Experiment 6: Glitch Art

During my research I discovered an entirely new scene, and a collective of artists who create both static and moving Glitch art visuals, on and off-line. Just like Glitch audio works, there are again two different approaches to this artistic form – natural Glitch and Glitch-like. Artists will either work with naturally occurring Glitches and errors, whilst others will force the Glitch, using techniques such as databending, datamoshing, and circuitbending.

In order to create my desired aesthetic I would need to force the Glitch, instead of working with naturally occurring errors. I found that one technique in particular not only created a variety of easily achievable Glitch-like aesthetics, but it was also an approach that could be used to pre-Glitch images. Thus creating greater distortion, and further removing the original meaning and context of each users original works. I was drawn to this technique, as during the code editing process you have no idea how the code changes will affect the image outcome. The interruption in the original code disrupts the image, and the new file is the computers reinterpretation of the original, as it tries to read and overcome the broken coding.

 For this experiment I took a number of the record covers (used in other experiments) and glitched the original image via varying forms of code manipulation. In order to achieve the glitch image outputs I opened each of the images as text/edit files. In this format I cut, copied and pasted large sections of the code, deleting some and rearranging large sections. For some of these images I also employed the technique of data moshing. For this two images are opened as code and the copied and pasted code is mixed together to create new moshed version of the original images. The manipulated file is then saved and reopened as an image (jpeg). 

 These techniques are relatively quick to execute. The more code that is cut and moved the more glitched the image becomes. There were a few times during the experimentation of this technique that I glitched the images too much and the files became unreadable. I found that leaving a large section of code at the beginning and at the end of the file made it much easier for the file to be read. Removing huge chunks of code also made it much harder for the code to be read. This involved a lot of trial and error and allowed me to test the limitations of this approach. There are limits to forces glitch techniques and manipulating the code too much pushes the files to their limits.  

 The new glitched and moshed images become distorted versions of the originals. It is often easy to spot within the images where the code has been cut, which results in blank spots and pixilation. I found this technique to be extremely successfully and I was very pleased with the images I was able to create. I am currently unsure how these images will be used in the final orchestra, but I intend to feed them into MaxMSP in order to manipulate them further, and to project them digitally.

 I aim to use this technique to manipulate both digital audio and video files with the aim of creating similar outputs.