The glitch aesthetic may be rooted in the look of malfunction, but when it comes to actual practice, there’s often not much glitch in glitch art.
Yes, some glitch artists are actually exploiting bugs to get their
results – but for most it would be more accurate to describe these methods as introducing noisy data to functional algorithms or applying these algorithms in unconventional ways.
But this is also not algorithmic art as we ordinarily think of it – it
is a more demented form of generative art: zombie algorithms stripped of their ordinary purpose or built with no clear purpose at all, set loose to twist data into strange new patterns, or to expose sideeffects unwanted by their original designers.