Compression Reel from David OReilly on Vimeo.
8-bit chip music went mainstream in the last few years. Well, now it’s video compression’s turn. What, you thought crunchy blippy glitch sounds were cool, but that video could only look crap when over-compressed digitally? Too late: even Kanye West is doing it now.
First up: the best of this genre seems to come from director David O’Reilly, pictured above. The man has his own compression-themed t-shirts.
The music video getting the most blogosphere airplay comes from Chairlift. Chairlift’s “Evident Utensil” is a music video made of datamosh errors – a twisted visual special effect formed from an algorithmic anomaly. You’ve seen it before, and like many of us, were as fascinated by these digital artifacts as you were by the patterns your NES made when the carts got dusty and the VHS’s when you taped one few too many Cinemax feature presentations. Of course, because this is pieced together from compression artifacts, it looks even more horrible compressed, so you need the HD version. As the uploader says:
NORMAL QUALITY LOOKS LIKE BUNK. clink on “WATCH IN HD” to WATCH IN HD!!! HD stands for “HOLY DATAMOSH,” which is what G-D bestowed upon us in the form of a MASSIVE COMPUTER GLITCH that eats up INDIE MUSIC VIDEOS and turns them into INTERNET GOLD. See the gold in its purest form at:
http://www.court13.com/Chairlift-EvidentUtensil.mov
But don’t think for a second this is going to stay some obscure “Internet” thing. No, media moves too fast for that now. Enter Kanye West. As Jeremy Elder writes on his blog shape+colour:
Datamoshing is the new tiltshift. I guarantee. Now it’s just a matter of who’ll do it well and which big company will soullessly made a campaign out of it “because the kids think it’s ‘dope.’”
That’s just the beginning.
Then you discover a visual wormhole full of datamosh. After all, YouTube’s “related” feature is only going to pull up more digital nonsense. And so you dive in — and the vids with 300 counts turn out to be way more interesting.
They start normal, but get strange. You’re soon under someone’s umbrella of glitch.
And then you’re here, like, following a glowing piñata down your own optic nerve.
“a;slkgha;sovi[ro843;ligj;alkfg jafu9vp984poij;4k34.gk;kj;” murmurs a man named cosmosabravo to you. You think you’re on something, or maybe you swallowed the “wrong character encoding pill.”
But you press ahead.
Cosmosabravo drools pixels, and you follow.
And there’s something about “Takeshi Murata,” but you’ve lost any fidelity. The odd YouTube commenters start to make some freaky kind of sense. “Whole wheat! bananas! tarpit is on the cartune exprez dvd. Plate Tectonics *is* Pixeltan. Devin Flynn and his lovely lady, Mika. thanks for the venues, keep it real”
“i wish i could see the real thing some day .”
Nope. This is real.
So, the next time you’re frustrated uploading to a dozen different web servers with Flash that doesn’t play anything right on your PowerPC Mac anyway, and you’ve forgotten how you muxed your demuxers and your head is becoming mosh …
Keep going. Set the corruption settings wrong. Get 500,000 of your friends to watch it and claim it’s CBS. Wait for a takedown notice. Upload it again.
A hundred uploads later, you might have some new form of art.
Or maybe it’ll just be another useless glitch.
You know what I think will be the “next big thing”? HD without artifacts. But better catch it now, before it gets appropriated.
I'm warming up to this technique, but I love the journey in this post!
How is this done? Ramping up compression on export???
david oreilly has been doing it for years, since his venetian snares video at least
@JoannaEngel: Haha, you beat me to mentioning David's awesome Venetian Snares video. Here's the link:
http://vimeo.com/1715318
"How is this done?"
First vid looks like the gloopy artifacts you get when Media Player Classic screws up trying to play back WMVs.
"You know what I think will be the “next big thing”? HD without artifacts. But better catch it now, before it gets appropriated."
Haha. Fuck. It almost pisses me off, because its true. Fucking Kanye West. That video is pretty awesome. Fuck.
Need to release those glitch plugins already… 😛
hey what track is playing in david oreilky's glitch reel? I love it! I love glitches! I want compression glitches in real life!
[…] en mi corazón. El videoclip hace uso intensivo de una “nueva” técnica que parece que ya se está poniendo de moda. Guste o no, el caso es que hasta ahora no era muy común, […]
drul pixel the. teh pix pi pi aph afgh. $$$342agph. fafpht. 😀 😀 😀 !!!! teh. teh teh!!!!1 fteh ftehapple.>>>>VLC<<<< wmv &&&scrub vidcodec. mma ek 😀 S:D sence video. 😀 ghsg 🙂 VLC VCKL 🙁 wmv wmv ##raghg drool pixels<<<>>>_>baby. 😀 crazy like a fox. 😛 😀 😀 😀 !!!! $$# ragha arugh pi pii pi squeez VLC%%%charflit, flarhfit. ckharlift. 🙁 🙁 bad babyb, bad band. teh teh teh!!!! the
The only one really interesting is indeed the top one. I do like the visual charm of the whole thing (fad?) but the application of it needs work. It failed miserably in Beck's video Youthless, IMHO. Very nice post this! I hadn't noticed it.
CDM's now part of me bookmarks too, laddy! Yarrr….!
David just chipped in on the whole discussion. It's totally true, the effect in these other works has absolutely nothing to do with the music
http://www.davidoreilly.com/2009/02/datamoshing-i…
[…] in the video? Anyway – apparently there’s a more. Over on Create Digital Motion there’s a decent post about this Data Moshing including some visual examples, the one posted here is considered the best one and, well, it […]
[…] Create Digital Motion […]
[…] Via cpluv. Mai multe despre acest subiect pe CDM […]
Finally it's hitting mainstream 🙂 I’ve used the compression artifacts for scene blends in Futures http://vimeo.com/2669109, but it got rejected by the label since it was considered too experimental some years ago…
[…] http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query=datamosh&aq=f http://createdigitalmotion.com/2009/02/18/data-moshing-the-online-videos-my-god-its-full-of-glitch/ […]
[…] home movies, and he seemed to actually speak in a language made up of compression artefacts, and he showed up in comments and said, insightfully I thought: drul pixel the. teh pix pi pi aph afgh. $$$342agph. fafpht. 😀 😀 […]
[…] Data Moshing the Online Videos: My God, It’s Full of Glitch […]
[…] effects that emulate compression artifacts, a technique called “datamoshing.” Here is an overview of some videos using this effect. In the popular realm, Chairlift and Kanye have exploited this […]
[…] doing some digging around on the web, I found some other videos using the same effect, but none quite as good as this one by David […]
Hello
Do you know french artist Jacques perconte that makes film for years with these technics
see uishet or Pauillac, Margaux his last films. i met him on a festival on 2002. i'm not sure he knows about the idea of data moshing… he follows his medium.
[…] techno-cannibalistic imperative, aesthetically, is the digital video editing technique known as Datamoshing (aka. “Pixel Bleed“) – a digital version of Bill Morrison’s Decasia (2002). […]
[…] http://createdigitalmotion.com/2009/02/18/data-moshing-the-online-videos-my-god-its-full-of-glitch/ […]