datamosh

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

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).

A video that has been datamoshed.

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).