After struggling initially to find a way of automating the process of glitching images, I found a couple of web-based methods which proved useful. The first is an add-on script for Firefox browser called GlitchMonkey. When activated, this script randomly scrambles the images of a web page. I experimented with some popular sites…
The second system is called Glitch Browser. This is a webpage created by the same collaborative as the GlitchMonkey application which allows the user to enter a URL and have it glitched in a similar way.
“Computers are not allowed to make mistakes. The glitch browser represents a deliberate attempt to subvert the usual course of conformity and signal perfection. Information packets which are communicated with integrity are intentionally lost in transit or otherwise misplaced and rearranged. The consequences of such subversion are seen in the surprisingly beautiful readymade visual glitches provoked by the glitch browser and displayed through our forgiving and unsuspecting web browsers.” (from www.glitchbrowser.com)
I was excited to see that when a URL is entered into the Glitch Browser’s site address bar and the page is glitched, a new, unique URL is in turn generated in Firefox’s main address bar. It would therefore seem logical that if I take this newly generated URL for the glitched web page and put it back into the site address bar on the Glitch Browser website, the result would be a double-glitched image. This process could be repeated over and over in theory. The results of this cyclic process, however, are not not as expected or desired. The images on the webpage seem only to glitch in the very first iteration.
The next stage in the experimentation was to turn on the GlitchMonkey plug in script and run it on the Glitch Browser web page. As can be seen below, this seems to proves successful in creating a double-glitched page.
If the URL generated from this is now used in the same manner as previously, pasting it back into the Glitch Browser site address bar, but this time with the GlitchMonkey script running, we get differently glitched pages in each iteration. As of yet I am unsure whether this is actually glitching images over and over, or if the script simply glitches each iteration once, but in a random, unique way each time…
Either way, the results are fruitful. The main drawback I feel is that only the images on each page are being glitched, not the text content. There must be a method of decaying the page as a whole however. I will look into the idea of decaying websites through the decay of its source code. Scrambling it in a similar way to the image code with HexEdit could produce some relevant results, and the concept of a website relates well to our perception of physical space, with many metaphors now being commonplace when referring to digital web ‘space’.
