The Mind Distorts Memories Over Time, Photos are Just a Means of External Backup

For activity C I decided to create gifs out of the images edited through the HEX plugin on ‘HxD’, this method of glitching I found was a lot faster than using Audacity as messing with straight lines of code at random doesn’t require a whole lot of finesse. Because of this, the HEX method is fairly straight forward for making gifs in photoshop after messing with the image over and over to make it progressively more cooked. However I found that in Audacity, while the process was a little longer, it made for more clean looking images with more intricate glitch effects (logically as Audacity has a load of effects to apply to the converted raw data).

At first I downloaded ‘Notepad ++’ for the process of glitching through text edit, but found quickly that ‘HxD’ ran a lot smoother and was quicker to use for this purpose as Notepad would crash when I tried to cut and paste code as well as making me change the file type from “.txt” every time I wanted to save a variation of a photo.

No idea exactly what I was doing but working with whole lines of code at once seemed to create more aesthetically pleasing results than just going ham and chopping up whole chunks of code at random.

Compared to glitching apps that just do it all for you, doing it manually like this involves a lot more experimenting and trial and error. When you do however get something back that looks nice, it feels more rewarding than just running something from your camera roll through an app. Needles to say too that doing it in this way allows for so much more variation and possibility while an app is limited to the effects programmed (and a lot of them will make you pay for the more wild effects too).

My general inspiration and theme for this collection of images would be memories and the way that even the really important stuff gets warped and distorted over time. These photos are all from old holiday memories from house parties to trips to the beach with my ex or to the forest with friends. Interestingly enough I think the nights or days that you make the most memories and recall vividly are almost more likely to get twisted and warped as you remember them over and over, in the same way that running an image through a scanner over and over starts to cook it as you can’t re-create a perfect replica of the image and the changes that start occurring get more and more pronounced with each copy like a positive feedback loop (also a bit like mutations in evolution). But so be it, If the universe didn’t cook it a bit from time to time we’d still be bacteria and glitch art wouldn’t even exist.

I really like the way this photo I have of an RWB Porsche in Tokyo in particular turned out after using Audacity (first image below) I used a combination of “Auto Duck” cutting and pasting sections of data, pitch and tempo changes as well as reverb and chirp from memory. It kind of reminds me of ASAP Rocky’s LSD music video which is just amazing to look at the whole way through.

Just because I’m a messy person too and I have way too much smack to talk I’m going to post part 2 of this activity once I go use a scanner to cook up more photos and maybe make a few more gifs too…