Got an "unexpected" computer crash? I think there's a single fact you must know before you initiate your traditional odious self-harm ritual. Computer crashes are the basic ingredient of an entire mostly underground, but exciting and growing artistic movement named glitch art. Rather naturally, the term doesn't designate Photoshop-distorted images, but direct interventions on source-code - i.e., audiovisual creations generated by random or deterministically forced programming errors.
Perhaps its most prominent web presence is Ant Scott, owner of the beflix.com domain since july, 2000, a former case of fractalitis, for whom the 20th-century always proclaimed "aesthetics of the unintended" (e.g., remember the jarred images of cubism, the intentionally inserted imperfections of Mondrian, the established role of noise/distortion in music/video) are now "part of a post-digital movement."1
In his very first blog post on beflix.com, Mr. Scott included a little table of differences between glitch art and fractal art, which I partially reproduce below with a few minor annotated slashed interventions/additions.
Glitch Art ---> Fractal Art
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artificial ---> mathematical
(/general/)fun & /vacuous/ ---> attracts /geeks/
purely digital (/i.e., discrete/) --->digital & /continuous/
/found/ ---> usually computed
deterministic & /quasi-random/ ---> chaotic
fast, /instant gratification/ ---> (/usually/) slow to compute
Actually, Mr. Scott makes some crude points that could hurt my inner geek, especially as I'm a nonlinear dynamics enthusiast (although not a fractalist). However, his main argument seems insuperably attractive: Glitch art is for the layman expecting instant gratification in using art as a mostly funny high medium of entertainment. As most often my particular geekiness manifest itself in the instant gratification requirement form, glitch art strung a chord in me in a way I couldn't ignore.
Browse around, there are many instances on the web - e.g., some academic treatments, >1,500 glitch enthusiasts on Flickr (>3,000 images), a glitch "web browser", and some glitch editors -; be a glitcher yourself, and expand this node.
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1 Here you can fairly point out the somewhat different meanings of the not exactly interchangeable terms error, imperfection, accidental, and incompletion.