Screens are now sharp, bright and close to perfect. So it is odd that a great deal of current art, design and music video is made to look like a faulty television. Scan lines, colour fringes, rolling bars and blocks of broken pixels are everywhere. The style is called glitch art, and its older relative is the CRT look. This post explains both.
What a CRT was
CRT stands for cathode ray tube. It was the technology in almost every television and computer monitor until the mid-2000s. A beam of electrons was fired at the inside of a glass screen coated with phosphor. The beam swept across the screen line by line, from top to bottom, many times a second. Where it hit, the phosphor glowed.
That process left marks on the picture:
- Scan lines. Fine horizontal lines, with dark gaps between them.
- Glow. Bright areas spread softly into their surroundings.
- Red, green and blue dots. Each point on the screen was made of three coloured phosphors. Up close you could see them.
- Curved edges. The glass bulged, so the picture bent at the corners.
- Flicker and roll. A weak signal made the picture jump, tear or drift.
At the time, these were faults to be put up with. Now they are a look.
What a glitch is
A glitch is a short fault in a system. In pictures, it is what you see when the signal or the file goes wrong. There are two main kinds.
Analogue glitches
These come from tape and broadcast signals: a worn video cassette, a badly tuned aerial. They look like horizontal tearing, wavy lines, snow, bands of noise and colours that smear sideways.
Digital glitches
These come from damaged files and failing hardware. They look like blocks of wrong colour, parts of the picture shifted out of place, repeated strips, and images that melt into the one before. The melting effect has a name, datamoshing. It happens when a video file loses the frames that tell it what the picture should be.
The effects, and what to call them
- Scan lines: horizontal lines across the picture.
- RGB split, or chromatic aberration: the red, green and blue parts of the image pulled apart, leaving coloured fringes on the edges of things.
- Pixel sorting: rows of pixels dragged out into long streaks.
- Displacement: slices of the image shifted left or right.
- Noise and static: grain, snow and speckle.
- Tracking lines: the bands of distortion at the top or bottom of a video tape picture.
- Blocking: square patches, as in a badly compressed video.
A short history
Artists have been breaking screens on purpose for a long time. In the 1960s, video artists used magnets to twist the picture on television sets. In the 1990s and 2000s, people began to open image files in text editors, change the data and see what came out. Others bent the circuits of old games consoles and keyboards. The term glitch art came into use in those years, and by about 2010 there were festivals and books about it.
After that it spread into ordinary design. Vaporwave used tape effects heavily. Music videos, film titles, game menus and fashion took it up. It is now a standard part of the visual language.
Why it has come back
- Nostalgia. People who grew up with tube televisions and video tape are now adults with homes to decorate. The look reminds them of childhood games and films. Younger people, who never used a CRT, find it new.
- A reaction to perfection. Modern images are clean to the point of being cold. A fault gives a picture warmth and character, in the way film grain or vinyl crackle does.
- Retro gaming. Old games were drawn for CRT screens, and many players think they look better on one. Interest in old hardware has grown with that.
- It suits the times. A glitch is a moment when the machine shows itself. In a period when people are uneasy about technology, pictures of technology failing feel right.
- It marks a picture as hand-made. When software can produce smooth images without effort, roughness reads as a choice.
What it means in a picture
Artists use glitches for different purposes.
- Memory. A degraded image looks like something half remembered.
- Distance. A subject seen through interference seems far away, or transmitted from somewhere else. That suits space subjects well.
- Instability. A world that flickers may not be solid.
- Old against new. A classical statue or an animal under scan lines sets the timeless against the temporary.
Glitch and CRT pieces at Kiyo Arts
- Scanline Spaceman. An astronaut with red, green and blue fringes against a blue nebula, like a transmission breaking up.
- Earth Glitched. The Earth with red and blue streaks dragged across it.
- CRT Lion Retro Wave. A pale violet lion on black, as if drawn on a dark screen.
- Stone Angel Vaporwave. A stone angel in blue and acid green, with scan lines and a broken frame.
- Cyber Wave Escape. A wireframe grid and mountains, the early computer graphics side of the same family.
Using glitch art at home
- It suits rooms with screens in them. A desk, a gaming setup, a media room, a studio. See game room and den wall art.
- One piece is usually enough. Glitch effects are busy. Several on one wall become tiring.
- Pair it with something calm. A plain landscape or a black-and-white piece beside it gives the eye a rest.
- Give it a plain wall. White, grey or black. Patterned wallpaper behind it is too much.
- Choose matte. Matte paper and canvas suit the look. A glossy surface adds real reflections on top of the drawn ones. See matte vs glossy prints.
- Look closely before you buy. The fringes and lines are part of the artwork. They are not a printing fault, and the print will show them as they appear in the picture.
Related styles
Glitch effects turn up across the retro-futurist family. Vaporwave uses tape distortion and early computer graphics. Synthwave uses scan lines and neon grids. Cyberpunk uses flickering signs and failing displays. See vaporwave vs synthwave vs outrun and cyberpunk vs Y2K vs Y3K.
Browse the poster prints and canvas art collections to see more.