Glitché is a free iPhone application that lets your mash up your pictures using common computer errors and bugs. Absolutely love the name - the control of unwanted distortions for aesthetic effect is so far removed from the original outcome of a computer error.
Apps like Glitché and others (such as Dscan) certainly make us think about digital imagery elements like pixels and scans. One of my favourite 'glitchy' works (that has always stuck in my head) is this beautiful film by the artist Jon Perez: "a nat geo video of a cheetah running at full pace recorded with a high-speed camera on the world's fastest moving dolly is corrupted into a series of repetitious flows each time the codec uses a new key frame to explore extinction and decay". The translation of informational error into natural issues is fantastic.
destablizing, I from Jon Perez on Vimeo.
On the topic of pixel and glitch, Rosa and I, as a D I S C O U R S E project, ran a workshop yesterday which we called 'Digital Landscape'. As a result of a recent university module I'd taken called 'Reality Sucks: Contemporary Landscape', I wanted to think about how we could make people think about their landscapes in relation to 'the digital'. As a result, we came up with a really simple activity in which we took the urban landscape of Leeds' new domed Trinity Leeds shopping centre in the heart of the city, and attempted to deconstruct it.
By blowing up the image and asking members of the public to identify and apply the photograph's 'pixels' (small cut out squares of black, whit and grey card), our workshop played with aspects of (im)materiality, digital imagery, and contemporary (physical and virtual) landscapes.
More info: http://ahdiscourse.blogspot.co.uk/ and http://artworksleeds.tumblr.com/
Below are some pictures I was playing with on Glitché of the original photograph of Trinity that we used in the workshop:
