A problem with glitch

A slice out of a blog from http://animalswithinanimals.com/stallio/2005/05/application-sensitive-image-bending.html


A powerful reminder of one of the core concepts of databending: you never really working directly with data; you work with the data as interpreted by the editing environment you use to access that data. there is at least one built-in layer of abstraction present at all times. with image-bending, you could say that the "real" bending happens not when you edit the data, but when that data is reinterpreted back into its original format. the same exact file will bend differently when opened in different applications on the same computer/OS, and will also look different when viewed in the same application but on a different computer/OS.

This raises some fundamental questions: just how important is the "computer" part of the equation? will two machines running the same OS and application versions interpret a file in the same way? or do hardware variations, etc factor in? could it be that a bent volatile file will render differently on every computer you open it in? or does OS even factor in at all?