datamosh

English

Etymology

From data +‎ mosh.

Verb

datamosh (third-person singular simple present datamoshes, present participle datamoshing, simple past and past participle datamoshed)

1. To intentionally corrupt a digital video, creating a surreal effect.

   Coordinate term: databend

   • 2016, Michael Betancourt, Beyond Spatial Montage: Windowing, or the Cinematic Displacement of Time, Motion, and Space, Routledge:

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

   • 2017, Allan Cameron, “Facing the Glitch: Abstraction, Abjection and the Digital Image”, in Beugnet Martine Beugnet, editor, Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty, Edinburgh University Press, →ISBN:

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

   • 2017, Stephanie Boluk, Patrick LeMieux, Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames, University of Minnesota Press, →ISBN:

     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.

   • 2017, Marc Lafrance, Lori Burns, Alyssa Woods, “Doing hip-hop masculinity differently: Exploring Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak through word, sound, and image”, in Stan Hawkins, editor, The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music and Gender, Routledge:

     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.

   • 2019, Clint Enns, “Hardware Hacking, Software Modding, and File Manipulation: Process Cinema in the Digital Age”, in Scott MacKenzie, Janine Marchessault, editors, Process Cinema: Handmade Film in the Digital Age, McGill-Queen’s University Press, →ISBN, page 492:

     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.

   • 2019, James J. Hodge, Sensations of History: Animation and New Media Art, University of Minnesota Press, →ISBN:

     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.

   • 2020, Shane Denson, Discorrelated Images, Duke University Press, →ISBN:

     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).

   • 2020, Rosa Menkman, “Refuse to Let the Syntaxes of (a) History Direct Our Futures”, in Daniel Rubinstein, editor, Fragmentation of the Photographic Image in the Digital Age, Routledge, page 117:

     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).

   • 2022, Jordan Schonig, The Shape of Motion: Cinema and the Aesthetics of Movement, Oxford University Press, →ISBN, pages 162–163:

     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.

Noun

datamosh (plural datamoshes)

1. A video that has been datamoshed.
   • 2015, Gregory Zinman, “Getting Messy: Chance and Glitch in Contemporary Video Art”, in Gabrielle Jennings, editor, Abstract Video: The Moving Image in Contemporary Art, University of California Press, →ISBN, page 107:

     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.

   • 2015, William Brown, Supercinema: Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age, Berghahn Books, →ISBN, page 52:

     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).

   • 2016, Jihoon Kim, Between Film, Video, and the Digital: Hybrid Moving Images in the Post-Media Age (International Texts in Critical Media Aesthetics; volume 10), Bloomsbury Academic, →ISBN:

     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.”

   • 2019, Carolyn L. Kane, High-Tech Trash: Glitch, Noise, and Aesthetic Failure, University of California Press, →ISBN, pages 106 and 118:

     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).

   • 2022, Jordan Schonig, The Shape of Motion: Cinema and the Aesthetics of Movement, Oxford University Press, →ISBN, pages 164 and 231:

     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.

See also

• glitch art

Further reading

• Compression artifact § Artistic use on Wikipedia.Wikipedia