A word between squelch and glitch. Sgueltch moves away from traditional glitch art's rigid, pixelated, grid-based disruptions and toward fluid, continuous, biologically-inspired distortion. The familiar look of glitch such as blocks, grids, lines, compression scars, and hard digital fractures are aesthetic traces of specific epistemics, technical systems, and the defaults that computation inherits.
Sgueltch asks what digital error can become when it begins from other substrates: ooze, tissue, silt, weather, viscosity, lesion, flocking, breath, and growth. It values asymmetry, unpredictability, embodiment, and mess-compatible media as a counter-infrastructure and a counter-erroring for an alternate digitality.
Glitch theory has long read the broken image as a rupture that exposes the machine: Rosa Menkman's glitch makes visible the flow it interrupts, and Legacy Russell's glitch feminism weaponises that refusal against the body the system presumes. Sgueltch takes the next step. These gridded artifacts are the codec confessing its order. From Jonathan Sterne's account of formats as decisions about what to discard, Susan Leigh Star's infrastructures that vanish by becoming standard, and Mary Douglas's dirt as matter out of place, conventional glitch is this quantized epistemic regime glitching on schedule. To actually leave the grid you have to change the substrate underneath it.
Reimagines pixel sorting as a biological process. Instead of the rigid linear artifacts of traditional sorting mechanisms, Pixel Lesions lets you infect an image with organic growths. The sorting algorithm follows organic growth patterns like lichen or slime mold.
open tool →Emulates the decay of analog phosphor screens using Voronoi tessellated phosphor cells instead of a regular grid. Has settings for turbulence, chromatic bleed, current flow. Features a dual light-bleed system for Kawase bloom and a subtractive Umbra: the inverse of familiar CRT bloom.
open tool →A web-based granular resynthesizer specializing in gurgling noises such as erratic pitch bends, time warps, and unpredictable burping filters, capped with a gooey convolution reverb.
open tool →A browser-based text renderer that jitters type qualities such as size, rotation, spacing, baseline wobble, color drift, opacity variance, blur, breathing, and chromatic ghosting. Exports the result as SVG or PNG. Allows own OTF/TTF
open tool →A collection of browser-based codecs and native file formats for databending. Each codec changes the image substrate before corruption: ooid uses Gaussian blob records, scute uses Voronoi seed territories, and vermis uses a Hilbert-thread filament. The tools expose damage controls plus byte, hex, and text editing so loss becomes round, cellular, or flowing instead of generic compression noise.
open collection →