Lively, Youthful, and a Bit Messy
For my Glitch art piece, I began with a photo I took on my way home from work one evening. It features the sun setting amongst some buildings off of the Lawrence Red line stop. I chose this image because it makes me think of all of the beautiful moments I have had in college so far, but manipulating the image will allow me to also convey the chaotic nature of college as well as the beauty in the chaos. To mess with the image, I initially tried to follow along with the instructions listed on the Critique Collective tutorial. Unfortunately, I became confused very quickly as my computer repeatedly crashed. When I finally was able to get to the code of the image I selected, I realized that there were emoji characters within the image’s text code. There were emojis such as a sailboat, stars, and different zodiac signs. To make the image glitch, I decided to replace the emojis with a word that described the image. For example, I wrote sailboat in place for the sailboat emoji and so on. I was excited to see how this change would affect the image, but the TextEdit software I downloaded was not complying in computing the text into a glitched image. My purpose for changing the emojis to the words they represent was my critique on the current generation’s inability to articulate what they really mean. Words fail us in truly expressing what we want to say and how we feel, but art and music do a better job of allowing a person to express themselves without the strict borders of language.
To edit my photo, I ended up using a glitch art generator that took the image and rendered it in accordance with the settings I adjusted. In short, I was not able to actually go into the text and code of the image and manipulate it myself but I was still able to create a beautiful piece of work. I created multiple versions of the piece and saved them all individually as I really enjoyed the aesthetic of a glitch cityscape and the colors of the image shifted in each edit. I decided on this edit to be presented as I really enjoy the vibrant color scheme and how it relates to my idea of artistically expressing my college experience thus far. The glitch art is just chaotic and bright enough that it accurately reflects my feelings of college: lively, youthful, and a bit messy. The blue on red accent colors from the glitch also gives me a youthful vibe as it reminds me of 3-D glasses which I associate with seeing movies as a kid.
