
It’s hard to ignore the way the internet and new media affect the speed of any given artistic movements course, things jump from the underground to the mainstream with out ever having really integrating itself into popular culture.Īs for this being an “effect” I will also have to disagree. I don’t think the small time gap between the “early” work and the Kanye West video is a result of “basing one's art on an effect” but rather more a product of digital art’s modus operandi. Once the wow factor is past it's just old movies (or whatever) set to spooky festival music. Of the two examples you've given, the Murata is the weaker for that reason. That you are calling the Davis/Rad and Murata "two early examples" when they preceded the West vid by a year or two shows the futility of basing one's art on an effect. He talks about the *content* of the datamosh (although he doesn't use the word datamosh) and questions the role (and sufficiency) of the artist-as-editor. Davis/Paper Rad piece: on YouTube it says "Umbrella Zombie Mistake" but here you are calling it "Umbrella Zombie Datamosh Mistake." Where did you find the revised title?ĭavis posted some of his code (with amusing comments) in a PDF for an exhibition called "Structures Found/Structures Lost." He also has some commentary about recycling pop culture. The technique itself seems pretty simple… just ignore the compression keyframes during playback.Question about the title of the Paul B. Sven König’s two projects, aPpRoPiRaTe! and Download Finished! originate around the same time (2004/2005). In 2004, Owi Mahn & Laura Baginski made a video called Pastell Kompressor in which they manipulated the compression keyframes in some timelapse videos.

Update: There’s a bit of datamoshing in this 2005 David O’Reilly clip and even more in a 2005 video made by Kris Moyes (Moyes briefly uses the same technique in this 2008 video for Beck). Update: Aha, the technique is called datamoshing.

Update: Here are a few candidates: Takeshi Murata, paperrad, and Mark Brown. Does anyone know what the Patient Zero is for this technique? This Radiohead video for Videotape comes close but doesn’t use the compression artifacts to cleverly cut between scenes…which is the real artful moment here. The videos were done by two different directors at around the same time, which probably means that neither originated it.

Two is a trend: Kanye West’s video for Welcome to Heartbreak uses the same video compression technique used in Chairlift’s Evident Utensil.
