53: the sound an image makes

At the end of the day, so much of what we interact with is just data. They might appear as text, images, videos, or audio, but they're all built on the same building blocks of 1's and 0's. Everything is a wave. The light waves that allow us to see a photograph, the audio waves that emit a sound, the gravity waves that give us an earth and life.

What happens when we manipulate those lines, not just tweaking the echo and decay on an audio file, but manipulate one wave to affect another? For ripples to affect other dimensions. I think about how so much of the necessary work now is not just creating an impact across one axis (around one political issue), but rather to create change along these shifting dimensions, these intersections in which all these waves collide (to connect the dots, where everything is actually one big issue).

I took a self-portrait photo and broke it down to a bitmap file—making the image into an array of numbers that describe the color of each pixel. Then, I imported the image to Audacity, the image editing software, and started messing with the "audio" wave/track. For one of the photos, I inversed the wave, with another I added a phase shift, and then with one more I added an echo and decay to it.

Then I exported the audio track and reconstructed the data into an image. The resulting data-bending is a mix of strange color shifts and glitchy artifacts. When we open our strategies to change across new directions, the results just might be pleasantly unexpected!

My journey in documenting projects, ideas, collaborations, creative sketches, and more can be found at a flower is not a flower.