Datamoshing

When my friend Maxyme showed my this video clip of Welcome to Heartbreak by Kanye West, I was amazed by how they generated and controlled the video compression artifacts. Original. I loved it.

Today I saw Chairlift’s Evident Utensil videoclip, which uses the same technique. I think this one is even better.

From the Wikipedia entry on compression artifacts:

The use of compression artifacts as a visual style, sometimes known as datamoshing, is produced by exploiting the way different video codecs process motion and color information. The technique was pioneered by artists Sven König, Takeshi Murata and Paul B Davis in collaboration with Paperrad, and more recently used by David OReilly and within music videos for Chairlift and Kanye West.

David OReilly really nails it. Check out is Compression Reel.