Databending & Spatial Collage

I was invited to contribute to a fledgling zine in April. The issue’s theme was “Analog vs. Digital Destruction.” I rarely submit my creative work to anything and decided this would be a good exercise.

The destruction element of the theme was meant to be a relinquishing of control over final results. Organizers asked us to pick either an analog or digital medium/workflow, and stick with it throughout our process. My thoughts immediately drifted to databending.

I’ve explored databending with digitized film photos before. This involved opening the image file in text editing software and messing around with the code until it produces interesting results.

But I wanted to an additional layer of improvisation.

Halide is a camera app that can capture photos with depth data and then display the image as a 3D point field in your environment through an AR mode. I took photos on my daily walks, many of flowers and plants due to it being Spring, and began overlaying them on different environments. The results were something akin to collage. Spatial collage?

I noticed an interesting juxtaposition. I gravitated to placing natural growth over manufactured spaces. But these flower and plants were captured and rendered in a decidedly digital, artificial way. It seemed like these inorganic, inert environments were being invaded by neo-digital life.

My last step was to take the best collages, muck around with their data, and find the final images through the unpredictability of copy/pasting/deleting code. The results gave the impression of the digital and physical attempting to merge and create a new hybrid world. It could be argued this is our current situation.

You can see all the finished pieces I submitted here.