When looking for inspiration for what to turn into glitch art, I was really hoping to find one single theme or type of thing to use. I was originally thinking of doing landscapes or sunsets, but I almost felt like those were both too generic and not interesting enough. While searching through Unsplash, I stumbled across a picture of a hand holding a rose and instantly knew I had to work with flowers. The following images are arranged in the order that I worked in, which works handily because they appear to become more and more “glitchy” as they go. The first 5 were glitched using pixel sorting while the last 4 were done with databending in Audacity.

R053

D415Y

D4ND3L10N

5UNFL0W3R

P0PPY

L1L4C

J45M1N3

D4F0D1L

0RCH1D

I was really hoping to achieve something that looked like it was actually hand painted with one of these glitches and I think this last one achieved that very well. I tried to keep some sense of randomness with my glitches, especially the ones done in Audacity, to almost let fate work it’s magic. I would apply effects randomly and in varying amounts, without much rhyme or reason, so while it would be difficult to replicate each result, that’s part of the beauty of it.

Some of the results turned out much more visually pleasing than others, but though there are some that aren’t great on the eye, I’m pleasantly surprised that any of them turned out looking as cool as they do. Some of my favorites are 0RCH1D, L1L4C and P0PPY. P0PPY especially stands out to me because of how contained the glitch looks. Although it was applied to the entire image, the white background isn’t capable of glitching as noticeably as the flower itself.

I think there is a lot of potential with these methods of making glitch art. They’re simple, especially once you’ve tried a few demo pieces, and can have incredible results. It also helps one to further understand that we live in a simulation and birds aren’t real.