RAW Files

So Christian casually announced that he was friends with Joe Gilmore - one of the main facilitators for Glitch: Designing Imperfection and qubik.com - who I've been talking to via email, which opened up a ridiculous amount of possibilities. First of all, there is the simple task of opening any file as a RAW file, simply by changing its file extension (ie. WAV, TXT etc.) to .raw, this means that any file can be turned into visual data. Once the file extension is changed the file is opened in Photoshop and you are given options on how you would like to view the file, ie. the dimensions (limited within the file size), the amount of channels, whether these channels will be interleaved or not, whether the image will be 16bit or 8bit.

Smaller files tend to just produce static, as far as I could work out this was because there were so few bytes it was impossible to produce more the one channel for the image, resulting in a monotone bitty mess...

However, large uncompressed files like could produce some really interesting imagery. This was actually my PPD presentation from last year, it had huge amounts of info, so there were far less limits in terms of the amount of channels etc. these are just a couple of experiments with the channel interleaving and dimensions, they produced some mad colourful static.

As I messed with larger files it became clear that there needed to be a bit more of a balance in file size. Many of the files had too much going on and ended up just looking like static as well, in order to generate more interesting patterns for example, this was a fully uncompressed wav of a track I recently finished (featured on this), the files like 33.9mb and produced similar levels of static...

So I tried a shorter track of the same bitrate, a synth laiden intro I created for a mixtape a while back, which created some really interesting patterns...

This was the first image that generated something that actually reminded me of the original file, it looks alot better zoomed in on as well, this was the image at 400% minus the yellow channel. Not sure what use any of these have, but I feel like they're kind of little baby steps towards actually understanding whats possible in terms of unorthodox creativity with computers.