pixel rot (2022)

pixel rot  is a datamoshed video montaged from found YouTube videos of abandoned house interiors. It is presented on a television stripped of its plastic shell, resting on a found steel panel covered with chipped paint. My intention was to coalesce the decay of the display surface, the raw presentation of television hardware, and the corruption and displacement of visual information.

The video in this piece was my first successful attempt at datamoshing. The effect produced by datamoshing mimics accidental glitches that can occasionally occur in file compression. Datamoshing is a practice that displaces differential frames by either removing key frames (I-frames) or manipulating delta frames (B- or P-frames), which define the differences between key frames. In this case, selected P-frames were multiplied to corrupt the video structure.

When a video is datamoshed, areas of motion between shots encounter a collision of discontinuity, but this discontinuity also functions as a link, or a glitch-stitch, between the frames, resulting in the distinctive visual effect of the glitch.

Datamosh abstracts the structure of character or action, replacing narrative and legibility with a phantasmagoria of colour. The video is antiproductively deformed through purposeful decay. It is made fuzzier, reduced, showing formations of pixels that imply the image’s corporeal constitution as digital code. Datamoshing appropriates digital decay into a method of absenting images, artificially mutilating video into codified pixel rot.

Photo credit: Frank Piccolo