As mentioned elsewhere, when teaching about glitch subjects we broke them into four categories. Databending was one form, another of the glitch seminar topics was datamoshing. It means manipulating the data – but I always felt that was misleading because a lot of “datamoshing” techniques are really just controlled corruption and misregistration rather than manipulating directly. You delete keyframes in the AVI data to ruin video carefully, and I finally broke down and got the plugin for After Effects that makes it relatively simple (although even then it has some significant bugs). You’re dealing with corrupted files that have been re-encoded, essentially, and there’s even phone apps that do this now – so it’s feeling more domesticated all the time. I have a few experiments – notably the Tokyo Rose video I started working on, but I have some experiments using motion and video to create artifacts and moshed textures. I called my first experiments with that “every_first_step_you_take_will_eventually_make_you_cringe_” because I’d been embarrassed by earlier things I’d done in the past, and I was trying something new again. I still love this series, but I only occasionally return to experimenting with mosh textures because it’s not exactly an effect that I came up with – so while it looks great I think (and my most critically well-appraised piece from my first exhibit) I like to experiment with my own textures more often.
