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(Warning: Long post, lots of images)

I was flipping through the Visual Assignments in the Assignment Bank, and found an assignment about glitch art that seemed pretty neat. So I downloaded this image of the Mona Lisa from Wikipedia and opened up the image in Notepad++. I decided to see what would happen if I removed all instances of a number from the file, and got some really cool glitched versions. The versions below are missing the number stated before:

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Out of all of them, the one without 2s looks the most like the original Mona Lisa. It’s really interesting how drastically they change just from removing a single set of numbers in the file. In addition, I tried removing every number except for a single number. As might be assumed, they ended up way more glitchy. For example, here’s the version with every number except 6s removed:

Since these are way more glitchy, I won’t put them all here. They’re all in this album on Flickr, though. Another thing I tried was replacing all numbers with their spelled out versions (e.g. “1” > “one”), which gave me this:

Which reminds me, some of the images appear differently depending on where you view them. You can probably see all those artifacts in the above image. However, on my computer it looks like this (I took a screenshot):

It has the same general pattern, but none of the artifacts. I think this shows how different browsers and computers deal with the loss of data from my removing lots of information from the file. Lastly, instead of just removing or renaming numbers, I tried shuffling around some of the blocks of data inside the file, giving me:

Just a few tiny edits to the image’s file and it becomes entirely different. It’s especially cool that this is a form of art that simply couldn’t exist before digital images. It reminds me of art like L.H.O.O.Q. where earlier works of art are modified to create a new work of art. For the sake of fairness, I decided to glitch L.H.O.O.Q., too (removed 0s):

Tools used:

• Wikipedia for the art
• Notepad++ for glitching