Interview with Glitch Artist jrdsctt | MakersPlace Blog

Minneapolis-born digital artist jrdsctt is a MakersPlace OG and a staple of the community with over 250 unique collectors on MakersPlace. With his Genesis Drop, jrdsctt invites a new element into his creative process: artificial intelligence.   

Heavily influenced by the music and lyrics of Nine Inch Nails and inspired by their former art director Rob Sheridan (1998–2014), jrdsctt uses glitch techniques such as pixelsorting and databending to explore unknown yet somehow familiar settings that occupy liminal spaces. 

jrdsctt joined MakersPlace as an artist in early 2019. He later became their first official ambassador, helping run the MakersPlace Discord server alongside staff. This role eventually transitioned into an official job with the company in May of 2021.

He has been working there ever since, helping build the MakersPlace community during the day, and glitching dystopian worlds in the evening. The web3 space has consumed most of his waking hours (and some of his unconscious hours as well).

Between our day-to-day meetings with him, we caught up with jrdsctt for an interview to discuss his beginnings in glitch, the influence of music on his work, and how AI is revolutionizing the world of glitch art.

Visit jrdsctt’s storefront.

MP: Can you tell me about yourself and your history with art and, in particular, glitch media? What kind of art were you making pre-glitch?

I don’t know how serious it was, but I wanted to be an artist from a very young age. At that point, specifically, I wanted to be a cartoonist. But I realized pretty early that I have no drawing abilities. It’s just not my forte. I ended up exploring many different kinds of creative output. I made music for a while. I was really into podcasting for a while. I tried to get into writing. 

One of the first things to click was when I discovered photography in high school. I was lucky enough to go to a high school that still had a dark room, so I’d take some black and white photos and develop all my own stuff. 

I decided to go into photography for undergrad, and I found myself increasingly drawn to the post practices of photography. I enjoy taking photos, but I have a lot more fun editing them. 

Then during junior and senior years of college, the art students started a group where we’d do a kind of weekly show and tell. One guy came in and showed off a basic glitch technique. If you drag and drop a photo into Apple Notes, it converts it to code and metadata. Then you can cut some of the code or add some, copy and paste the Declaration of Independence, whatever you want. You can resave that as a photo, and either it comes out glitched, or it won’t open because it’s so corrupted. 

I’m a big fan of Nine Inch Nails and their former art director Rob Sheridan, who was with the band starting in 1998. When I learned this basic “baby’s first glitch” technique, I realized I had just opened up this…