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).