FIRST, we’ll watch these videos introducing Glitch art:

Video 1, Video 2, Video 3, Video 4, Video 5

OBJECTIVE

Make a glitched image using TextEdit(Mac) or WordPad (PC). You must submit your image and  on Canvas 1 hour before the start of class.

GRADING

The image will be graded on:

1. Can the student explain how they arrived at this work (the manipulations made)
2. Effort (is it clear that this work clearly took time and effort to create)
3. How interesting is the image to look at? (does it have interesting use of color, etc?)

Image Glitching

Here’s how it works:

Save an image as an uncompressed file such as .bmp, .raw, or .tiff.

Uncompressed image files contain more detailed data than compressed (lossy) files such as .jpg extensions. Thus, uncompressed files have more data available to edit than compressed files do, and your image is less likely to completely break when corrupted.

Converting a .jpg to a .bmp, .raw, or .tiff can be done in virtually any image editing software by clicking either “save as” or “export as” and changing the extension of the file.

---

Technique #1: Audacity

Audacity is a music editing program, but its effects can be exploited to corrupt and glitch your image files.

Download Audacity for free at http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/.

Open Audacity and click “File” and “New.”

Click “Import” and “Raw Data…”

Select your .tiff file.

Set the Encoding to “U-Law” and Byte Order to “Big-endian.” (although I’ve also heard people recommend selecting “Low-ending – try both!)

Select part of your sound wave, but avoid the very beginning (about .25 seconds) because it contains the header. If you edit the header, your computer won’t be able to read the file anymore.

Click “Effect” and select any effect you want.

Here’s my original image:

Here’s what some of the effects look like:

Echo:

Wah-wah:

Phaser:

Invert:

High Pass Filter:

Distortion: 

Click “File” and “Export…”

Set the format to “Other uncompressed files” and click “Options…”

The header should be “RAW (header-less)” and encoding should be “U-Law.”

Save your file and open it up to see your new artwork! If you have any trouble opening the new file, try changing the extension from .raw to .jpg