The blessing and curse of modern photography is this: Even if you didn’t snap a perfect picture, perfection is just a click or swipe away. Mistakes are easily removed, yes, but so too are imperfections. This is great if you’re a photo editor at Vogue. It's not so great if you're an artist like Sabato Visconti.

Visconti is part of the growing field glitch photography, a genre that wreaks visual havoc on photographs by messing with their digital properties. If a glitch is a visual manifestation of an unexpected malfunction in source code or other technology, then glitch art is an exploitation of that in the name of expression. The genre has been around as long as there’s been technology to mess with, but the ability to databend media is growing exponentially with the rise of mobile devices and apps. The photographs Visconti creates are surreal and atmospheric, and appear to be the work of an abstract painter, not the result of digital manipulation.

The Brazilian artist became interested in glitch photography a few years back after what he called a “happy accident.” An artist friend was having trouble with her card reader; every time she’d open a jpeg, the image was distorted by misaligned pixels. It was clearly an error, yet it looked cool. “I wanted to figure out how to reproduce that without needing a broken card,” says Visconti. He opened the jpegs with them a hexadecimal converter to see the code. “I saw that it was writing zeros randomly through the file, and said, ‘Oh, I could do this myself.'"

Visconti made this piece using PixelDrifter.

Soon Visconti began manipulating his photographs in a hexadecimal converter, toying with the code to produce strangely beautiful images. His affinity for the medium brought him online, where he discovered a thriving community of glitch artists openly posting tricks and codes for creating ever-weirder ways to alter photographs. In the last few years, Visconti has created static-filled images by editing a photo with audio equipment. He's opened raw files through WordPad and saved them so the encoding would produce strange characters in the final image. He's embraced cachemashing, and distorted photos by converting them to vectors then databending the file. The point being: There are plenty of ways to glitch a photo.

Some of his most beautiful work is the result of running photos through Dmitriy Krotevich’s PixelDrifter. The software sorts and swaps pixels in an image, creating images that look like they’ve been smeared or shaken apart. “It’s taking the logic of digital media and turning it on its head,” says Visconti. “With the pixel sorting that’s what you’re doing.”

WIRED editor in chief Scott Dadich recently wrote about Wrong Theory, the idea that once you've master the rules, you must break them—do something wrong—if you are to create something truly new and transformative. Glitch art subscribes to that notion. At a certain point, glitch photography transcends the idea of simply altering something and becomes a medium in its own right, replete with a digital toolbox of tricks and best practices. “It’s part of the spirit of the age,” he says. “The notion of creation through destruction and deconstructing what you have is kind of the attitude that appeals to my generation.”