Uploaded December 2020 | Updated September 2026, 4 days ago
Marked by a peculiar combination of fluidic transformations and pixelated patterns, compression glitches have come to be regarded as minor but unavoidable instances of seemingly random image distortion. But a closer look at the visual qualities of glitches, and at the process of compression, reveals a systematic intelligence at work that is directly related to the technological processes underlying digital compression's reproduction of movement.
This video essay demonstrates through datamoshing how compression glitches make those processes visible. Though they indeed degrade, obscure, and roughen cinema’s lifelike reproduction of a world in motion, in doing so compression glitches create new ways of seeing the movements of the moving image—their shapes, their intensities, their forms.
Marked by a peculiar combination of fluidic transformations and pixelated patterns, compression glitches have come to be regarded as minor but unavoidable instances of seemingly random image distortion. But a closer look at the visual qualities of glitches, and at the process of compression, reveals a systematic intelligence at work that is directly related to the technological processes underlying digital compression's reproduction of movement.
This video essay demonstrates through datamoshing how compression glitches make those processes visible. Though they indeed degrade, obscure, and roughen cinema’s lifelike reproduction of a world in motion, in doing so compression glitches create new ways of seeing the movements of the moving image—their shapes, their intensities, their forms.
