Glitch Art (databent selfie)

First, I never knew you could look at an image as a .txt file, so that was interesting.

This is the image that I started with:

in order to edit the photo you have to convert the file type.

When you convert your .jpg into a .txt it will look like this,

believe it or not, that’s your photo!

The next step is to delete, add or move around the text, changing the code that made up of your photo.

The first change I made was pretty minimal. I took out a few chunks of text here and there and got this result:

It was interesting, but pretty minimal. I decided to try a few more times, taking out more and more text each time.

this next time I changed all of the “k’s” to “m’s”

 it made a big difference

the next time I tried to change the “e’s” to “k’s” and the file was too corrupt and it would not let me open it…whoops!

This is what happened when I changed the “3’s” to “1’s” it looked similar to when I changed the k’s and m’s:

The next few times I added random words and letters throughout the code.

After that I got curious and decided to try and combine two different images, crazy, I know.

I found this picture of my cat, Olive.

I changed it into a .txt file and copied different code from the photo of her and pasted it in the code of my photo.

The first try I got this result:

I could see little bits and colors from her photo, so I knew it would work so I kept trying.

 

 

Overall, my favorite results were when combining the two different images. The colors of the two images really went together nicely so even when a random strip of one went through the other, it was interesting to see the contrast that it created.

My favorite one would probably be:

I think for placing random text in random places, it really created an interesting composition and color scheme to look at.

 

What did you learn? Describe your learning process. What was most challenging?  What was most fun?  

To me, the entire thing was a learning process. I had never heard of glitch art or what it was or how to do it. The most challenging part would have to be not knowing, but that was also the most fun for me. Not knowing exactly what was going to happen when you change or take something away was frustrating, when it didn’t happen the way you had hoped but then also exciting, never knowing exactly what was going to happen.

How did this activity connect (or not) to your prior knowledge of art and art education?

This activity to me was like learning any other art form. Today I painted with oil paint for the first time and the experience that I had learning how to make glitch art was very similar. Trying something new is all about following steps and then from those steps branching out and figuring out your own unique way of doing it and getting the outcome that you want to achieve.

 

 

 How might you use and/or adapt this activity in an art classroom? 

I think that I would use this in a classroom the same way that we did today. A chance to invoke conversation, get to know names and faces. Seeing how students take the information that I give them and then watching them rearrange the image in different ways. I think it would be interesting to do this as a way of seeing how different students experiment with different ideas and techniques.

 

kelsey G.