I was sorry to miss last week’s discussions on word processing programs — as an avid fan of Wordpad, I would have loved to chime in. Wordpad’s got a couple of really neat qualities that I take advantage of whenever I’m struggling to draft a piece of original writing. I often have a hard time getting started on a story, and there’s something about the bare-bones simplicity of it that takes the pressure off and lets me jot down ideas without fixating on the red and green lines of Spellcheck or a toolbar filled with clutter I don’t actually need. I’ll freewrite huge chunks of the work I need to do and then just copy it into Word for editing, but the change in scenery, if you will, does a lot to clear my head.
There’s another reason I am incredibly fond of Wordpad, though, and it has nothing to do with writing. Wordpad is my program of choice for making glitch art — deliberately corrupting the raw data in an image to get interesting visual results.
My first introduction to glitch art was through Rob Sheridan, creative director for the band Nine Inch Nails. I’ve always been interested in using tools in unexpected contexts, and when I figured out I could experiment with this myself in some simple ways, I dove right in.
By opening a bitmap image in Wordpad (something that was never intended to happen) and adding or deleting just a few symbols here and there, the information contained within the image gets scrambled and the end result is a unique jumbling of colors and lines. It’s very easy to break an image so badly it won’t even display anymore, but with some careful tinkering, it’s possible to generate some eerie and occasionally very beautiful outputs.
You can go from this:
To this:
Pretty neat, huh? And all that by simply opening an image in the “wrong” program.
For a primer on databending and simple glitch art, check out this neat article, and then try it out for yourself if you like! Be sure to save your original image somewhere else though — it’s extremely difficult to undo the intentional damage you’re about to cause.
Have fun.
(Thanks to Emily Goodrich and Ben W.R. for their contributions to the gif above — last night turned into a databending party and I went ahead and made something from our collected results.)