Back in 2005, I submitted a bunch of images for the Glitch Art & Design Aesthetics book. It hit the shelves last month, and they used one of my images (the one on the bottom left). I got my free copy of the book last week. Score!

[View with PicLens]

Inspiration can often be found in strange places. What begins as a mistake, an error, or even a complete breakdown in a system, can lead to intriguing and beautiful results. These “happy accidents”, as Bob Ross liked to call them, can be captured, and exploited. This phenomenon is the topic of the new book Glitch: Designing Imperfection, which came out this year. Four years in the making, it’s not just a collection of pretty pictures, but also explores the aesthetic of the error, in several essays. I submitted several images to the authors back in 2005, in hopes of getting some of my images in print. Just one was selected, but that was enough to score me a complimentary copy of the finished product.

Since I was hoping to see more of my pieces used, I figured I’d take this opportunity to showcase all the images I submitted. The first two are screenshots captured after random crashes of my work PC, back in 2000. The rest are the result of a corrupt JPG contact sheet that a photographer emailed me, which became a source of fascination, as it mangled, distorted, and posed a general threat to itself and others when I attempted to view it in Photoshop. I learned to direct the effects to my liking, and assembled the set of images that you see here.