.
