Datamosh

To understand datamoshing, you need to know about I- and P-frames. Digital video files are made up of sequences of different types of frames. I-frames (also referred to as keyframes) are full representations of a single frame of the video.

Still frames from a datamoshed (glitched) MPEG video showing time–motion displacement (the graphic, repeating elements).

In datamoshed works, time seems to stall, streak or speed ahead in unpredictable ways.

Beyond flickering frames and ticking timers, embodied habits and muscle memory, crowdfunding platforms and advertising campaigns, there are still games around these games that continue to elude their ends, games that take place across a wide range of media—from chain letters, scavenger hunts, geocaches, dead drops, public performance, and other forms of locative media to web rings, spectrographic imagery, datamoshed images, SSTV transmissions, and hundreds of cryptographic codes to disguise and disseminate their gameplay.

The chorus lyrics, when combined with West’s intensified vocal expression and the datamoshed images, communicate the subject’s desperate need to intervene in his life and make a change.

As well, director Ray Tintori released a comprehensive, three-part YouTube tutorial titled “how to datamosh,” and Tom Butterworth has written software for Quartz Composer that allows you to datamosh and play with compression artifacts in real time.

Exhibited as a three-channel video installation or as a theatrically projected single-screen work of experimental video, The Memory of a Landscape features an array of datamoshed images.

Thus, while compression glitches make these processes (fleetingly) visible, and whereas “datamoshed” videos like Takeshi Murata’s Monster Movie (2005) aestheticize the out-of-order execution of compressed video by removing the integral I-Frames and allowing the predictive P- and B-Frames to draw wonderfully psychedelic forms on the screen, it is important not to reduce the impact of compression to a purely “correlative,” perceptual one (as I argued in relation to Jordan Schonig’s analysis in chapter 2).

By now the original movie.mov seems to slowly disappear in the desktop background, which itself features a ‘datamoshed’ shark video (datamoshing is the colloquial term for the purposeful deconstruction of an .mpeg, or any other video compression using intraframe/keyframe standard).

Though there are many tools and methods for datamoshing, from various software programs designed for codec breakage to downloading incomplete movie files, the general means by which a datamoshed video are produced involve intervening in the codec’s regimented organization of compressed video frames, specifically what are known as I-Frames and P-Frames.

Murata creates his glitch video from software packages such as AfterEffects and the DivX codec (a program used to read or write media files), though the pixel bleed effect has become so popular that developers and artists have recently introduced datamosh plug-ins for existing software.

Contrary to the notion of continuous space put forward in the last chapter, characters in films do not melt into their surroundings and become lost in a soup of colour – except perhaps in the datamoshes that Meetali Kutty and I have explored elsewhere in relation to theories of chaos and complexity (Brown and Kutty 2012).

Similarly, Brown and Kutty view what Manovich sees as the exchange between “the original ‘liveness’ of human figures” in film and the “artificial liveness” generated by the algorithmic procedures of digital display, claiming “we are seeing humans interact with/assemble with, or from, pixels; that is, within the frame of the datamosh, the humans and monstrous figures have an ecological relationship/form an ecology/form a network with computers.”

This pioneering datamosh mixes Rihanna’s smash hit Umbrella (2007) with the Cranberries’ Zombie (1994).[…]And while this work is not a datamosh in the strict sense I have defined, the piece offers a unique use of vector-based graphics to create a glitch aesthetic in time-based media.[…]Understanding the backend technical decisions for Compression Study #1 (fig. 22), helps us to see its value as an early datamosh (2007).

To see how this works, I’ll examine the 2008 music video “Evident Utensil” by the band Chairlift, which limits its datamosh degradation to the most fundamental effects of the technique.[…]Similar kinds of defamiliarization are equally apparent when datamoshing artists single out what I termed in Chapter 1 “contingent motion forms” like fire and water, such as in the opening of Monster Movie or in Nabil Elderkin’s datamosh-heavy music video for Kanye West’s “Welcome to Heartbreak,” which uses an abundance of contingent motion forms—screen-filling explosions of water, fog, and fire.