I thought I'd put the projects in reverse order, to make it easier for people who have seen the earlier glitch projects already.

Lesson 5: Editing Sound as Image

I thought I would try to create some kind of rhythmic pattern by playing the idea that pixels are arranged from left to right and from top to bottom. So what I did is just select long bars of vertical pixels and replace them with white (command-. on a mac). The idea is that there would be some kind of regular rhythmic pattern corresponding to each line of pixels with the same pattern of white pixels. The result was not as regular as I thought it would be, but I'm still fascinated by the result. Also, the original file was shortened by more than half (white space became truncated?).

Here is the upper half of the image.

Hope and Change - image 1 - student project

Here is the original sound (it's a piece by me that gradually increases the density of orchestration from a solo bassoon until it's distorted and noisy).

https://soundcloud.com/luketaylor/criticalmass

Here is the databent version...

https://soundcloud.com/luketaylor/critical-mass-databent-version

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Lesson 4: Datamashups

Here are a couple of results from a lot of experiments. I went overboard and did a lot of work with not a lot of super great results IMHO. I'll try to update more if I can find the time. This one takes an image and mashes it with a reversed version of itself.

Hope and Change - image 2 - student project

Here is a mix of three tracks with pieces of the image reversed and rearranged in different ways.

Hope and Change - image 3 - student project

Then I took a GIF of Animal from the Muppets headbanging. I divied up the images in GIMP and datamashed all of them. I was surprised that the result wasn't more extreme.

Original:

Hope and Change - image 4 - student project

This is the result of datamashing all 15 frames together...

Hope and Change - image 5 - student project

It seemed that after 5 frames or so there were diminishing returns on the perceivable changes. Here is a GIF illustrating the datamash from 1+2, 1+2+3, etc. All the way to 15.

Hope and Change - image 6 - student project

And then a GIF of an extreme JPG compressed version...

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Extra Project: Bending Vector Graphics

I've been interested in bending vector graphics since I saw there was a possibility a few weeks ago. My first attempt was pretty...meh.

SVG files (scalable vector graphics) are great because they can be scaled to any size and you don't loose any resolution. That's because SVG files are written in an XML code that describes lines/curves in terms of relative coordinate and angles, so that, for instance, a plain black circle is about 1 line of code that tells you how big the circle is, where it is on the canvas, and it's line and fill color.

Here is an example of what an SVG file looks like in a text editor...

Hope and Change - image 8 - student project

This is a lot more complicated than a simple circle because of reasons which you'll see below, but you get the point. It's readable code.

Bending an SVG file is pretty simple. You just have to be careful not to bend any of the words, which are specific keywords that describe things like "paths," and you must be careful not to bend any of the header info either (the header can easily be cut out and pasted back in after the bend). Essentially this just means a simple Find and Replace technique using decimal and hexidecimal numbers.

So where can I get some complex SVGs? I could just download some from the internet, but I thought of something more fun. Adobe Illustrator has this cool feature called "Live Trace" which takes an image and converts it to vector graphics.

So where can I get an iconic image to vectorize...hmmm...

Hope and Change - image 9 - student project

Usually the goal with vector graphics is to make the vectors have as few breakpoints as possible, but my goal is different. I want complexity because that means more data to hack. So here is what a "bad" Live Trace looks like.

Vectorize

Hope and Change - image 10 - student project

You can see the edges aren't smooth as you would normally want if you were a graphic designer trying to make a nice simple smooth image. But that's not what I want. So lets go for our first bend. I'll open it up in Text Edit and do a Find and Replace.

Iteration 1: Find and Replace

Hope and Change - image 11 - student project

You got a little something on your face Mr. President.

Iteration 2: Find and Replace

This is the iteration where the image got ridiculously long. Here's a shrunken overview...

Hope and Change - image 12 - student project

Here is the cropped version

Hope and Change - image 13 - student project

Mmmm...yummy...

Iteration 3 (cropped)

Hope and Change - image 14 - student project

You can see that some of the colors are changing too. Especially in the next one.

Iteration 4: Final

Drizzle President

The image dimensions shrunk to a more manageable size and I really like the colors and the shape of it. It almost looks like some kind of cartoon bust.

Hope and Change - image 15 - student project

Pebble Splatter

Here is an unrelated bent SVG that was derived from close up photograph of concrete. There were thousands upon thousands of vertices (because the image has tons of detail as compared to the Obama poster), so Illustrator slowed to a crawl when working with this image.

Original:

Hope and Change - image 16 - student project

Bent SVG:

Hope and Change - image 17 - student project

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Lesson 3

Databending with Audacity

Cactoid II

Pretty simple Audacity bend using echo. Same original as Cactoid I.

Hope and Change - image 18 - student project

Spinal Penetration

Another echo bend with another cactus original.

Hope and Change - image 19 - student project

Salty Schmear

Same original as Salty Smolder (a macro of a cracker). This was a created by first bending in Hex Fiend and then (you guessed it) using an echo effect in Audacity. Clearly echo is my fave.

Hope and Change - image 20 - student project

Glacial Itch

So lets take a stepped approach to a relatively involved glitch. To start lets do echo (I know, I know, but it's so good) on an image of a glacier.

Step 1.

Hope and Change - image 21 - student project

That looks good by itself, but lets take it further. How about reversing a portion of it.

Step 2.

Hope and Change - image 22 - student project

Let's add a little phasor action.

Step 3.

Hope and Change - image 23 - student project

Way to go algorithm. Now lets compress it into a jpeg and hack it with Text Edit find and replace.

Step 4.

Hope and Change - image 24 - student project

Well, I think I just designed the new flag for the nation of Glitch (now all we need is a battle cry). But why not go further? Lets rotate it and bring it back to Audacity. Cut and paste to counter some of that horizontalness.

Step 5.

Hope and Change - image 25 - student project

That'll work. Let's rotate it back and apply my favorite effect (echo) once again to top it off.

Step 6.

Hope and Change - image 26 - student project

....aaaand that's a wrap! Or is it?

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Lesson 2

This was a PNG databend using TextEdit. Inserting paragraphs and deleting chunks. The PNGs didn't open in GIMP (just as black images), so I converted them to JPEGs in Preview first.

Salty Smolder

Hope and Change - image 27 - student project

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Lesson 1:

All of these glitches are done in Hex Fiend or Text Edit on a Mac. Using some combination of cut and paste, find and replace, or just typing random messages into the file.

Chicken of the Woods

This is my first attempt at glitch from a couple of weeks ago.

Original:

Hope and Change - image 28 - student project

Databent:

Hope and Change - image 29 - student project

Glitch Dialog

Original:

Hope and Change - image 30 - student project

First iteration:

I love how on the very first edit in Hex Fiend that the birds faced each other...

Hope and Change - image 31 - student project

Final:

I went several iterations further, but I think I like this one the best (thinking of cropping, but I'm torn. I really love the green part).

Hope and Change - image 32 - student project

Cactoid

Original:

Taken with an iPhone with an aftermarket macro lense.

Hope and Change - image 33 - student project

Databent:

I used the following technique to get this effect: Edit in Hex Fiend, rotate, edit in Hex Fiend, rotate, edit in Hex Fiend, rotate, edit in Hex Fiend, rotate, edit in Hex Fiend.

Hope and Change - image 34 - student project

Piering

Another macro, this time its a close up of a sandy pier.

Hope and Change - image 35 - student project

Databent:

This was a simple find and replace with an extreme result. I'm rarely satified by the horizontal stripping effect that I get when I take something too far because they all tend to look the same, but I am quite fond of the colors and texture of this one.

Hope and Change - image 36 - student project

Puhonix

I just downloaded this from a random website. It's a photograph of what I believe are Lorikeets.

Original:

There appears to be a glitch in this photograph already...

Hope and Change - image 37 - student project

Databent:

Entirely done with Text Edit. I inserted short texts in place of large blocks of code and long texts were inserted in place of shorter texts. I had to screen grab this because only my mac previewing function interpreted the image this way (it looked very different in "GIMP"). The black bars are from the fullscreen mode of the previewing function (I liked them, so I kept them).

Hope and Change - image 38 - student project

Here is the same exact bend but in GIMP...

Hope and Change - image 39 - student project

Luke Taylor

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