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kottke.org posts about datamoshing

David Bowie’s Love is Lost (Hello Steve Reich Mix by James Murphy)

James Murphy (LCD Soundsystem) remixed David Bowie’s Love is Lost in the style of minimal music composer Steve Reich. Here’s the video for it by Barnaby Roper:

The video is NSFW, although most of the NS-ness is of the watching scrambled Cinemax on your uncle’s cable in 1985 variety (aka datamoshing).


i’m on my datamosh, glitchin up vide0000ooos

Not even going to try to explain this one. Ok, I’ll try a little…this is Yung Jake singing about datamoshing and making animated gifs and such.

you think it’s connection you think it’s your bandwidth
but its me. i’ll steal your bitch like a bandit
see me on YouTube. fucking with video
find me on world star. find me on Vimeo
im not on PhotoBooth. that shit’s different
cuz dey told me to step out of the frame but i didnt

(via ★philgyford)


Datamoshing

Two is a trend: Kanye West’s video for Welcome to Heartbreak uses the same video compression technique used in Chairlift’s Evident Utensil. The videos were done by two different directors at around the same time, which probably means that neither originated it. 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. (thx, andrew & demetrice)

Update: Here are a few candidates: Takeshi Murata, paperrad, and Mark Brown. (thx, matthew, simon & justin)

Update: Aha, the technique is called datamoshing. (thx, daniel)

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). In 2004, Owi Mahn & Laura Baginski made a video called Pastell Kompressor in which they manipulated the compression keyframes in some timelapse videos. Sven König’s two projects, aPpRoPiRaTe! and Download Finished! originate around the same time (2004/2005). The technique itself seems pretty simple…just ignore the compression keyframes during playback. (thx, philip & sven)