datamosh
Language: English
Part of speech: verb
Forms: form: datamoshes
form: datamoshing
form: datamoshed
form: datamoshed
Etymology: From data + mosh.
Senses: examples: text: Still frames from a datamoshed (glitched) MPEG video showing time–motion displacement (the graphic, repeating elements).
ref: 2016, Michael Betancourt, Beyond Spatial Montage: Windowing, or the Cinematic Displacement of Time, Motion, and Space, Routledge:
text: In datamoshed works, time seems to stall, streak or speed ahead in unpredictable ways.
ref: 2017, Allan Cameron, “Facing the Glitch: Abstraction, Abjection and the Digital Image”, in Beugnet Martine Beugnet, editor, Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty, Edinburgh University Press, →ISBN:
text: Beyond flickering frames and ticking timers, embodied habits and muscle memory, crowdfunding platforms and advertising campaigns, there are still games around these games that continue to elude their ends, games that take place across a wide range of media—from chain letters, scavenger hunts, geocaches, dead drops, public performance, and other forms of locative media to web rings, spectrographic imagery, datamoshed images, SSTV transmissions, and hundreds of cryptographic codes to disguise and disseminate their gameplay.
ref: 2017, Stephanie Boluk, Patrick LeMieux, Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames, University of Minnesota Press, →ISBN:
text: The chorus lyrics, when combined with West’s intensified vocal expression and the datamoshed images, communicate the subject’s desperate need to intervene in his life and make a change.
ref: 2017, Marc Lafrance, Lori Burns, Alyssa Woods, “Doing hip-hop masculinity differently: Exploring Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak through word, sound, and image”, in Stan Hawkins, editor, The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music and Gender, Routledge:
text: As well, director Ray Tintori released a comprehensive, three-part YouTube tutorial titled “how to datamosh,” and Tom Butterworth has written software for Quartz Composer that allows you to datamosh and play with compression artifacts in real time.
ref: 2019, Clint Enns, “Hardware Hacking, Software Modding, and File Manipulation: Process Cinema in the Digital Age”, in Scott MacKenzie, Janine Marchessault, editors, Process Cinema: Handmade Film in the Digital Age, McGill-Queen’s University Press, →ISBN, page 492:
text: Exhibited as a three-channel video installation or as a theatrically projected single-screen work of experimental video, The Memory of a Landscape features an array of datamoshed images.
ref: 2019, James J. Hodge, Sensations of History: Animation and New Media Art, University of Minnesota Press, →ISBN:
text: Thus, while compression glitches make these processes (fleetingly) visible, and whereas “datamoshed” videos like Takeshi Murata’s Monster Movie (2005) aestheticize the out-of-order execution of compressed video by removing the integral I-Frames and allowing the predictive P- and B-Frames to draw wonderfully psychedelic forms on the screen, it is important not to reduce the impact of compression to a purely “correlative,” perceptual one (as I argued in relation to Jordan Schonig’s analysis in chapter 2).
ref: 2020, Shane Denson, Discorrelated Images, Duke University Press, →ISBN:
text: By now the original movie.mov seems to slowly disappear in the desktop background, which itself features a ‘datamoshed’ shark video (datamoshing is the colloquial term for the purposeful deconstruction of an .mpeg, or any other video compression using intraframe/keyframe standard).
ref: 2020, Rosa Menkman, “Refuse to Let the Syntaxes of (a) History Direct Our Futures”, in Daniel Rubinstein, editor, Fragmentation of the Photographic Image in the Digital Age, Routledge, page 117:
text: Though there are many tools and methods for datamoshing, from various software programs designed for codec breakage to downloading incomplete movie files, the general means by which a datamoshed video are produced involve intervening in the codec’s regimented organization of compressed video frames, specifically what are known as I-Frames and P-Frames.
ref: 2022, Jordan Schonig, The Shape of Motion: Cinema and the Aesthetics of Movement, Oxford University Press, →ISBN, pages 162–163:
coordinate_terms: databend
glosses: To intentionally corrupt a digital video, creating a surreal effect.