Describe how this process of collective image creation and decomposition creates a glitch transformation.

My group members were Nok Wan, Amanda and Minjee. We were told to create a glitch using any sort of method available, although most of us used photoshop, creating the effect of glitch in the images shown above.

Creating this piece was an unfamiliar experience to all of us: we weren’t computers ourselves. Our first round of edits usually ended up very safe. An example would have been my own edit of Nok Wan’s image, where I was unwilling to distort her face for fear that it would ruin a Masterpiece. We didn’t want to make it seem unrecognisable right from the start. I started off with adding on by duplicating parts of the image, and adding rectangles of colour that seemed like it was a glitch. I added a noise layer as well, as glitch was commonly associated with heavy noise, in my perception. Some others would also change the colours of the image, rather than affect the image itself, to colours that were not normal for a human to have (cyans, purples, etc.).

As the image gets passed down from person to person, some are more daring than others and started distorting faces. Or they tend to add on even more, or maybe even took away some elements. When the face started getting more and more unrecognisable, however, people started getting more daring with their pieces, going to more distortable options like liquify.

 

How is each transformation creating a new form of its precursor?

I realised that everyone had their own ways of creating glitches. For me, I loved the idea of repetition in glitch, like when you dragged a window and your computer started lagging and everything started to just become an animation broken down frame by frame, and then melded together.

From the above images, you could slowly tell that the only thing visible from my original image was the little streaks of darker hair becoming just some sort of texture — you could not tell that it was my hair at all, if you did not know what the original image was. It became some sort of psychedelic poster you would see on the streets, probably just had to smack on some text. The colours were very bright and vibrant, and the contrasts in colours used were very drastic. Which I actually liked a lot to begin with, because in my opinion pastels were an overrated thing. Nothing wrong with pastel glitches those are cool as well, but hey, I just basically find the colour palettes used in typical glitches really cool.

It also doesn’t help that constantly resaving jpegs can basically fry a photo. The constant edits take a toll on the resolution and I actually find it really pretty. Never found a better self portrait, man. :’-)