P-frames are “predictive frames,” which hold abstract information - essentially, they store data for how the video’s pixels move, and nearly nothing else. As an excellent tutorial has it, I-frames are “inter frames,” which means they contain the frames’ image data. Essentially, there are three kinds of frames, which store compressed images: I-frames, P-frames, and B-frames. In 2009, Kanye West would use the technique in his video “Welcome To Heartbreak.”Ĭonceptually, datamoshing is pretty easy: To create the most basic version of those dramatic, pixelated effects, all you have to do is take advantage of how videos are encoded. Two years later, the artist Takeshi Murata created “Monster Movie,” which blended footage from a 1981 B-movie and a heavy soundtrack and which is now in the permanent collection at the Smithsonian as perhaps the most influential piece in the datamosh canon. 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. As 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.

Datamosh avidemux