Glitchwear is a clothing line that turns the language of digital error into a textile form. The project grew out of my ongoing exploration of the glitch as an aesthetic and conceptual framework. For years I have used ISF, the Interactive Shader Format, together with the live video performance software VDMX to generate textures that embrace the unpredictable beauty of computational failure. These experiments treat the computer not as a tool for perfection but as an instrument that can reveal unexpected outcomes when pushed beyond its limits.
The visuals that became Glitchwear began as a forest scene built in Unity, a digital twin of reality. This serene environment served as the base layer before I began to manipulate it with shaders, breaking down the natural forms into digital fragments. Trees dissolved into pixel noise, light fractured into unexpected patterns, and the simulated forest became a site for controlled digital chaos. The combination of Unity’s photorealism with the distortions of ISF created a tension between nature and machine, order and error.
Working with ISF inside VDMX allowed me to perform these disruptions live. The shader patches were pushed into unstable territories, with feedback loops, noise injections, and parameter shifts that transformed the Unity forest into something unpredictable. Over time I built an archive of glitches that captured these moments where the system bent and broke in visually striking ways.
The Glitchwear textures came directly from my visuals for the Liars 2024 tour. During the tour I extended this process, capturing the edge-of-collapse moments where the digital forest and glitch overlays merged into raw energy. These recordings were later translated into patterns for the garments, carrying the essence of those live performances into a new medium.
Each piece is knitted on demand using these glitch-derived textures. This approach rejects mass production and the uniformity of fast fashion, offering instead wearable artifacts that channel the aesthetics of digital experimentation. The glitches that once flashed across screens in dark clubs now live on as patterns woven into fabric, a reminder that beauty often emerges when things do not go as planned.
Glitchwear continues my exploration of the aesthetics of error, translating the language of corrupted data and broken images into something tactile and lasting. It invites wearers to participate in the same embrace of unpredictability that has guided my work with shaders, video, and performance for over a decade.
Technical
Glitchwear is produced by translating real-time generative visuals into knit-ready bitmap patterns. The process begins with a 3D scene created in Unity that serves as a digital twin of a forest environment. This scene provides a realistic base layer that is intentionally destabilized using custom ISF (Interactive Shader Format) patches. ISF allows direct manipulation of the GPU rendering pipeline within VDMX, enabling complex visual distortions that are both parameter-driven and influenced by live inputs.
The shaders introduce disruptions such as pixel displacement, color channel separation, and temporal feedback loops. These effects are applied to the Unity render output during live video performance, resulting in evolving glitch textures that would not exist through static design methods. Parameter modulation is controlled in real time, creating a range of visual states from subtle noise to complete image breakdown.
During the Liars 2024 tour, these shader patches were refined through performance. Video clips of the live visuals were captured throughout the shows, preserving moments where the digital forest collapsed into raw glitch energy. Still frames were extracted from these recordings and processed to maintain their pixel integrity. The images were converted directly into bitmap textures for the knitting machine. The knitting machines read the bitmap patterns and translate each pixel into a corresponding stitch, embedding the glitch aesthetic into the textile with high fidelity.
This workflow combines Unity for scene simulation, VDMX for live manipulation, ISF for shader-driven distortion, and bitmap-to-knit translation for production. The result is a pipeline where performance visuals become physical textiles, merging computational aesthetics with material form.
Project Page | Instagram | Bluesky | Dan Moore
