Glitch vs Surf Club
グリッチ / サーフ・クラブ
Glitch comes from UI Expression and Surf Club from Digital Art. Both are read here as style. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Glitch
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Refuses to hide error and corruption, exposing the fragility of the digital medium itself.
Surf Club
A movement that made the collaborative blog itself the site of the work. Nasty Nets, founded in 2006 by John Michael Boling, Joel Holmberg, Guthrie Lonergan, Marisa Olson and others, was the first to popularize the term surf club, and other collectives took the label up. It grew out of link sharing on del.icio.us, so found images, screenshots of searches and targeted ads pile up in date order inside a default blog template.
| Glitch | Surf Club | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | digital | 2006–2012 |
| Family | UI Expression | Digital Art |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | Channel shift / Block noise / Scanlines / Dropout | A default blog template left alone, with posts stacking in date order and no design applied / Screenshots of web searches, targeted ads and stock gradients posted as found / Posts answering other posts, so the same image returns altered by another member / Amateur material sitting in the same column as work, with nothing marking the difference |
| Best used for | Expressing uncertainty and system failure · A jolt of tension in music and video | Showing what the late 2000s web felt like through a run of images left exactly as found · Running a project where the shared posting space is the work, and holding the line against tidying it |
| Type | Partially corrupt a monospace or plain sans | Do not choose a typeface. Leaving the default in place is part of the meaning, and replacing it makes something else. |
| Composition | Build the healthy composition first, then break part of it | One vertical column in date order. No editing and no curation, just the order things were posted in. |
| Material | RGB shift, compression noise, missing pieces | Leave found material as found. Keep the compression artefacts, the low resolution and the stock gradients. |
| Caution | Perpetual glitch loses meaning. Stage the difference between normal and broken. | Cleaning up the found material and arranging it well removes the found state that the style is actually made of, leaving only collage. |