For my part, I started with a photo I took of a sticker on a crosswalk:Īnd then here’s the file compressed with a delay effect in Audacity: In the further study section we link to a video tutorial on this. For example, a fun way to distort an image is to open it as an audio file in Audacity, a free and open source audio editing program, apply filters, and then export it again. In the middle, though, files tend to have a lot of numbers you can safely mess with in order to make corruptions and glitch art.Ī lot of historical ways people corrupt files involve opening them up like they’re a different kind of data.

The very end of the file sometimes also has important data, like the JPEG signal that the image is done. Why? No deeper reason than the fact that we needed to pick something to tell other programs that they’re reading a JPEG to help them understand and display it.įiles tend to put important data about how to interpret the file, like the size of the image or about how it’s been compressed, near the beginning of the file. What makes a picture different than a song, as far as the computer is concerned, is that the file was made with different conventions. Now, to talk about how corrupting files can be artistic we need to start with describing a little bit about how file formats work and what it means for a computer to store something.Įvery picture, every video, every 3D model, every song, every meme at the end of the day is just a very long sequence of 0s and 1s, binary data. In the rest of this article we’ll be dealing with just a brief overview of the world of intentional corruptions and glitch art.

Learn how you can corrupt images to make art!Ĭorrupting files: it doesn’t sound like a good thing does it? It conjures images of broken computers, lost work, and-if you grew up in the early days of home desktops- computer viruses intentionally breaking operating systems.īut, I am here to tell you that it is possible to corrupt files not for evil but for good! Not for destruction, but for art!

Easy way to datamosh videos