Some of you will be asking yourselves, “What is Digital Decay?” The question we really should ask our selves is: “In an ever-digitizing world, is there any chance of our information ever becoming degraded?” When analog was king, we worried about our tapes becoming stretched, our records being warped and even our books becoming ravaged by time. Now, we live in a time where information is truly never lost.

With digital, it is all 1’s and 0’s. There is no half signal or funny picture. As we roll into this digitized future, is there any ways our data can become lost? In a great article by Richard Almond, aka rafolio, he asks a great question: “What if digital data did decay in a more poetic sense? What if we embraced and allowed this decay to happen, and appreciated its binary charm?” There is beauty to be found in the chaos of glitches.

So what does all this have to do with openGL? While trying to teach my self the basic of graphics programming, I came across some code that created a very unexpected outcome. The only way I could explain this was it being digital decay. The more I experimented, the more random the results became. I am not sure if any one else had came across this while programming in openGL but I found the images strangely pleasing. The program created all the images formed in this article.

After a few experiments, I concluded that it was old buffer data from memory that has yet to be cleared from the computer. In a sense, it is the images that you had once seen captured in the process of being deleted by the computer. In turn, this gives a visual representation of data being lost forever. After some thought, I decided to make an application that any one can use. I call it melt, currently only for the mac. Below, I have included a link to the application. I encourage any one to try it, and share their findings.

melt.app.zip