Databending

This self directed brief was an exploration of data manipulation techniques which when used creatively allow for an intricate and impossible to replicate outcome. By opening the source code of image files and editing it directly 'image moshing' or 'databending' them through copying and pasting sections and deletion, find and replace as well as conversion to audio and using audio production methods on the resulting noise file a lesser known and amazing set of effects can be achieved.

Inspired by glitch art, data moshing and digital expressionism I wanted to create a blend between geometric posts I had made using Illustrator which featured minimal, modernist elements but then use post pressing to see what kind of outcomes I could get.

Initially I edited the code directly which was a difficult and tedious thing to get to grips with at first where it is very difficult to do something purposefully, however after some amount of time I realised that by copying and pasting sections around I was able to bend and glitch some of the images.

Following on from this I took to converting the image files into audio using an audio editor called 'Audacity'. The result is a file which sounds like radio static, however when in this form the audio file can then be edited using audio production techniques which resulted in the following posters, by doing this repeatedly and loading in files which had been glitched already and editing over the top of the edits I was able to create some really varied outputs and interesting outcomes.

Outputs can be very different from small changes in the effects applied to the audio.

File sizes were very large for these outcomes, these are scaled down versions which have been reduced many times. There is also difficulty in certain file types being opened in photoshop or image editors without being resaved as .png or .bmp files. This is to be expected due to the strange nature of the file conversion and file corruption techniques!

Images start to completely lose their initial forms and turn into something completely different.