Hi beautiful digital art people,Welcome back. If you’ve been forwarded our email, make sure to subscribe below:Today I am going to carve the third column of our digital art temple — the Glitch. The glitch is the error, the decay, the deconstruction of our rendering machines. It breaks apart the illusion of coherence that pixels and smoothing provide, and exposes the raw chaos code underneath. It pulls the matrix apart into its component code and reimagines the pieces as abstraction.Glitch aesthetic has an etymology dating back to the late 1970s and early 1980s, as video game consoles become popular and their computing hearts were able to break down into a distinctive machine artifact. Consider Jamie Fenton and the below art generated by messing around with the game cartridge — “When pressing the reset button, it was possible to remove the cartridge from the system and induce various memory dump pattern sequences”.Another prominent early artist is Rosa Menkman, whose work brings forward the algorithms of encryption and encoding that we find in digital objects. These things are the texture of our electronic communication, like capillaries under the skin. I feel like there are some vary tangible physical art pieces that play on the same ideas. For example, macro photography of rust or decay. However, rusting and decay is a slow, incremental process that breaks down and wears out material. It eats away at structure through physical process. Glitch, however, captures something else — some element of reproduction, and then a structural transparency of the rendering medium.Xerox / photocopy art also comes to mind. Consider Ian Burn’s “Xerox Book” which consisted of a sheet of paper that was repeatedly run through a photocopier, until the artifacts emerged and overtook the page.I am part of a DAO called DOS Punks DAO — more on that in a minute — founded by the glitch artist Max Capacity. I had asked the group to help me understand the core ideas of the aesthetic, and Max po