deface

Knowing I would be “defacing” my images, I thought it made sense to capture a place that itself was already defaced. So, I took my camera to an abandoned apartment complex in Carbondale, IL at the southern edge of the rest belt. This place had already been defaced in real life: broken windows, crumbling concrete, and plant overgrowing. I could find no better example of place defaced as this.

I used audacity as I have many times before to mangle the data of the images into audio, add sound effects over the audio data, and then convert the data back into a now distorted image. Next, I went into the code of the images themselves to simply write in the word ‘deface”, so the word itself is encoded in the image file (this did minimal visual defacing to the image as it at most left a small gray streak. Finally, I overlayed the images with a color layer using the hexadecimal color code #deface (I should note that hexadecimal color codes only allow for six digits and letters only up to ‘f’) which created this bright rotting green color. In the end, I had virtually defaced an already defaced place.