Glitch Art Workshop

At EMFCamp, I was lucky enough to get a place on the Introduction to Glitch Art workshop run by Antonio Roberts.

The workshop attendees plugged in their laptops and sat at tables in the workshops tent, while Antonio explained what glitch art was and showed us some examples, including some of his own great glitch art. (Have a look at Antonio's website).

We were asked to make sure we had photo editing software (I opted for GIMP), Audacity, and a good text editor installed. (I went with gVim). We also installed hex editors, but didn't get around to using them. (As a Linux user, I opted for Bless.)

Some of the things we did were:

1. Opened a small .jpg or .bmp image file in a text editor. (If we didn't have an appropriately small .jpg or .bmp, we edited/saved files in GIMP beforehand.) Then tried out different things in the text editor on these files, such as:

Mashing the keyboard and adding some random text into the image
Searching and replacing some of the characters in the text file with a longer string
Copying several lines and inserting it elsewhere in the file
Deleting sections
Adding paragraphs of text

The important thing to remember when doing this was to try not to affect the header, as this could break the file entirely.

We then saved the files and opened them again in GIMP to see how they looked.

It was interesting to contrast between what happens to images with different file formats, as the effects could be quite different depending if it was a .jpg or a .bmp.

2. Opened an image file in Audacity and then applied effects, such as Echo.

Here are Antonio's instructions on how to do this: Databending using Audacity.

Antonio also showed us some effects he created using Pure Data, and also talked about how he uses scripts to create cool effects, and I think he talked a bit about editing videos also.

Here's one of the images I edited, of me at EMFCamp in 2012:



I enjoyed the workshop and later edited another picture from EMFCamp (2014):