Glitches are headaches—technology coming apart at the seams.

The term, which may derive from Yiddish words conveying slippage, was fittingly popularized by NASA engineers and astronauts. Into Orbit, a 1962 account of Project Mercury, provides one of its earliest usages, courtesy of John Glenn, the first American to circumnavigate the globe outside its atmosphere.

“Another term we adopted to describe some of our problems was ‘glitch,’” he explained. “Literally, a glitch is a spike or change in voltage in an electrical current,” an occurrence with extreme, unpredictable, and potentially fatal results.

In other words, it’s where the art happens.

“The long, twisted history of glitch art“, Miles Klee, Kernel.