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Processing + JPGs

After meeting Ted Davis (FFD8) and attending his panel with Paul Hertz at Gli.tc/h in Chicago earlier this month, I decided that I should get over my personal aversion to programming.

Using Processing, I’ve written a primitive (and probably poorly structured) program that will enable me to go through a file byte by byte and sequentially change the value of a particular byte.

The GIF above started as a JPG. By stepping byte number 0xC4 (or the 196th byte in the file) through values 128 through 220, the alignment of the image raster was thrown askew.

Writing a program to proceduralize the restructuring of data doesn’t seem antithetical to the glitch ethos. Though, somehow there’s a line that is crossed once that code becomes packaged and sold, used only for a particular effect, rather than extended further. At that point, the process seems little different from the ritualized produce/consume (prosume) paradigm established by large “productivity” software firms. For me, anyways, glitch has been about skirting the usual channels of productivity. Creating your own tools is part of that.

Processing code