If you often work with digital photography, this building may look strangely familiar and create a stirring annoyance in your waters. The architect has intentionally designed it to look like a typical image file glitch. Look a bit closer.
The brainchild of Christoph Merian Stiftung, the piece was commissioned by the House of Electronic Arts Basel and now sits prominently on display onto the facade of the museum.
Bitnik‘s public art piece for the House of Electronic Arts in Basel echoes the dedication of the HeK to a radically contemporary use of media within the arts. The Glitch refers to current art production, which involves reflecting its underlying technological and social conditions. It also alludes to the intrusion of chance, temporality and playfulness caused by erroneous data transmissions. But where the digital glitch usually is a very short-lived phenomenon, Bitnik here translate it into a long term public art piece.
H3333333K engages with the building by applying a visual software error, a glitch, directly into built stone. The glitch is staged as an architectural dimension, subtly shifting parts of the buildings façade and giving it a surreal property.
In The Matrix movies, a glitch in the software is the cause of Deja-vu, a repetition in something that has already appeared. Much the same in a real Jpeg file, a frame can be spliced and reorganised with just a fragment of code damaged.
A video of the installation taking place.
We think the design is a fresh approach to digital photography, which despite its perfections, still has plenty of room for the more creative photographer in mind. Here’s a few more images from different vantage points which may help you get your head around where the glitch starts and the real world ends.
H/T Cesar Kuriyama
Phogotraphy 
