Databending Experiment

Ever since seeing an example of databending by Wenry Westcott on his blog, I found myself sucked in to the idea somewhat. It just seemed fun so I decided to take a look into it.

The first image that came to hand happened one I took of Phil from my course for a project:

I quite like it, so decided to to use it. Chopping and changing the code was pretty fun for a little while, but in the end I became more obsessed with the code than anything else. Here it is before I started editing it (note that the code, when turned into an image, was too large to save as any file but a .tif, which isn't viewable on all browsers as far as I know):


I set the font size to 1pt, in order to get the most code on page as possible. Also I didn't think it was all that necessary to be able to read it, as it is pretty much illegible anyway. Here it is afterwards:


It took hours to get rid of all the line breaks. It's the first piece of process art I've ever had a go at, and I'm not sure how it relates to my practice yet. However I'm rather fond of it. I'm not sure how best to display it to show the effort that was involved in producing it. Maybe that's not important if the image is strong enough on its own.

Unfortunately by the time I'd finished taking all the line breaks out of the code the file was so corrupted that it could not be opened as a jpeg any more. However as it would probably be interesting to see what it looked like near the end, here it is:

I'm guessing that the reason the image is cut off halfway is because as I was taking the line breaks out manually the odd couple of characters also got deleted.

Also here's a close up of before and after (I can't seem to get a full res version of either online as they are so large, plus I don't want to upload them to my server just yet):

Before:

After: