What Do Glitch Art and Youth Protest Have in Common?
Revisiting the social phenomena that unfolded in 2011, we saw young people across the globe mobilize, disrupt, and occupy public spaces. From Occupy Wall Street in New York to Los Indignados in Madrid, Geração à Rasca in Lisbon, and Occupy Dame Street in Dublin, and other related mobilizations, these movements were not only political, but also visual and symbolic, taking shape both in physical places and across digital social networks.
In the midst of my doctoral studies, I was there—in Praça do Rossio, in Lisbon—immersed in the crowds, collecting real-time data and documenting events as they unfolded. What I had been studying in theory suddenly erupted in practice. My research became the first doctoral thesis in Portugal to address this phenomenon focusing on youth, the internet, and protest by collecting in loco, real-time data while the demonstrations were still ongoing.
A decade later, international media outlets like The Guardian, and El País revisited these events to reflect on the movement’s legacy. What changed? What remained? Yet these retrospectives often overlooked a key point: that protests are fundamentally visual and embodied acts of resistance. They blur the line between public performance and digital artifact.
This is where glitch art enters the frame. Glitch art is a form of digital aesthetics that embraces error, distortion, and randomness. By corrupting digital files, photos, videos, sounds, it reveals the hidden structures of technology and draws attention to fragility, failure, and noise. Like protest, glitch art disrupts the norm. It resists perfection. It speaks through cracks and ruptures.
In my project Glitched Protest, I revisited original photographs I captured during the 2011 protests in Lisbon and subjected them to glitching techniques, introducing errors that produced unexpected visual outcomes. These images became reimagined records of the events, reflecting both the fragmentation of the moment and the mediated nature of memory.
The performative dynamic of both glitch art and protest lies in their refusal to comply. They are aesthetic acts of resistance. Both exist in the in-between: between failure and expression, between disruption and creation.