Glitch art resonates with the increasingly complex love-hate relationship humans have with technology. Errors, and by extension the changes, that can occur within software source code and data can provide a fertile foundation for the imagination.

In an attempt to explain this nascent artform, Martino Prendini wrote: “The error becomes image and movement, system errors are exploited, and it has a certain punk nature. At the same time, this kind of art exploits the glitch and uses it, so its nature is also entropic, dadaist... Glitch art is therefore the contradictory relationship between man and machine losing his functionality."

Multiple initiatives have already sprung from, inspired, and built on the idea that errors are human—and beautiful. Glitch artists take it further, and attempt to challenge the common belief that technology and algorithms are flawless and cannot malfunction. Take Poxparty by Jon Satrom for instance: it develops "funware," Apple-inspired software products which have flaws before reaching to the market and are sold with those unchanged. Outside of the simple quest for aesthetics, glitch art questions the cultural values that are associated with technology.

Jeff Donaldson, aka Glitchaus, interprets the movement by weaving computer software glitches into textiles. His latest attempt to bring tradition into modern times is called "malwear," scarves and throws whose knitted motifs encode famous malware. Ars talked with Jeff about his art, the meaning of malware-inspired scarves, and much more besides.

Ars: What got you into glitch art?

Jeff Donaldson: Well, I started before “glitch art” became the umbrella term that it is now. I began in 2001, four years before I had my own computer with access to the Internet. Back then, I was studying music composition at a college in Maryland and was heavily influenced by jazz and contemporary composers like Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and of course, John Cage. Being a guitarist, I was doing my own compositions with prepared guitar or “extended techniques” for guitar. “Prepared guitar” relates to Cage’s “prepared piano.”

Also in 2001, a friend got me interested in “circuit-bending.” Back then this involved the intentional short-circuiting of battery-powered audio toys to create novel sounds. Circuit-bending as a practice requires the addition of wires to existing circuits to create different “shorts” to produce sounds. I saw this as using Cage’s “prepared piano” technique and concepts of indeterminacy to electronics. What I did was apply these ideas to video devices.

Ars: How did the whole textile art thing come in?

JD: Also in 2001, when I began preparing Nintendo video game systems to intentionally short, I noticed similarities between the broken 8-bit graphics and traditional textile motifs. The output from my "prepared NES" (pictured top) could also produce patterns that reminded me of contemporary textile motifs found in the Bauhaus movement. What grabbed my attention was how a broken video game system could create motifs similar to conceptual art tapestries. For me, it was like a future echo.

Ars: That's a really unique path! And why malware?

JD: Malware is part of my "data knit" and "data weave" series. These works deal with the history of textiles as carriers of information. Throughout history, various messages have been encoded into textiles either through symbols or through colours. Kente cloth is a great example: with it, each colour represents something.

Further Reading Malware: what it is and how to prevent it

In 2010/2011, I started a computer virus research project with Garmin Karasic, Rolf van Gelder, and Nina Wenhart. My interest in malware is conceptually related to my interest in “glitch,” though of course with computer viruses, there is a particular, intended outcome. As I was working on data knits, I realised that there was a file size that fits just about perfectly in a knit scarf: after visualising the data with my process, approximately 32KB of data can fit. For example, the “ Melissa ” binary is approximately 52KB.

Ars: How did you encode source code into textile metaphors?

JD: 32KB fits when colour is compressed at 2BPP [two bits per pixel], which is how the Stuxnet and Melissa motifs were created. The more colours available for knit and woven textiles, the more data can fit due to colour coding binaries.

With my data knit/weave textiles, binary data is colour coded giving colours a new significance. For example: 0 = black and 1 = white at the most fundamental, binary level. For the Stuxnet throw specifically, binary digits are grouped in two where each group equals a different colour: 00 = white; 01 = light grey; 10 = tan; 11 = dark grey.

Ars: And what about shapes?

JD: When using shapes in textiles, the forms are created through either the prepared video systems, hexedit techniques, or display resolution errors. Take the "pied-de-poule" [houndstooth] scarf, for example: that motif was created by opening a pied-de-poule image file with a hex editor, randomly editing the source code and then saving. Because of the indeterminate results, I was not able to see the effects until I opened the image again.

In a nutshell, I conceptualised this as an extension of the traditions: bringing these traditions into the digital age as it were.

Ars: Do you use software that you have written? Is it open source?

JD: I am not a programmer myself and was not interested in taking all the time to learn how to write the software, so I worked with a programmer friend who coded a tool for me. It is based on ROM hacking software that I had been using since 2007. My friend, Miles Thompson, optimised the ROM hacking software for my textile design process.

The software will eventually be open sourced. It’s a bit of a niche thing, and highly specialised.

Ars: Why scarves and not, say, dresses? I was thinking for instance of the Rijks Museum collection where public domain art was printed on garments worn by staff when presenting.

JD: I started with scarves because that was the first “on-demand” production outlet available to me. Also, scarves carry the similarities with knit motifs and 8-bit pixel art.

Ars: Did you knit it all yourself? Manually or with a machine?

JD: Yes. I use a Brother knitting machine. A lot of really great work has been done in integrating Brother knitting machines with modern computing. One of the earliest concepts of mine, which ultimately developed into Glitchaus, was that of machines knitting/weaving machine data. In 2014 during a residency in Berlin, I realised a related concept: creating motifs with machine errors.

I was working with a Brother knitting machine that interfaced with a modern laptop via a "knittic device." Those are Arduino-based interfaces that replace the Brother’s onboard computers. The knittic was corrupted which resulted in a mechanical error. So instead of creating a motif, loading it into the knitting machine and then knitting the motif, the actual machine created the motif. I was quite happy: that's a glitch on another level!

Ars: Glitch art refers to extracting or creating aesthetics out of bugs and other digital glitches. By transforming that into art, would you say your work had bugs? I mean, the malicious software that you have used for your creations worked efficiently—what glitches did you find in them to beautify?

JD: Malware is not about “glitch art." It is related to it only in that when a computer virus executes, the results can be similar to that of a computer glitch. What I wanted to show was the underlying structures, the data structures of these infamous little programs. Or, in the case of Stuxnet, the underlying structure of weaponised software.

The work can also be seen as using knits as carriers similar to how these computer viruses spread as e-mail attachments. There are different ways to interpret malwear, depending on the person. But I am not explicitly saying that malware is a glitch.

Ars: Some art critics consider glitch and the "vaporwave" genre of music alike as movements denouncing capitalism. Is it also the case with your creations?

JD: I understand the sentiment and in some ways agree. For me, glitch comes from Eastern philosophies of appreciating imperfection. The Japanese tea ceremony is closer to how I see it: where in the past we could appreciate the imperfection of the finishing of a tea vessel or the natural weathering of surfaces, wood, and such, I see glitch representing this philosophy digitally.

I also see glitch as a crude form of artificial intelligence as well as commentary on contemporary society. It is the humanising of what was and has been sold to people as the perfect tool. The average user is so far removed from the workings of computers or any digital device that glitch shows the human hand involved. Of course, I can see it as a political movement of subverting control.

Ars: Are you planning a follow-up line for malwear? Or is there too much everyday banality meeting technology already? After all, baby monitors and toasters ended up taking down Paypal and Twitter…

JD: (laughs) Yes, I would love to see what Mirai looks like, that’s for sure. And I've already been talking with my developer about doing it. Malwear is going to continue into more knits and wovens as well as different apparel. Indeed, as next year Glitchaus will be 10 years old, I feel that I have said as much as I'd like to with knit scarves and throws. I’m currently in a sort of transition from accessories to clothing.

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If Donaldson's malwear has piqued your interest in the nascent artistic domain of glitch art, here are a few other links and resources that you might find enlightening. The Flickr Glitchbot autonomously takes CC-licensed images and re-uploads glitched versions; and similarly, Flickr has a group for 3D-printed glitch art and there's a similar Pinterest board. As glitch art grows in popularity, be sure to check for local exhibitions and conferences; there were big glitch art events in Europe and North America this year, and 2017 should be no different. And of course, there's a glitch art forum on Reddit, too.

And now, we're off to see if you can reverse-engineer one of Donaldson's scarfs—and if we can extract Stuxnet from a woollen throw, would that get us into trouble with the authorities? There's only one way to find out.

If you'd like to buy some malwear, head over to the Glitchaus shop. There's probably just enough time to order one as a Christmas gift, for that special quirky someone.

Rayna Stamboliyska is an independent consultant and researcher with a focus on the social relevance and impact of data and technology. Since 2013, she has been working in conflict and post-conflict zones, seeking to instil ethics and responsible uses of data in economic development programs in MENA and CEE. Her first book addresses data visualisation with D3.js; the forthcoming one discusses trust in the age of technology, focusing on hacking, hackers, and the darkweb. She can be found on Twitter @MaliciaRogue.

Listing image by Photo by Raquel Meyers, used with permission