Blips and Blankets

When Brooklyn, NY-based musician Phillip Stearns found circuit bending, he started experimenting with all kinds of art, branching out from audio into visual, then ultimately into textiles. That one tool, the ability to modify electronics hardware to create things from the resultant glitches, led to his endeavor called Glitch Textiles.

“The project started with an investigation of glitch images created by circuit bending digital cameras,” Stearns says. “By deconstructing the hardware, it became apparent that the whole field of digital photography was more computational in nature, bearing little resemblance to non-numeric (‘analog’) photography.”

Of course, harnessing glitches isn’t always easy — their very nature means that the results are going to be somewhat unpredictable. However, their visual renditions are also often extraordinary, seeming like brief and fleeting moments captured in time. Vibrant colors and sharp contrast remind us of the digital underpinnings of the art, even as it drapes and flows over your living room sofa.

Initially, the glitches used may have all been created by Stearns’ careful soldering and tweaking, but now there are many options, which come from some pretty interesting sources.

“There are still designs made with circuit bent cameras, but others use custom pixel sorting algorithms, or a custom data visualization I wrote, even exploiting rendering errors in Blender,” Stearns says. “Most recently, I’ve been creating designs using malware that I’ve captured on servers I’m operating as honeypots, as well as visualizing recently discovered state-sponsored cyberweapons.”

This article appeared in Make: Vol. 71.