Digital TV Dinner, widely considered the first Glitch Art, was created by Jamie Faye Fenton in 1978 with Raul Zaritsky and Dick Ainsworth. This artwork is a cyberpsychadelic exploration of digital-analog glitches created intentionally by Fenton. She designed the technology that these glitches occur on, in a perfect example of how Glitch Art, while seemingly easy, can also be extremely difficult, involving expert knowledge of how to build and break technologies beautifully. Based in Chicago (then and now) Fenton glitched the hardware-software system of the Bally BASIC Arcade, also known as the Astrocade, to make Digital TV Dinner.
The Bally BASIC Arcade home computer platform was designed for playing and creating your own Games, Video Art, and Electronic Music, as well as for general-purpose personal computing. Jamie Faye Fenton worked on the machines' development team at Dave Nutting Associates for Midway Games, then known as Bally Midway. She developed the Bally BASIC ROM-based operating system and original games. The company also ported games for which it had purchased licensing rights. One such video game was Western Gun, originally developed by Tomohiro Nishikado of Taito in 1975. Fenton worked on the team that remade (and substantially changed) Western Gun for the Bally Arcade. Their version, titled Gun Fight, was released by Midway as both an arcade cabinet and as a built-in game that shipped with the Bally Astrocade home computer (in 1977).
Building on these early professional experiences, Fenton continued her work in game development and software while also becoming an integral part of Chicago’s vibrant, emerging Media Art communities. In 1978, she created BASIC ZGRASS, a “Sophisticated Graphics Language for the Bally Home Library Computer,” with Tom DeFanti and Nola Donato. The ZGRASS language was embraced by artists and teachers, including Jane Veeder and Phil Morton. Fenton later went on to develop the Director software that would become the (Macromind, Macromedia and then Adobe) industry standard for multimedia and interactivity. This profoundly influential software spawned an entire genre of Digital Art and Games, from CD-ROMs to Internet. Fenton continues to be active in Glitch Art worldwide at events such as the Glitch Art is Dead Festival and online communities, inspiring those who have just discovered her work. — jonCates, 2025
jonCates: "It’s important for people to understand that you are the person who created all of it: the source code, the hardware, the glitch. You understood it at a very fundamental level, building the system that you are then manipulating and exploiting in ways that could surprise even you. Before you made Digital TV Dinner you had developed the Bally BASIC for the Astrocade. How did that come about?"
Jamie Faye Fenton: "I had dropped out of college to be a video game engineer and was employed by Dave Nutting Associates, first to do pinball machines. Then I switched over and started coding video games.[6] My first video game for Dave Nutting was Blackjack, which was a monument to Las Vegas even though the game never shipped (fig. 3). I did a couple of video games like 280 ZZZAP and Checkmate, both of which were relatively successful. They each took two months from start to finish, but nowadays two months is the length of a quality assurance cycle of a game! Then we thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice to make a game for the home,” so we started working on this thing that eventually was called the Bally Astrocade (fig. 4). We made two fateful decisions when we designed this hardware, doing two things differently than all the other game and hardware designers. First, we didn’t insist that you turn the power off before you insert a cartridge; we actually put circuits in, called buffers, that tolerate having a memory card to the game cartridge inserted or removed. Second, we made the video that came out of the Bally Astrocade NTSC legal so it could be recorded on any video cassette recorder. You could actually just hook it up to the television transmitter that we broadcast with in the United States.[7] No one else’s games did that. I was good at optimizing and coming up with strange ways of doing things that you would never expect. I did this by imagining and adopting the psychology of someone who was living inside the computer."
jonCates, Jonathan Kinkley, and Jamie Fenton, “Stability Isn’t Everything It’s Glitched Up to Be: An Interview with Jamie Fenton,” published by The Art Institute of Chicago museum, 2022
THIS artifact is a 《 glitch.school 》 open educational resource. COPY-IT-RIGHT jonCates, 2025
