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Glitch News ruins good photojournalism for the sake of art

Glitch News ruins good photojournalism for the sake of art

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Image noise is often valued as an artistic tool when it comes to film, but digital recording and playback devices are quite a bit harsher when they mess up, introducing pixelated images, incorrect colors, and sometimes simply destroying the picture altogether. Not everyone sees digital noise as a nuisance, however, and on the Tumblr blog Glitch News, hundreds of once crisp-and-clear news photographs have been warped into glitched-out, colorful visions that look like they've been through a nasty transmission error.

Glitch News images

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While the images appear to have been captured straight from a television news feed, they're in fact deliberate transformations of existing photographs. All of the source images are linked back to, so you can see just how a human pyramid was twisted into a garbled desert mirage and how a suited man was turned into a Willy Wonka-esque portrait. The pieces largely play off of a type of noise known as macroblocking, which divides an image into chunks as a means of compression. That compression is normally worked out by the time it reaches a viewer, but as most should know, that isn't always the case.