Don't adjust your screen; there's nothing wrong with it. That glitchy image is supposed to look like that.
Amidst today's airbrushed magazine spreads and seamless interfaces, some have discovered beauty in the broken. Cue lo-fi revival bands, 8-bit animation and the entire GIF aesthetic.
Glitch art tends to spotlight digital or analog "mistakes" and feature them in an artistic light. Mixed with the nostalgia of the not-so-perfect, glitch art sits alongside the revival movements of film photography, vinyl and now cassettes as we reminisce about a pixelated, slightly antiquated past.
Taking an art form all its own, glitch art not only glorifies the broken aesthetic; artists are also recreating, remixing and chopping up perfectly fine modern examples into screwy faux-relics. Call it bricolage, post-postmodernism, whatever, glitch art is kind of like Instagram in binary code: putting old-school web 1.0 filters onto imagery of the present.
Prominent types of glitch art include databending or datamoshing, which stretches the confines of what a file or machine is supposed to do to all the things it is capable of doing.
For example, take a music file, change the .mp3 extension into a .raw extension and open up a "song" with Photoshop to reveal an "image" of the song. Likewise, take an image file, change the .jpg extention to .txt, open up the file with a text editor, edit it, then change it back into an image file -- you'll have a glitchy, corrupted image.
We gathered a roundup of some creepily beautiful pieces of glitch art and videos in the gallery above. Take a look and let us know what your own favorites are in the comments below.