AV1 Corruption

Video codecs are cool. I made the base glitch art by compressing a single frame of noise into an AV1 video with aomenc, and then randomly flipping bits in the bitstream until I got a result I liked. Many colorful patterns emerged, almost like paint splatters from afar. Look closer and the corruption shows the codec's guts: block partitioning as blocky grids, directional intra prediction as smeared lines, and the wavy checker patterns of the DCT and ADST.

To make it allRGB, I used an iterative evolutionary method to selectively swap pixels. My optimized multithreaded version now runs a billion iterations per minute, generating the final image in no time!