A photo book of my last roll of film before leaving Hong Kong. Entries from my diary are embedded into the code of each image, creating a “beautiful error”.
Discipline
Editorial, photography
Output
Photo book
Published
Central Saint Martins, 2022
The project
The finished book, bound in blue cloth, with glitched diary text across the covers.
Process
Where the diary goes in the code changes how the image breaks.
A JPEG is read in order. The start of the file holds the instructions for decoding it: its size, its colours and how it was compressed. The rest is the picture itself, read block by block. Diary text placed near the start scrambles those instructions, so the whole image falls apart into bands of colour. Placed further in, everything decoded before the diary stays intact, and everything after it is shifted and recoloured.
Entry embedded near the start of the codeEntry embedded further into the code
