Data Bending

Data Bending

Data bending, a concept somewhat akin to circuit bending, is the purposeful creation of glitches within sound files, text, images or videos through esoteric computer wizardry. What started out as an accidental by-product of fickle technology has now evolved into a deliberate aestheticization of damaged information.

Taken from: http://newrisingmedia.com/all/2013/1/31/the-art-of-databending.html

A really useful website in explaining what data bending is and different methods of doing so.

Discovering new ways to do things is a key element to the entire experience of my photography course!

Take the coding from a digital photograph and by using softwares such as text-edit and audacity


Different Image Files

JPeg, RAW, TIFF, GIF, PNG

Image fils can be quite large, and larger file types mean more disk space usage. Compression is a term used to describe ways of cutting the image file size.

Another reason for the many file types is that images differ in the number of colours they contain. 



Bits of Colour

The simplest images may contain only 2 colours (e.g. Black & White) and will need only 1 bit to represent each pixel. Many early PC video cards would support only the 16 fixed colours. Later cards would display 256 simultaneously, any of which could be chosen from a pool of 16 millions colours.
New cards devote 24 bit



Lossy & Lossless

Compression schemes can be lossy and lossless.

A lossless compression algorithm discards no information. It looks for more efficient ways to represent an image, whole making no compromises in accuracy. In contrast, lossy algorithms accept some degradation in the image in order to achieve smaller file size.

My Attempt @ Data Bending

Using an image that I had taken from Tenerife, I used 2 methods of data bending that altered the original image in some shape, form, texture or colour: One was a software called Audacity - this converted the image file into an audio file, where you then can put effects on such as fades, echos and distortions on the file, export it and convert it back to an image file and view the outcome. The other was by altering the coding of the image, this was done by cut, copy and paste parts of the images code by viewing it as text instead of an image file. Below are my attempts at data bending which I then put on my facebook for my friends and relatives to view.

Original Image File

Image #1 [Bent with Code Edit]

Image #2 [Bent with Code Edit] 

Image #3 [Bent with Code Edit]

Image #4 [Bent with Code Edit]

Image #5 [Bent with Code Edit]

Image #1 [Bent with Audacity]

Image #6 [Bent with Code Edit]

Image #7 [Bent with Code Edit]

Image #2 [Bent with Audacity]

I thought this way of editing a photo was fascinating and it's definitely something I want to incorporate into my main project of displaced culture as this technique of photography displaces the picture with its construction, which reinforces the meaning that I'd be trying to convey within my selection of photos. I thought as well as myself that my friends would like the outcome of the images I had made from databending, so I put them on my facebook as you can see below.

It had a very positive response from my friends and family and lead me on to look at the works one of my friend's suggested: Richard Mosse. Take a watch of the video below, the landscapes captured with the infrared camera in the 'impossible image' project look similar to the outcome of the landscape in some of my code editted images.

https://vimeo.com/67115692