Distorted Love

In the beginning, trying to make a piece of glitch art was difficult for me. I downloaded several Hex programs and kept having the same problem: I was not able to reopen the image after I altered the code because the file was too corrupt. I went back to the original way we learned in class by using TextEdit, and found it to be the most useful once I decided what I actually wanted to accomplish for my photograph.

My glitch art has a background story. A few days ago my long term boyfriend broke up with me. Being the bitter woman that I am about it, I decided to take a recent photo of us to disfigure. It took me some thought into what what characters I wanted to replace, and what to replace them with.

The original image:

My Glitch Art:

To create this photo I used the “find and replace” tool in TextEdit. At first I wanted to replace every “H” (for Hillary) with the emoticon, “</3.” When people used emoticons back in the day, “</3” meant broken heart. After this attempt to find and replace the “H’s” with “</3's”every photo was too altered to open, so I had to come up with a new plan.

I decided to select a random area within the code and replace every “H,” with the word “over.” Tediously, I did this 421 times. This number is symbolic because our anniversary is on April 21st. A few random lines appeared on the photo, but nothing significant. So, I took the same starting point where I replaced the “H’s” and replaced every “B” (the first letter of his name) with the same word “over,” 421 times. The result my code altering is seen above.

Though there is not much distortion to the photograph, the formula I used for altering the code is significant, and the way it turned out can be interpreted differently to anyone who does not know the reasons why I altered the code the way I did. This glitched photo is personal to me for a few reasons. First, it is of me and my now, ex-boyfriend. Second, I found it interesting that not much change occurred in the photograph when the “H’s” were replaced, but the “B’s” created a significant impact on the image. The placement of the distortion is also interesting because the selection of where I began altering the code was random. Mainly, the lines ended up over his eyes. I used the word “over” to replace the letters with, which I find ironic as well.

Looking at this glitch art one could interpret he was “blind” or not in tune with the relationship because his eyes are covered. Another way someone might interpret this photo is through the distorted portion covering his eyes and not my own, it can present the notion that he is in general no longer “in the picture” so to speak, or that his presence is no longer around, for “the eyes are a window to the soul.”