![kanye west datamosh kanye west datamosh](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/nS7QvOX8LVk/maxresdefault.jpg)
They ran it through a proprietary codec, called “sörensen- 3,” which blended the French plateaus with a person’s figure. “As basis for ‘pastell compressor’ we have been using time- lapse shootings of clouds drifting by, which we took on the plateaus in the south of france ,” they wrote. One of the most influential examples of the technique was a 2003 video called “ Pastell Kompressor,” by the artists Owi Mahn and Laura Baginski. The most recent of which generates 4K imagery from a convoluted youtube search that looks for (among other things) vloggers, beauty/cosmetics vids, sports, and nature/landscape videos.” David KraftsowĪs Kraftsow mentioned, datamoshing is a type of glitch art - which, in the context of art history, can be broadly defined as art created by corrupting or otherwise manipulating an existing file - that has roots in the net art movement of the early aughts. “Then a few years ago” - Februrary 2015 - “I made the app into a Twitter bot, which itself has gone through a few versions. “I refashioned the site and had it look specifically for “vlogger” content to generate stills,” he said. Then, the curators of digital art collective Rhizome asked him to create a more robust version: a desktop app. It started as a website in 2009, where anyone could enter a YouTube URL and see specific glitch effects in their browser - but it was hard to maintain, Kraftsow explains, which meant it didn’t last very long. “It’s actually a somewhat old glitch art project of mine that’s gone through a lot of iterations, the most recent of which is the Twitter bot,” Kraftsow writes to me in an email.
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“The bot uses my own variation on an old glitch art technique called ‘datamoshing,’ which basically generates a specific kind of h264 compression glitch which creates the smeared, pixelated sometimes painterly artifacts you see in the output,” says David Kraftsow, the artist behind ( H.264, also known as MPEG-4 Part 10 or Advanced Video Coding, is a video compression standard - for recording, compression, and distribution - widely used across the internet since around 2014, which provides better video quality than earlier ones.)
![kanye west datamosh kanye west datamosh](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/list/000/640/414/4ca.gif)
There’s a name for this kind of glitched-out aestheticism, and it turns out to have a well-established artistic past. The other day I came across a Twitter bot, which tweeted out screenshots and clips from random YouTube videos - but images and videos were bitcrushed and pixelated and kinetic, more abstract painting than encoding error. And, as I recently learned, prediction is the difference between a YouTube video and glitch art. This is all to say that prediction is key it’s the difference between getting the ball in the back of the net and whiffing entirely, the gap between getting a seat on a crowded train or having to wait, chastened, for the next one. I can hear coach’s voice even now, when I navigate the crush of travelers during New York City’s all-too-frequent rush hours. I wasn’t too great at it, at least not at first.īut the lesson stuck. If we did it right, he promised, we’d be able to do in soccer what Neo does in The Matrix - not, like, stop bullets, but be in the right place at the right time to stop an attack on our goal. “ An-tiiii-ciiiiiii-PAY-shun,” he’d yell at us, while we were diving around for the ball. When I was younger, I had a soccer coach who stressed the importance of anticipation.