Evolving Glitch Art

In this paper we introduce Glitch art as a new representation in Evolutionary Art. Glitch art is a recent form of digital art, and can be considered an umbrella term for a variety of techniques that manipulate digital images by altering their digital encoding in unconventional ways. We gathered a number of basic glitch operations and created a ‘glitch recipe’ which takes a source image (in a certain image format, like jpeg or gif) and applies one or more glitch operations. This glitch recipe is the genotype representation in our evolutionary GP art system. We present our glitch operations, the genotype, and the genetic operators initialisation, crossover and mutation. A glitch operation may ‘break’ an image by destroying certain data in the image encoding, and therefore we have calculated the ‘fatality rate’ of each glitch operation. A glitch operation may also result in an image that is visually the same as its original, and therefore we also calculated the visual impact of each glitch operation. Furthermore we performed an experiment with our Glitch art genotype in our unsupervised evolutionary art system, and show that the use of our new genotype results in a new class of images in the evolutionary art world.