Getting into Glitch Art

I’ve been experimenting over the past few months with analogue video. Perhaps confusingly for those of us that come from the world of photography, that doesn’t necessarily mean shooting on film like Super 8, but rather… non digital video signals. This does mean that sometimes I’ve been using an old crappy VHS-C camcorder, but I’ve also been trying out a whole bunch of different analogue video processors. I am especially interested in old video enhancers which have been modified to give really interesting and unusual effects.

I won’t go into the ins and outs of analogue video art here, but suffice to say there’s a huge number of possibilities for creating unusual or intriguing images. I’ve collected a variety of different devices to play with, but I’ve also tried my hand at circuit bending my own. After blowing up a few things, I’ve managed to have some success.

One of the challenges with video art can be finding source footage… but of course I have a huge archive with years worth of photographs to play with. Ironically, I don’t really like going back to edit or even use my own pictures for purposes outside being a photograph… for example… using them for music that I make. However… there’s something transformative about the analogue video processing which brings them to life in a different way, and I’ve found it pretty fascinating so far to see the stills bursting with extra colour and movement.

Anyway, I’ve gathered together a selection of some of the first results I’ve gotten from my experiments using different devices. All of them were displayed on a CRT TV, and are shot using a Sony A7.