HexEdit // More RAW

So the second thing Joe Gilmore put me onto was a Yahoo group called Databenders. Now I was aware that was a community of people actually making glitch-influenced work, but this was a pretty big group - it has almost 1,200 posts. It would be quite easy to immerse yourself in this niche source hacking culture, it's not just visual, I think more than I realised music is a huge part of it. I already new about musicians like Atom TM, Pixel and Alva Noto on the Raster Noton Label but there were people promoting a ton of events in this group in the vain of these avant-garde audiovisual artists. It's funny 'cause I've pretty much spent the last two years trying to work out where my visual practice met my music production and there's never been a more obvious connection. Anyway, thats a whole other story, what I found in one of the posts was a link for HexEdit, it does pretty much the same job as TextEdit, but it organises any files data in a completely different way. I was almost starting to see patterns in the code, I felt like Keanu must've felt in The Matrix....

I tried similar techniques as before to glitchify data images, this was the file shown in the post showing the process of it being torn apart through source deletion in HexEdit...

Alternatively I compiled it as a looped animated gif here.

It was interesting exploring the process of taking apart an image - considering its just a data-sourced image in the first place - until it was unrecognisable as the original. Just after the last one shown, it was un-openable as a jpeg and had to be opened as a .raw file again in Photoshop, this created visuals I hadn't ever seen before, because the file was corrupted so much, there was far less of a pattern to these. Here the are in various different settings...

I think more than anything I learnt from this task how little I know. At least HexEdit made a little more sense in terms of the way it organised the source code, but I still have no idea what meant what, I feel like I need to stop thinking about what I can make go wrong and start by actually learning about how to make a code work, from scratch. I may regret saying this so late in the game.