Them's Fightin' Words

I was dicking around on the interwebs yesterday when I found this pretty interesting video about Glitch Art, which up until yesterday I knew pretty much nothing about.

Turns out it’s a whole artistic movement based around a process called “databending”, which is basically the artistic misuse of digital information (props to stALLIO for that one).

Something about the philosophy of Glitch really struck a chord while I was watching the video I’ve pasted below because Glitch is basically a gigantic fuck you to the airbrushed, synthesised, photoshopped aesthetic that gets shoved down our throats every minute of every day.

I’d only ever heard of Glitch as a sub-genre of electro, but never as a fully-realised artistic movement. Here’s the video I dug up that explains what it is and how it’s done:

I did some reading up on different databending methods, and tried my hand at it with some random sample images on my laptop.

I used the “wordpad” method to bend the following images and got some pretty radass results.

Here’s the pic I chose pre-bending:

And here’s what it looked like after I climbed in there and fucked shit up:

Stoked with the results I decided to repeat the experiment with some more sample pics.

Like this one of some penguins having a laugh:

Which I smooshed up into this:

And my personal favourite, a cuddly koala:

That I effortlessly turned into something that I’m pretty sure I saw at the end of a three-day acid binge.

I tried a few other images but soon got bored. The problem with the wordpad method is that it’s dead simple to do and the results are completely random so I’m not sure whether or not it can really be called “art”.

If you want to try this, all you have to do is get a .bmp file (if the image you want to use is a different format, just open it in Paint and save it as a .bmp file), open it in Wordpad and hit save.

To do that, hit the Windows key and type “Wordpad” in the “search programs and files” field. Open Wordpad, click the drop down file menu (top left), click “Open” and make sure you change the file format from “All Wordpad Documents” to “All Documents *.*”

Find your BMP file, open it, hit save, close Wordpad, open your new BMP file and hey presto! What was once a KLAP GYM BOYCHAY…

Turns into M-Net after Open Time ends.

I guess the art in wordpad databending is trying it with as many different images as possible until you get something awesome because a lot of the time the databend leaves you with an image that just looks like TV static.

If any of you crazy cats know other databending methods that yield better results, please feel free to let me know.

I also want to give audio and video glitching a try, will post the results if I get it right.

-ST