About

Datamoshing is the practice of intentionally using compression artifacts in digital video and animated GIFs that is sometimes to referred to as "glitch art."

Origin

According to the tech blog Bit_Synthesis^[4] published a post titled "Datamoshing – the Beauty of Glitch," the practice of datamoshing had been used by digital artists since at least 2005. In 2006, a technique created by artists Betrand Planes and Christian Jacquemin transcodes one lossy video format into another was demonstrated with the modified DivX video codec DivXPrime.^[2][3]

Spread

On August 2nd, 2007, YouTuber Michael Crowe uploaded a video titled "Takeshi Murata," which featured a montage of datamoshed videos (shown below).

On February 24th, 2009, YouTuber datamosher uploaded a datamosh instructional video (shown below, left). On June 16th, rapper Kanye West released the music video for his song "Welcome to the Heartbreak" (shown below), which featured many datamoshed video artifacts. Within the first four years, the video gathered more than 10.3 million views and 11,400 comments.

On May 16th, 2011, YouTuber Yung Jake uploaded a music video titled "Datamosh," which included a variety of compression artifacts (shown below). On March 25th, 2012, the /r/brokengifs^[1] subreddit was launched, featuring animated GIFs created using datamoshing techniques.

Notable Examples

External References