Beautiful Corruption


Scrambled Clown.

I rarely have any computer problems, mainly because I use a rock solid MAC work station and it's proven to be an iron horse year in and year out.


Digitized Doodle.

Every so often though I deceive myself into thinking I know something I don't regarding my computer. It usually happens late at night or on the weekends.


Imprisoned pixels.

A few weeks back I decided to use the "Sync" feature in my Transmit app. I'd never tried it before but decided to play around with it. I set up a folder on my FTP server with like two images on this thinking for some moronic reason that it would sync everything in a folder on my desktop with the folder on my FTP server. This would prove to be a big mistake on my part.


Illo with a bit problem.

You see the app did exactly what it was suppose to do. It synced the folder on my FTP with my desktop and since I only had two images in my FTP folder I saw folders on my desktop just start to vanish one by one. I immediately got that stomach dropping sensation and before I forced quit the app about 30 folders had literally just disappeared as if erased.


Pixelated Tattoo.

To compound the problem unknown to me my current backup system had broken four days prior. All my current projects had literally gone bye bye and I began to panic.


Binary pattern problem.

Thank God for IT friends like my buddy Tony Knight who came over that night and ran a recovery application that took about four hours to recover what I had managed to do in a matter of seconds. About 98% of all my files were recovered in the end.


001011010011 gone wild.

I then spent about a week re-organizing all my work files and re-compiling project folders because the recovery app just renames all files with a number and recovers them into format type folders like "tif" or "jpg" or "pdf" or "psd" so nothing had the correct name and I had wade through thousands of files one by one and sort them all out. (Well most of them at least) It was a major pain in the @$$!

I now have safe guards in place to prevent this from happening again. I have installed a drobo so my files are more secure and I have time machine running for my backup. I won't be playing with unfamiliar functions anytime soon.


Truncated Wormwood.

As I went through all my jpeg images I noticed a handful didn't survive the recovery very well. They were corrupted. If I tried to open them in Photoshop it would give me an error message stating the files were corrupted. In other words the base binary code that makes up the image was scrambled. I could view the images using "Quick View" though and proceeded to capture the scrambled beauty corruption produced.

The may be screwed up but the end result visually is still pretty cool looking.


Beautiful Corruption.

I've take the scrambled beautifully broken code and compiled it into a larger image you can use. Didn't intend on any of this to happen but it all worked out OK in the end and produced a pretty cool effect to boot.

I guess you can say this is a creative side-effect of my recent computer problems?

Download "Beautiful Corruption Here."