What’s a picture made of, anyway? Ink and paper? Firing neurons?

In the case of digital photographs, they live on a computer in little collections of data. When one is opened in a program not intended to show us images, like a text editing application, it is translated into something visually incomprehensible—a string of characters that correspond to pixels like threads in a tapestry. Pull on one, and sometimes the whole fabric unravels. Other times, a new color is revealed.

These images were created by writing lines of poetry into photographs while they were opened as text files. Through trial and error, I looked for patterns in the way the visual information is expressed, and experimented with the most interesting ways to alter the map without breaking the file. At least in digital artmaking, unlike life, there are “undo” buttons.

Video of my workflow when writing a “glitch poem”: