Last week the topic of Glitch Art was brought up briefly in both classes. My ears perked up just at the mention of this type of art and I instantly found myself digging through Google Images and Tumblr blogs to find examples of glitch pieces that I liked. There were several to say the least (some of which I have linked to below just because I was inspired by them so much). This type of art has been something that I have been intrigued by for a while. It is just so cool! That being said I have never created any glitch art on my own because I didn’t truly understand how it was done. With this renewed interest in glitch art and a resurfacing of familiarity with Processing, I decided to do some digging and look into the possibility of creating glitch art with Open Processing. After a little bit of research I found that I needed to correct myself and that the true genre of art that I was after was Data Bending; which to me seems to be under the umbrella of glitch art. This WIRED article does a good job of describing the difference between the two. But basically, data bending is intentional process of creating glitch art.
Here are some pieces that I was really inspired by when I fell down the rabbit hole:
I finally was able to pull myself out of the rabbit hole and I decided that I wanted to dive a little deeper and look at the code that was creating these beautiful images. From what I was able to gather, most of these bending is done by rearranging the pixel data in the image using an array of algorithms. Some use the original pixel data from an initial image and others combine that data with other data, whether it be numerical or color data. Now it was time find some initial images to start with for my own data bending efforts.
During class the topic of glitch art was brought up and instantly ideas started flowing for how to create new and exciting pieces. The first thing I did was just open up Tumblr and look through some feeds for inspiration. I forgot just how cool data bending and pixel manipulation can be; the artworks that are produced are just incredible! I definitely went down the rabbit hole for quite a while and I’ve included some of the pieces that I found to be the most beautiful. There are a few classic pieces that I think could be cool to use as a jumping off point. Most of my interests are with the outdoors and I’ve always found nature soothing so I want to combine that interest for nature and classic artwork. Some potential initial images include: The Son of Man, Starry Night, American Gothic, and A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. I’ve also included some cool photos I found online as well as some of my own photos in the slideshow that I think would look pretty awesome after some data bending.
Initially I will do some data bending using some static algorithms in Open Processing, however, my plan is to incorporate some live data to be used to create the bend, so right now some possibilities include: Twitter Data (location, tweets/hour, retweet count, favorite count, etc.) Bitcoin Data (height, age, transactions, etc.), and maybe even Nasa Data. Who knows? The possibilities are endless!