Glitching Reznor (Sydney Emerging Artist, Painter & Illustrator: Luke Marcatili)

Glitch Art: The aestheticization of digital or analog errors such as artifacts and other “bugs”, by either corrupting digital code/data or by physically manipulating electronic devices (Wikipedia).

I was recently asked to create a portrait of a celebrity of my choosing and chose to paint Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails (and How To Destroy Angels), whose new album Hesitation Marks comes out in September.

It was the perfect opportunity to try out a few techniques I’ve been interested in a while. The first is subtractive painting and the second is glitch art.

Here’s my original painting of Reznor. It’s oil on board which is pretty much how I plan to do all my paintings for the foreseeable future.

Once I’d finished the painting I decided to use it to glitch the image, inspired by Trent Reznor & Nine Inch Nails’ long collaboration with Rob Sheridan. As the Creative Director for Nine Inch Nails and How To Destroy Angels, Sheridan has incorporated the glitch aesthetic into almost all Reznor-related releases of the last 10 years.

Glitching or databending a digital image is about opening up the image code and changing the image at the level of code. Because it is impossible to read the code that makes up compressed digital files, you can’t know what you’re actually changing making the results somewhat unpredictable.

The image of the oil painting (above) glitched via TextEdit.

By databending the code, the image begins to reflect aspects of it’s true nature as a digital file. In an age where digital software is used to make images appear hyper-real and highly idealised, creating images that remind the viewer that they are looking at an artificial representation of reality becomes necessary, just as painting began to acknowledge and embrace materials and mark making after the advent of photography.

Another randomly glitched version of the image.

After I created a few glitched versions of the image, I brought them back into Photoshop to composite together with the un-glitched image, with the following results:

LM