Exploitation of "the bleeding pixel effect," now a trend called "Datamoshing," is a digital phenomenon that has been receiving attention lately. The effect, created by manipulating digital compression, was recently used in Chairlift's music video for "Evident Utensil" (above or in hi-res) and Kanye West's video for "Welcome to Heartbreak" (youtube) (hi-res).
Both Kanye and Chairlift gave "major props" to digital artist Takeshi Murata (b. 1974, Chicago) for inspiration. Below is footage from his influential 2005 piece, Monster Movie. His video work is hard to come by, but UbuWeb also hosts a quality version of his 2006 film Silver, here.
Melissa Feldman writes for "Art In America":
A main part of Murata's technique involves digitally compressing the footage so that the movement of a series of frames is reduced to a single twitching image that records only the net difference in movement from one frame to the next... The video's visual effects also evoke the way Impressionist painters broke down images into brushwork and blurriness, which similarly gave way to abstraction. For his part, Murata likens the liquid look of his digital distortions to the physical deterioration of old film stock.
Murata graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1997 and was recently featured in a New York Times' special report titled At Last, Artists Harness the Internet.
I like the effects use in each of these instances and all three are surprisingly different in their impressions, I guess related a lot to the content of the music. The Chairlift video reminds the most of messing with the greenscreen-ish app on photobooth in how the composition of the face and details is lost and usually majorly tripped out. I like how in this video its done with the effect of compressing the space, fluidly moving from one interior/exterior space to another. I still wonder how far can this be pushed and what kind of lasting power it has. 'trending'. ?
ReplyDeleteKanye's Effect is the best by far.
ReplyDelete