Continuing on from my attempts to deliberately break or glitch images I’ve been looking at how digital files are downloaded and what happens when some of the data is missing. Torrent sites host illegal downloads of movies, software, music etc and the idea is that when users have downloaded a file they then “seed” this to other users. Each seed offers smaller parts of the whole file and each part comes from a different computer in a different part of the world. It’s all part of the ever increasing deluge of data pinging around us at all times.
It’s an interesting idea that one file, or more specifically one image could be made up of smaller parts from anywhere in the world. Of course, when you look at the image it is identical to any other digital version of the same image. So in order to highlight this process, I thought I would try downloading (“leeching” in torrent terms) a series of images and then halting the process half-way through – when there is enough information to open the image but but not enough to complete it.
The result is something like this:
Being a torrent site most of the images available were pornography. My interests aren’t necessarily in the rights and wrongs of this, but with what makes the image in the first place. The stuff under the hood. I settled for a folder of images of women with at least some clothes on. I think the glitches make the final image more suggestive than the original.
I then took this one stage further and added some additional code glitches (see previous post for more on this) just to finalise the image.
