Sunday July 19, 2009
Datamoshing

KANYE WEST “Welcome to Heartbreak” Directed by: NABIL from nabil elderkin on Vimeo.

I have noticed in a few music videos I have seen lately (okay it was two, and one of the was Linkin Park, but don’t judge yet) that there is this dodgy looking pixel-mess effect coming into vogue that reminds me of watching downloaded porn on the old crappy family computer. I thought my new mac was shitting it, but nay, it was on purpose.

Anyone who has watched a compressed video file on their computer should know what I’m talking about. When you skip forward through a fair chunk of the movie you get artifacts of the last part stuck on the screen and you can see the pixels moving being pushed around by the bastard ghost of the position you wanted to be watching.

Apparently this is a result of aggressive data compression in formats that use motion prediction (like MPEG). When you move the movie along, until it receives the next independently compressed frame, it keeps remnants of the last pixels, creating interesting colours and patterns.

So we arrive at datamoshing; the use of this usually unwelcome element on purpose as a visual aesthetic. It has been around for a while in different amounts of use and experimentation. It is used in The Presets ‘Are You the One’ and Beck’s ‘Youthless’ (plus more I’m sure), but it took my eye more recently as it has found its way into being the main aesthetic for clips such as Kanye West’s ‘Welcome to Heartbreak’.

Some people seem to hate it, but I love the effect it gives when it reflects the feel of the music such as in ‘Welcome to Heartbreak’. As an effect I think it is one of those that captures something that is a side-effect of our technological culture and flips it back into an artform. I believe we will be seeing much more of this, but hopefully in context and not as a cool fad.
Words by Jimmy

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