Corruption – A Very Glitchy Art

When you hear the word “corrupt”, what comes to mind? Computer crashes? Defective storage? Bricked devices? Those are all negative, so let’s add one more phrase to the list – Art. Yes, you can make art by corrupting files, and I’m here to guide you through the process. There are several types of corruption, and I’ll tell you about them.

Setup

Before you begin, you’ll need a special application called a hexadecimal editor, or a hex editor for short. The word “hexadecimal” may seem intimidating, but it’s just a way of representing numbers. It uses the numbers 0 through 9 and the letters A through F. Some examples are E1, 09 and 8D. A hex editor is like a text editor that works with hexadecimal numbers. I use a free online hex editor called Hexed.it.

Scrambling Data

The first type is just randomly changing the data of the image. I use Hexed.it because it lets your fingers fly over the keyboard without doing anything if you type a non-hexadecimal character. Below is the original photo I used, a video of me corrupting it and the finished product.

Notice how, in the “final product” image, a part is now lavender and misaligned with the rest of the picture. Those are some usual results of corruption. You can also use a random hex number generator to make the process easier. An excellent one is Browserling’s Random Hex Number Generator (browserling.com/tools/random-hex).

When you’re corrupting most file types, you should only scramble the random-looking parts; otherwise you could corrupt the header (discussed next) and make the file completely unreadable! The header could be your goal, and that is discussed in the next section.

Header Swapping

At the start of many files is a part called the header. The header tells what format the file is in. You wouldn’t want your .LOG text file to be misrecognized as a .WAV audio file! But that’s exactly what you can do with a little clever copying and pasting. That’s what I’ll show you how to do here!

For the starter file, I’ll use a diagnostics log from my computer.

Part of the original text:

2021-11-19 16:59:33, Info                  DISM   PID=9308 TID=11636 Scratch directory set to 'C:\WINDOWS\TEMP\'. - CDISMManager::put_ScratchDir
2021-11-19 16:59:33, Info                  DISM   PID=9308 TID=11636 DismCore.dll version: 10.0.22000.41 - CDISMManager::FinalConstruct
2021-11-19 16:59:33, Info                  DISM   Initialized Panther logging at \dism.log
2021-11-19 16:59:33, Info                  DISM   PID=9308 TID=11636 Successfully loaded the ImageSession at "C:\WINDOWS\System32\Dism" - CDISMManager::LoadLocalImageSession
2021-11-19 16:59:33, Info                  DISM   Initialized Panther logging at \dism.log
2021-11-19 16:59:33, Info                  DISM   DISM Provider Store: PID=9308 TID=11636 Found and Initialized the DISM Logger. - CDISMProviderStore::Internal_InitializeLogger
2021-11-19 16:59:33, Info                  DISM   Initialized Panther logging at \dism.log
2021-11-19 16:59:33, Info                  DISM   DISM Manager: PID=9308 TID=11636 Successfully created the local image session and provider store. - CDISMManager::CreateLocalImageSession
2021-11-19 16:59:33, Info                  DISM   DISM.EXE:
...

(DISM is a Windows utility for repairing corrupted files. Ironic, isn’t it?)

Me, adding a header from a WAV file:

The resulting WAV file:

Also, I’m creating a Corrupted Files Gallery. Below is a button to upload images that I’ll corrupt and add to the gallery.