I’ve fooled around with Processing a lot, and have used it and later (iirc) a C++ or C# library many years ago to do “programmatic” edits to images and photos I had taken.

Stuff like:

• What if I treat the pixels in an image as one long strip and instead of placing them in left to right strips top to bottom, I lay them down in a spiral? Or in vertical strips despite the original image not being square?
• What if I interleaved a copy of the image upside down every other row of pixels?
• Let’s just apply random fucking math to the different color values!
• Let’s select random rectangular sections of the image and paste them over the original at a random location, rinse and repeat 100 times.
• What if I broke the image down into a grid of equally sized rectangles and shuffled their location?
• What if I averaged the color of each rectangle and added that to the existing color value of those pixels?
• etc etc.

I’d come up with different ways to select portions of the image, different ways to place that back in, and different ways to combine the “pasted” section with original. I tossed together something like 30 different “formulas”, then would do like 10 runs of each one that had random elements, spit out the results into a folder of what ultimately was something like 300 “result” images, and then decide the five or so I liked the best.

Add in the fact that I really don’t have any clue how color math works so I wasn’t basing my ideas off anything but whimsy, and some occasional pre and post processing with both paint.net plugins and audacity (you can sometimes open images as raw binary, avoid the file header, apply audio effects, and save it as raw binary to still have an image but it often just makes a corrupt file).

Had a decent “glitch art” hobby going to keep me occupied in my free time.

I desperately need to find that old code again. I miss tinkering with it.

Unfortunately, the existing results are tied to a flikr account with connections to my real name, so I’d have to find the code and make more to share.

Yep I used that in university for generative art. It was a lot of fun and actually got me into coding unlike many failed attempts before that.