ƏNCØ/DƏR

Databending is the practice of manipulating a file's raw data to produce unintended visual results. One of its core methods is Incorrect Editing — opening an image file in a hex editor and modifying the data directly, outside of any image software, outside of any intended reading.

The result is unpredictable. That unpredictability is the point. The practice is in the exploration: what happens if you change this byte, this block, this section of the file? Each edit is a question. Each corruption is an answer you didn't expect.

DIS/FØRM∆T ENCODER gives that practice fourteen custom formats to work with:

Fourteen custom formats, each with its own internal structure — its own way of laying image data into blocks, channels and paths — which means each one breaks differently. Different interventions. Different corruptions. Different images.

Inside, every format is raw: no compression, no checksum, one byte for every colour of every pixel. That is what makes it bendable. A JPEG hides the image behind compression — one wrong byte and the reader gives up. Here every byte you touch is a piece of the image, and the file opens whatever you do to it. What changes from format to format is the order: rows, columns, tiles, diagonals, planes, deltas. The order decides the shape of the wound — a planar file shifts a whole colour, a delta file lets the error run until the line ends, a tiled file keeps it inside its block.

The cycle: encode your image here. Break the file — in a hex editor, in Audacity as raw sound, in WordPad as text. Render it back to PNG. What returns is the result of your intervention. Every format is unbreakable: whatever you do to it, it opens.