Glitch Art:A Significant Form

Over the past few decades,glitch art,one sort of digital art which focuses on technology failures,has entered and permeated in mass culture,even bringing about a boom in anti-aesthetics image creation on Internet.Those disfigured,glitched,distorted images with ghosting or jagged edges leave a strong impression on us.However,these glitches are not sabotage for sabotage's sake,but ways through which artists can express their thoughts about technical errors,norms and conventions,digital age experience.Nowadays,the rapid development of technology is increasing our dependence on it and subtly reshaping our daily experience at the same time.Technology is not only to promote efficiency and chase perfection,but also creates vivid illusory with digital representations.Thus,artists attempt to break data flow and cause the absence of expected functions,so as to reconsider and rethink things that we overlook in techno-culture.Technology as an indispensable tool for digital art,becomes an object to be expressed,damaged and questioned in glitch art.Moreover,glitches which challenge our traditional aesthetic experience with its broken image connect the art closely to our daily experience in digital era.That is to say,the aesthetics value of glitch art is strongly linked to its form.Specifically,the form is to expose technology's materiality---discrete data,code and computing in art context.This thesis will apply the theory of "significant form",what Clive Bell and Roger Fry say that art is the combination of form and significance,to explaining it is through making use of technology malfunctions to activate related association of normal life and thus to create a context proper for discussion of digital age,that glitch art gains its aesthetic value as one sort of art form.Glitch art has not yet attracted much concern in China,so there is still little research about this topic.This thesis is looking to bridge the gap that was not addressed in previous research.It will examine the nature of glitch art from the perspective of the combination of form and content,and reveals that "glitch",or say"abnormal",in some way is "normal".And it will also have reference significance to digital age experience through analysis of narratives of some art works.