The first takes a single video as a source and rearranges some key frames to glitch it out. The script I wrote can create two kinds of datamoshes. (Side note: it’s possible and awesome to actually create animated Magic Eyes, but that’s beside the point.)Īs you’ll see, I fell a little short of that stretch goal, but still managed to make something that looks pretty cool. The holy grail would be to use all the motion from one video over all the stills of another, to make sort of an animated Magic Eye effect, but without the eye focus requirement. My goal for this project was to use two separate video sources - to make a “mosh-up,” har har - and to completely automate the merger. In those cases, and in the tutorials and techniques documented since then, the glitches are typically introduced to a single edited video, and done manually in a visual editing program.

It became popular several years ago when it was used in near-simultaneous music videos by Chairlift and Kanye West. On March 25th, 2012, the /r/brokengifs subreddit was launched, featuring animated GIFs created using datamoshing techniques.Making mosh-ups: automated datamoshing from multiple video sources ĭatamoshing is a glitch art technique applied to videos to intentionally create “pixel bleeding” and other digital motion artifacts. On May 16th, 2011, YouTuber Yung Jake uploaded a music video titled 'Datamosh,' which included a variety of compression artifacts (shown below). Within the first four years, the video gathered more than 10.3 million views and 11,400 comments.

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.

On February 24th, 2009, YouTuber datamosher uploaded a datamosh instructional video (shown below, left).

On August 2nd, 2007, YouTuber Michael Crowe uploaded a video titled 'Takeshi Murata,' which featured a montage of datamoshed videos (shown below). 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. According to the tech blog Bit_Synthesis published a post titled 'Datamoshing – the Beauty of Glitch,' the practice of datamoshing had been used by digital artists since at least 2005.

Datamoshing video