Animal Engines and the Ferality of Glitch

SELECT GAME. A waterfall of corrupted ROM memory flows down screen. PLAY. Frames alternate wildly between fragmented tiles and palettes. PLAY A G7.2 This garbled sequence describes the psychedelic forms of Digital TV Dinner, a work of glitch video art created in 1979 by queer and transgender artist Jamie Faye Fenton with collaborators Raul Zaritsky and Dick Ainsworth. Widely regarded as the first instance of glitch art, Digital TV Dinner was produced by Fenton through the misuse of a Bally Astrocade, a game console for which she wrote the programming language Bally BASIC while working at Bally Midway throughout the 1970s.