“Glitches are the uncanny, brutal structures that come to the surface during a break of the flow within a technology; they are the primal data-screams of the machine. In the digital these utterances often take form following the “vernacular of file formats” (the encoded organizations of data). A file format signifies what protocols (formal descriptions and semantic rules) are used to structure or encode the information. Many different file formats exist, for different forms of information and every one of these formats possesses its own encoding structures, which can be understood as a grammar or idiom. When this idiom is broken, for instance by a glitch or a wrong encoding, the data in its basic/primal structures of encoding comes to the surface. Visually glitches show themselves through organizational structures like rasters, grids, blocks, points, interlacing vectors and frames and therefore often look complex, repetitive, discolored, fragmented and flickering”.

Source: http://dinca.org/interview-with-rosa-menkman-dutch-visualist/5323.htm

See also: Rosa Menkman