A few weeks ago, I built a simple app to open an image and mess up its bytes.
That was fun, so I redid it.
You open or paste an image and it immediately generates five glitchy versions of it.
Click the version you like and it generates five more glitchy versions starting with that one.
It also shows your whole history, so if you go down a wrong path, you can back up.
Besides the obvious benefits of having more kinds of glitches to choose from, this setup helps when working with file types that the prototype didn’t support. For example, PNG’s commonly glitch by cutting off the bottom portion of the image. Now that you have five choices, you’ll usually get at least one option with an interesting glitch.
I doubt I’ll add any more to this project, but if I did, the next step would be to allow users to write their own glitching algorithms. Currently it has these five algorithms:
- Switch two bytes randomly
- Set a random byte to zero
- Set a random byte to a random number from 0 to 255
- Reverse a section of bytes randomly
- Superimpose two bytes using exclusive-or
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