This is an experiment by Justin Windle aka Soulwire created as a result of a project where Justin needed to find a way of simulating digital interference on an image / video stream. Instead of using the graphics API or Bitmap effects, Justin resorted to the real thing.
The principle is incredibly simple. Corrupt / alter a byte (or several bytes) in the ByteArray of a JPEG and then load this back into a DisplayObject using Loader.loadBytes(). Because of the way in which JPEGs work, the image will still display but the corrupt bytes will mangle the output to varying degrees, depending on how many bytes have been corrupted. The result is an interesting glitch pattern, a bit like those which were accidentally created when my webcam drivers lost the plot. Read more..
An AIR app may be in the works, in the meantime you can download the source here.
Justin is an artist, designer and creative technologist living and working in London. You can find out more by visiting his website or his blog for latest project updates.
(via @zenbullets)
See also Digital Decay [Reference, Theory] article on CAN by Richard Almond.
[SWF]http://blog.soulwire.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/glitchmap.swf, 640, 480[/SWF]
