People acted. The Pit widened. The garden's rows filled with tomatoes like blushing pennies. A dancer found her rhythm again, her prosthetic foot gleaming like a promise under a streetlamp. The city's edges softened.

According to media theorists and artists, "dirtstyle" is an aesthetic movement that emerged alongside "glitch" art, but it is fundamentally different. Glitch art, popularized by figures like Rosa Menkman and Jon Cates, involves the "artful manipulation of the datastream"—creating art by actually breaking the file or the signal to create corrupted, degraded images and sounds.