Glitch art has a more intentional origin than most aesthetics — it did not emerge from a cultural movement or a decade, it emerged from artists deliberately breaking things. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, digital artists began treating data corruption not as failure but as material. The net art collective JODI deliberately broke its own web pages to expose the code underneath; later artists such as Rosa Menkman were bending files, forcing video hardware to malfunction, and asking what happens to an image when the signal degrades.

Menkman's 2011 "Glitch Studies Manifesto" gave the movement its theoretical backbone: the idea that noise, error, and artifacts are not the absence of signal but a signal of their own. The broken image tells you something the clean image cannot.

Neon Glitch takes this art-world lineage and collides it with the visual language of gaming and streaming culture. The RGB channel split — red, green, blue frames offset by a few pixels — is directly descended from the CRT monitor's physical limitation, where the three color guns could drift out of alignment. It looked like malfunction. It became identity.