Glitch art has a specific genealogy that runs through the early history of digital image processing. The core insight — that digital systems fail in visually interesting ways, and those failures can be induced deliberately — was explored in experimental contexts from the 1970s onwards, but became a recognizable aesthetic in the early 2000s as consumer digital tools became ubiquitous enough that their failure modes became familiar.

The visual vocabulary was established by artists working with video hardware, image compression codecs, and file corruption: Rosa Menkman's research into compression artifacts, and the community of artists who developed "databending" — opening image files in audio editors or text editors and introducing deliberate errors that produce specific visual artifacts.

The connection to cultural anxiety is hard to ignore: glitch aesthetics peaked precisely as digital technology became the invisible infrastructure of daily life. The error state — the moment when the smooth digital surface cracks and you can see the underlying data structure — became an aesthetic expression of skepticism about that seamlessness.