Glitch effect is one of the hottest videography trends right now. It's widely used in music videos, video games, movies – you name it. And it's not surprising given how cool distorted videos look! Digital distortion makes a video more dynamic and creates an illusion of ephemerality.

As a technical word, a glitch is the unexpected result of a malfunction, especially occurring in software, video games, images, videos, audio, and other digital artefacts. Early examples of glitches used in media art include Digital TV Dinner (1978) created by Jamie Fenton and Raul Zaritsky, with glitch audio done by Dick Ainsworth. This video was made by manipulating the Bally video game console and recording the results on videotape.

The term glitch came to be associated with music in the mid 90s to describe a genre of experimental/noise/electronica (see glitch music). Shortly after, as VJs and other visual artist began to embrace the glitch as an aesthetic of the digital age, glitch art came to refer to a whole assembly of visual arts. One such early movement was later dubbed "net.art", including early work by the art collective JODI, which was started by artists Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans. JODI's experiments on glitch art included purposely causing layout errors in their website in order to display underlying code and error messages.[4] The explorations of JODI and other net.art members would later influence visual distortion practices like databending and datamoshing (see below).