New Chopped and Screwed JPEGs

Here are some new glitch images i've been working on. You can find more on my flickr page here.

below the clouds


the most dangerous glitch


L@ND$C@P3_2


L4ND$C4P3

Slavic Village Revisited - Generation JPEG

[This page has been moved to http://bitsynthesis.com/2009/05/slavic-village-revisited-generation-jpeg/. Please update links to the new address.]

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These images are from Foreclosure, an old project of mine featuring foreclosed homes in Cleveland's Slavic Village, one of the neighborhoods hit hardest by the housing crisis. Aproximately 2,000 of the 8,000 homes in Slavic Village lie vacant.

One of the disturbing things about these homes was their new-ness. Though they were abandoned, they were almost all structurally sound, and many of them weren't in any sort of outward disrepair. In revisiting these images I wanted to express a sense of age and wear that was felt in person, but may not have come through in the original 35mm photographs.

These are 400th generation JPEGs.

100th Generation Obama

This is a 100th generation JPEG, but an artifact removal filter was applied after each recompression, resulting in the smeared effect.

I like to think of this as an analogy for the larger effect of Obama's PR people vs. his critics: who he is and what he is trying to do will be lost beneath the airbrushing and the shit. For better or for worse.

Generation JPEG

These are JPEGs that have been compressed many hundreds of times. This brings out the "natural" artifacts that appear from generation to generation. (you should really click to open the larger images to get a feel for the effect)

275th Generation Tree:


400th Generation Clouds:


425th Generation Ho Chi Minh City:

May Glitch Bless America

The aM3r1cAN F!aG, looking better than ever. The dollar bill is next.

Happy Earth Day!!!

JPEG chopped and screwed 2

Here's the latest (disclaimer: some photoshop used as well).



I'm starting to learn how to make educated guesses about what part of the image will be effected.

The following bullets refer to the text file which results when opening up a JPEG in TextEdit or another basic text editor.

• The top section should be left untouched, this seems to contain the code that identifies the file as a JPEG (even slight changes to this code may render your image file unreadable)


• The next few lines after the above section often relate to color. These are fun to play with, and only require very small changes. Try removing single characters, or small groups of characters for big results.


• The remainder of the text document describes the structure of the image. It also contains color information




• Changes are less drastic than in other parts of the document (sometimes very large sections of text can be deleted without much change to the image)


• Deleting too much information will result in grey bars, or the removal of whole lines of the image


• Copying, pasting, and writing new text seems to have the best effects in this area (though I have been using the delete key almost exclusively)


• Generally, the image is described from the top down. Ex: changes made to the bottom of the document are likely to affect the bottom of the image.
  


• JPEGs created in Photoshop are structured a bit differently than those found on the Web, and are harder (in my experience) to work with in this way

Oh, also... I have found that saving the files as "Western (Mac OS Roman)" works best for me. I originally tried "Unicode (UTF-8)" but it seems that this doesn't have a large enough alphabet to accommodate all the strange characters created by the JPEG.

JPEG chopped and screwed

Here are some more hacked JPEGs. Check em out.

original:


hacked:

JPEG Hacking

I spent my lunch hour today experimenting with hacking JPEG files. I opened the original file with a text editor and went to town cutting, copying, pasting, and typing. Small changes to the text result in sometimes drastic glitches, so I saved and checked my progress after every change. Often I had to backtrack, having wiped away too much of the image for it to be recognizable. Worth playing around with, though entirely unpredictable.

original:


hacked:

Dinosaurs Versus Aliens - in stencils

These are some of the stencils decorating the walls of my (former) house. They were designed and cut by me, just for fun.

More Designs From the Archives

Big Lebowski Stencil

Intended to be a stencil of Jeff Bridges from The Big Lebowski. Never got around to stenciling it, but I like the design. Maybe I'll get on that, my walls are looking pretty bare.

Planetary Wallpapers From the Archives

Some designs intended as desktop wallpapers. They are 1024x768. I was making a lot of planet designs around the time that these were made. Not my best work, but I just rediscovered them on my hard drive so I thought I'd throw them up.

(you can find a 1280x1024 version of the above image here)

The Face of Gregg Allen

This is a kinda wierd one. It is based on Gregg Allen's face, for those of you who know him. It's really not a complete piece, but it's been so long since I've worked on it that I figured I should put it up anyway.

I.D. Logo Design

I designed this logo for a student run political magazine called International Dialogue (ID). The magazine is currently in its second year of circulation at Oberlin College.


Here's an early version of the design, intended to be used as an element in the layout

Smoke Wallpaper Designs

These are two abstract designs I made as wallpaper for my desktop. They are 1024x768 jpegs, feel free to download them.

Beer Labels

Here are two of the beer labels I've made for my homebrews. I've got a 5-gallon batch of chocolate porter waiting to be bottled right now, so it'll soon be time for another design.


For a good selection of recipe kits and homebrew supplies, head over to morebeer.com.

Shoot the Sun

This is an album cover I made in the summer of '07 for a band called Shoot the Sun. Their career was cut short by infighting, but the album cover lives on.

Here's a link to one of the songs off their first and only demo album. The track is called Menthol and can be found here for streaming or download. Shoot the Sun was a collaboration between Jared Pryor and Nate Ellis, with Derek Rio providing occasional backup on drums.

Lionface Stills

These are stills from the lionface video posted below (actually, from the higher-res original).