12 · 2025
Nothing / Demon Heart
Digital image and audio
The same file is read as image and as sound: what the eye sees as damage is meaning to the ear.
- Methods
- Raw audio · Image data · Format conversion
The glitch running across the image is a raw audio file converted into image format.
Looking at it, you see a picture with one section destroyed. Convert it back into sound and you hear audio, while the part that was the image turns into noise.
What is nothing in one spectrum carries meaning in the other.
Nothing is added and nothing is drawn. The same bytes are interpreted twice, once by an image decoder and once by an audio one. Each reading treats the other's meaning as damage: the eye sees a destroyed region, the ear hears noise exactly where the picture was.
The work is not an illustration of that idea. It is the file itself, and either reading can be performed on the spot.
The process
One file, two readings
raw audio file → read as image data → the glitch you see IS the sound