GLITCHSCAPES

The project emerged from our process of figuring things out.

Where creative coding became both a technical tool and a space for playful exploration. As we developed scripts to parse and align images from the e-waste scanner, unexpected glitches surfaced: errors, shifts, and ghostly overlaps.

We leaned in, treating these moments of breakdown as opportunities for aesthetic investigation.

composite 01

composite 02

hardcoded diffusion 01

hardcoded diffusion 02

composite

diffusion

patcher 01

patcher 02

We transformed raw scans into macro-scale views of electronic and bio matter. The digital layer gave us space to zoom in, recompose, and rethink the visual language of waste.

Some of the outputs we got from scanning electronic components and bio matter we found during spring

raw scan image

image to video through runway ML

In Glitchscapes, the glitches are not failures—they’re traces of a process in motion. They marked where the computation struggled to make sense of what it saw, and we tried to understand, where we found new ways to see through it.

pcb glitch

pcb + microchip glitch

pcb + leaf glitch

pcb + flower glitch

Life After Waste (Game of Life Exploration)

Alongside our scanning and glitching processes, we brought in Conway’s Game of Life: a simple but powerful system where patterns evolve, multiply, and disappear over time. We layered this logic onto our scanned images to imagine what digital "life" might look like across discarded surfaces.

In this space, each pixel became a cell in flux. Responding to neighbors, forming fleeting patterns, then fading out. The juxtaposition of decayed material with emergent systems allowed us to ask:

What kinds of behavior can grow from waste? What if machines not only saw, but played with what we discard?

We built a GUI to experiment with these rules in real time—toggling behaviors, changing thresholds, and watching form and noise interact. It was another way of making the scanner more than a tool: turning it into a generative, reactive surface for creative computation. You can check it out here: game of life

Date: May 2025 | Location: No siteType: Research project with Chris Wu | Professor: Daragh Byrne

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