If you’ve ever been intoxicated enough to feel as if the world were spinning around you at 100 miles per hour, these oil paintings by Alexandra Pacula will look familiar. But it doesn’t take excessive alcohol consumption to experience this sensation; sometimes, all you have to do is stand still on a busy urban corner and take in the frenetic motion from a place of stillness. Pacula’s paintings of nighttime city scenes are intentionally blurred.

“My work investigates a world of visual intoxication; it captures moments of enchantment, which are associated with urban nightlife,” Pacula says in her artist statement. “I am fascinated by the ambiance of the city at night and its seductive qualities. The breathtaking turbulence of speeding vehicles and hasty pedestrians evoke feelings of wonder and disorientation. The vibrant lights become a magical landscape with enticing opportunities and promises of fulfillment.”

Each of Pacula’s paintings is mural-sized, making them appear in galleries as if you could step right into them. The stylized streaks of light suggest those seen in long-exposure photography.

“I recreate the feeling of dizziness and confusion by letting the paint blur and allowing shapes to dissolve. I suggest motion in order to slow down the scene and capture the fleeting moments, which tend to be forgotten. The sense of motion is intensified with the use of quick vigorous lines and sharp perspectives. By interpreting lights in graphic or painterly ways, I create a sense of space, alluding to a hallucinogenic experience.”

Intricately painted and carefully posed, the human bodies serving as canvases for artist Gesine Marwedel are virtually unrecognizable as they morph into swans, flamingos and iguanas. The 25-year-old German painter employs performance artists to bring her colorful illusions to life, leaving their faces and other body parts visible as part of each composition.

The ability to contort into unusual positions is a crucial element of making each of these incredible three-dimensional paintings work. Each photograph depicts not only the painted animal, but also its grace and movement.

“Body painting is not just paint on a living canvas, it is picking up the body shapes in a subject and the painting on the body,” Marwedel told PSFK. “It is the transformation of a human being into a breathing, moving, living work of art.”

Marwedel began to explore body art after providing therapy for disabled and autistic children through speech and music. See more of her work at her website, or in person at the World Body Painting Festival, to be held in Austria in July 2013.

Surreal, dreamlike and often haunting, databending creates digital or analog image errors for artistic effect. An art form in which corrupted files are either created or mimicked in photographs, paintings, sculptures, video or even audio, databending finds beauty in technology gone awry. Ranging from colorful pillows to uncanny oil paintings inspired by security footage, here are 40+ works by 12 notable glitch artists.

Oil Paintings by Andy Denzler

Looking like stills from aging home movies on VHS, Andy Denzler’s uncanny oil paintings capture the feel of analog glitches so well you can almost hear the buzzing sound emanating from the television set when looking at them. Denzler fast-forwards or rewinds videotape and abruptly pauses it, and then paints the frozen frame, using smears and rough horizontal lines to achieve the effect.

Security Footage Paintings by Regina Parra

Low-resolution security footage is translated into hazy watercolor paintings in a collaboration between Kon Trubkovich and Regina Parra. With this series, Parra immortalizes moments on film which already have somewhat of an eerie feel, rendering them even more fascinating.

Glitch Videos by Rosa Menkman

The Collapse of PAL from Rosa Menkman on Vimeo.

02: One Billion Steps aka The longer you sit on a bus, the smaller the world becomes from Rosa Menkman on Vimeo.

Dutch filmmaker and artist Rosa Menkman is an authority on the glitch art genre, producing events and written works as well as a ‘glitch manifesto’ and experimental work of her own. In fact, she completed her master thesis on digital glitch in 2009. “Glitches are the uncanny, brutal structures that come to the surface during a break of the flow within a technology; they are the primal data-screams of the machine,” Menkman told DINCA in a 2010 interview. “Glitch art is a practice that studies and researches the vernacular of file formats in exploitative manners to deconstruct and create new, brutalist (audio)visual works. However, glitch artists often go beyond this formal approach; they realize that the glitch does not exists without human perception and therefore have a more inclusive approach to digital material.”

Glitch Textiles by Philip Stearns

Artist Philip Stearns describes his collection of woven and knit wall hangings and blankets “glitches in the cold, hard logic of digital circuits transformed into soft, warm textiles.” The designs were taken from short-circuited cameras and other ‘unorthodox’ digital techniques.

Distortion by Nicholas Ballesteros

“This technique of altering or appropriating images is not for a desired outcome other than showing the found material’s sheer ability to be bent,” says artist Nicholas Ballesteros of his ‘Distortion’ series. Ballesteros uses a scanner and found images to produce these effects.

Glitch Art Pillow Covers by Benjamin Berg

Display colorful video glitches around your house with this series of throw pillows by artist Benjamin Berg. Also producing work under the alias stAllio, Berg discovered glitching by running the contents of his hard drive through music software. “Glitch art is a dance on the edge of a failing system,” he says.

Analog Glitches by Rob Sheridan

Artist Rob Sheridan created a series of visuals for the band How to Destroy Angels’ Welcome Oblivion and An omen EP, saying “these images were created by disrupting signals through analog tape and display equipment, not with Photoshop effects.”

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