ABSTRACT
The First Rule of Hacking states that “anything worth doing is worth doing wrong.” While glitch artists deploy a myriad of tools, tricks, and techniques, they all share the same hacker ethic: to take a familiar piece of technology and do something unfamiliar with it.5 For most glitch artists, however, it all started with a simple text editor. Like circuit bending, from which it gets its name, this is a process of trial and error, and it is a rite of passage for most glitch artists. The computer is on to us: in circuit bending, sometimes you go too far, adding a bend that causes the circuit to smoke and stop making sound; in databending, the worse-case scenario is an error message—less dangerous, but also less interesting. Each image file is a collection of numbers stored in the computer’s memory.
