Article

Datamoshing and the

emergence of digital
complexity from
digital chaos

Convergence: The International

Journal of Research into
New Media Technologies
1-12
The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permission:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1354856511433683
con.sagepub.com

William Brown
Roehampton University, UK

Meetali Kutty
Delhi, India

Abstract
In this essay, we explore the aesthetic possibilities that are opened up by datamoshing, a practice
whereby audiovisual artists actively downgrade the quality of digital images in order to render a
more raw aesthetic on screen. We follow this up by exploring the ways in which datamoshing as a
practice (together with glitch art more generally) highlights the decay that digital images undergo
over time. Because it takes place through the deliberate compression of images, we here argue
that the aforementioned loss of quality is an artistic form of entropy, which leads us to the
possibility for a theory of digital chaos. However, since the loss of data is reworked by artists in
order to create new forms, we argue that this is a form of digital emergence of order out of
chaos, or digital complexity.
Keywords
chaos, complexity, datamoshing, digital images, emergence, audiovisual, DVD, artist, Walter
Benjamin

In this essay, we explore the aesthetic possibilities that are opened up by datamoshing, a practice
whereby audiovisual artists actively downgrade the quality of digital images in order to render a
more raw aesthetic on screen. We follow this up by exploring the ways in which datamoshing as a
practice (together with glitch art more generally) highlights the decay that digital images undergo
over time. Because it takes place through the deliberate compression of images, we here argue that
the aforementioned loss of quality is an artistic form of entropy, which leads us to the possibility

Corresponding author:
William Brown, Department of Media, Culture and Language, University of Roehampton, London, SW15 5PU, UK
Email: William.Brown@roehampton.ac.uk

Downloaded from con.sagepub.com at UNIV OF CHICAGO LIBRARY on July 13, 2015

Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies

for a theory of digital chaos. However, since the loss of data is reworked by artists in order to create
new forms, we argue that this is a form of digital emergence of order out of chaos, or digital
complexity.

The myth of perfect reproducibility

Walter Benjamin (2004 [1935]) argues that a work of art loses its aura when it is or can be
mechanically reproduced. The focus of Benjamins famous essay is the politicisation of art/the
aestheticisation of politics in the 1930s with war being the inevitable consequence of this process
(2004: 810). Cinema in particular has the power to shape experience, leading audiences away from
the contemplation of art towards a state of distraction as the film keeps cutting to a new shot before
the viewer has had time to think upon it (2004: 808). As a result, film viewers absorb art as opposed
to being absorbed by the work of art, a position that, as the late Miriam Hansen has pointed out, is
not necessarily a lament as one defined by ambiguity (1987: 187).
In a later essay, Hansen points out that Benjamins work continues to be relevant in the digital
age, where the problems Benjamin confronted persist, albeit in different configurations and at an
exponentially vaster scale (2004: 19). She argues that the digital era, with its video games,
computers, digital effects, and music clips, is more so now than in the 1930s a period of play, a
concept that Benjamin introduced into his 1936 version of the Mechanical reproduction essay,
and which Hansen defines as being a political ecology of the senses (2004: 20). That is, in the
same way that Benjamins essay develops an argument concerning the politicisation of art/the
aestheticisation of politics, and in the same way that cinema in particular can shape our senses
(Benjamins famous example is to compare the camera to the surgeon, who enters into us), then so
too, is life in the digital age defined by negotiating political artworks/aestheticised politics that
change the mode of functioning of societal strata.
The term digital age is perhaps inappropriate, since to speak of the contemporary world as an
age surely means something very different to the age that Benjamin evokes in his essay as
WJT Mitchell points out in his consideration of the work of art in the age of biocybernetic
reproduction (2003: 489). Whereas Benjamin was writing between two world wars in which
technology had very visible and sinister effects on the contemporary world, especially in the realm
of armed conflict, Mitchell argues provocatively that we now live in an era in which technology is
ubiquitous, wars are ongoing and invisible, and yet nothing seems to happen or change that is to
say, it is not an age defined by societal shifts, as per Benjamins, but a static period in which
nothing much seems to shift at all. Furthermore, in the biocybernetic age (in which Mitchell says
that computers and biology are combined at all levels of life, from the fitness club to cloning), the
original artwork may have lost its aura, but the copy is quite probably an improvement upon it,
possessing even more aura than the original (2003: 487). Adobe Photoshop can remove photographic flaws, while genetic engineering can carry out a similar job with regard to physical
flaws on and/or in the body. If the cinema functioned like a surgeon, Mitchell points out, then
now surgery is like cinema, or rather virtual reality, since surgeons can and do now work
remotely and in a virtual environment that is only indirectly connected to the real but absent body
undergoing the surgery (2003: 488).
Mitchell goes on to argue that certain artists can compete with cinema in terms of what
its (political and, in Hansens terms, ecological) effects are, or what work the art can do (2003:
492498). And in some ways this essay will argue with Mitchell that alternative audiovisual
media production practices, namely datamoshing, can do work that competes with the effects of

Downloaded from con.sagepub.com at UNIV OF CHICAGO LIBRARY on July 13, 2015

Brown and Kutty

cinema. But it shall do so by arguing that a digital copy often does not have more aura than the
original, but that in some senses it deliberately has less. In another article that evokes the title of
Benjamins essay, astrophysicist and Leonardo editor Roger F Malina has written that software is
ideally suited for what he terms post-mechanical, or generative, reproduction (1990: 37). In other
words, when software is used in conjunction with an artwork to copy it, something new can be generated (it functions as a genotype) and, we shall add, in the case of the datamosh, and glitch art
more generally, this paradoxically takes place through the deliberate degeneration of the original.
Without wishing too much to twist Benjamins words away from his original intention, then, in
the context of datamoshing and glitch art it is worth remembering that computer technologies and
their appropriation by artists for creative purposes do not bring about the ability perfectly to
reproduce originals in a mechanical/digital fashion even though this belief persists in some
quarters. Holly Willis (2005: 7), for example, argues that:
in terms of reproduction, digital tools allow for the theoretically infinite reproduction of material with
no loss of quality, affording new modes of production based on appropriation and sampling, and
indeed, contributing to a culture of sharing and recycling.

Contra Willis, storing data on a hard drive does not mean that they are kept safe forever, nor are
those data perfectly reproducible. In part, this can be related to technological innovation, which in
turn renders old systems of information storage both in terms of hardware and software
obsolete, such that the data become inaccessible because illegible. However, this is also because
data simply decay. With regard to films, nowhere is this made more apparent than when Disney
and Pixar decided to release Toy Story (John Lasseter, USA, 1995) on DVD in 2000. As Paolo
Cherchi Usai (2001: 100) has explained:
twelve percent of the digital masters had already vanished. For three months, Pixar Animation Studios
staff scoured the system for the toys missing parts salvaging all but one percent of what had been lost
in the computers. The remaining scenes were reassembled. For subsequent Pixar movies, Lasseter said,
we have a better backup system.

In other words, it would appear that even in the space of five years data can vanish or become
corrupted and need to be rewritten, particularly if the artwork containing those data is neglected
and not put to use (e.g. run through a program) from time to time.

Data compression
Furthermore, not only can data be simply corrupted and lost, but so too are data commonly
compressed (typically for the sake of storage space). Stephen Keane (2007: 37) points out that the
original data of a digital film remain the same even though they might be converted into a different
and new file according to whichever output format the filmmaker wishes to use. That is to say, a
filmmaker may wish to convert an .mp4 file of an audiovisual text into a .dv file, but, after Keane, it
is not the original (and invisible) data that are converted, so much as the format in which those
data are outputted. Keane notwithstanding, there is a loss of data that takes place when they are
compressed to fit a new form, such that in an extreme and admittedly non-Benjaminian sense
rarely do we see the original of a film. To create a DVD of a 90-minute film shot on HDV format,
for example, requires the compression of the data that comprise the film, because an uncompressed
90-minute film might typically be 20gb in size (if not significantly more), while the average singlelayer DVD can only hold 4.4gb of information.

Downloaded from con.sagepub.com at UNIV OF CHICAGO LIBRARY on July 13, 2015

Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies

Although the fact of compression is common knowledge and therefore to discuss it runs the risk
of being simplistic, it is important that we make clear what happens during data compression,
because it helps to set up a definition of datamoshing. When the data that make up a film are
compressed to fit onto a DVD, it is not that the original 20gb go on to the 4.4gb disc in a perfectly
miniaturised fashion, but that enormous amounts of those original 20gb are discarded. Typically
this involves keeping all of the data from prominent, or key, frames (hence the term keyframes,
which can also be referred to as i- or image-frames e.g. the first frame after a cut or when there
has been a large amount of change through movement between frames). However, for the frames
between keyframes, commonly referred to as p-frames, only the aspects of the image that have
changed (e.g. pixels whose colour value has shifted) are kept, the unchanged aspects/pixels being
made simply to refer back to the same colour value in the keyframe. The result of compression is
not that all of the original information sits hidden on the DVD, but that it is disconnected from it.1
In this sense, and against Mitchell, a DVD is typically not an improvement on the original
film, even if that film was shot digitally. Indeed, if we can argue that the cinephiles desire to see
films theatrically is in some ways an attempt to confer on to cinema an aura that Benjamin
considered already to be missing, then the digital file stored on a DVD has undergone an even
greater loss of aura, which is not to mention other, older big-to-small screen compression procedures such as pan-and-scanning. Incidentally, in an epoch when Film Studies could just as easily be
called DVD Studies, the study of compressed cinema that is the viewing of feature films on DVD
becomes the legitimisation of studying simulacra, since, if we allow the foregoing logic to stand, to
study DVDs is to study a less auratic version of a form that Benjamin already saw as involving a
loss of aura.
Be that as it may, we shall turn our attention now to those artworks that use the loss of data via
compression and corruption as a means of creativity and expression. To this end, we shall discuss
the practice of datamoshing and glitch art more generally, and we shall consider, after Mitchell,
what work this art form can do.

Datamoshing: Monster Movie

The technique of datamoshing is said to have first been used by artists Takeshi Murata, Sven Konig
and Paul B Davis in collaboration with American art collective Paper Rad (see Pfeiffer, 2009). The
technique (which is sometimes referred to as bleeding pixel effect) involves using compression
artefacts as a visual style. That is, the artists use the changing elements of the p-frames that arise
when video files are compressed and they add these to i-frames from different digital moving
images, with the result that the i-frame of one image, typically paused momentarily on screen, suddenly seems to dematerialise as the moving aspects of the p-frames from another moving image
begin to manifest themselves on, within or from behind it. As a result, blotches or bleeding pixels appear, which might initially be considered glitch-like errors by the viewer, but which the
artists use expressively so as to create new meanings via the bleeding of one image into the
other. For example, Muratas Monster Movie (2005) is a 4-minute video that consists of monsters
intermittently emerging from a swirl of pixellated colours set to a heavy percussion track by
Plate Tectonics.2 The film, which visually recalls early colour-swirling artworks such as Arabesque (1975) by John Whitney and, latterly, Malcolm Le Grices Digital Aberration (2004), can
be considered important in several different ways.
Firstly, Monster Movie literally realises Lev Manovichs (2001: 302) dictum that, from the
perspective of the computer, a digital film is simply colours changing in time since only at

Downloaded from con.sagepub.com at UNIV OF CHICAGO LIBRARY on July 13, 2015

Brown and Kutty

certain moments do recognisable shapes and figures emerge from what is otherwise a swirl of
colours. As Manovich goes on to argue, this emphasis on colours changing in time means that films
become structured less around actors, shots and the conventional vocabulary used to define narrative cinema; instead viewers of datamoshes, Monster Movie in particular, are presented with
colours from which emerge temporarily recognisable shapes that disperse as quickly as they arise.
Secondly, Miriam Hansen reminds us through a reference to Manovich that within cinema there
has been a shift in the relationship between animation and what she terms life-action (2004: 19):
the digital era sees live-action cinema emerge as a subset of animation, as opposed to the other way
round. Hansen then relates this shift to Benjamins interest in Mickey Mouse as a creature capable
of making us re-question the dividing line between self, technology and world. In terms that recall
Mitchells biocybernetic reproduction, Hansen says:
Benjamins Mickey Mouse points toward the general imbrication of physiological impulses with
cybernetic structures which, no longer limited to the imaginative domain of cyber-fiction, has become
common in science and medicine, architecture and design, and a host of other areas. (2004: 19)

Applying these ideas to Muratas film, it is apt that Monster Movie should not only make us question the anthropocentrism of most films by having its monstrous characters seemingly struggle and
only occasionally succeed to differentiate themselves from the colour(s) that surround them, but
the film also suggests that these monsters are inseparable from their background. That is, after
Hansen, the work that Monster Movie does is to suggest that the monsters it depicts are a part
or continuation of the ecology of the film frame, as opposed to being separate from it. The films
images are cybernetic structures, in that they are composed of digital code, but they have seeming
physiological impulses, too, as manifested by the emergence of the monsters from the soup of colour that surrounds them. It is not, then, that Hansen is describing datamoshing avant la lettre, but
her Benjaminian terms provide an apt framework for us to think about this phenomenon.
Thirdly, it is also apt that Murata chooses to use compressed images of monsters in his film,
because the datamosh, not being structured so overtly around character and action, lends itself
more to being understood as a spectacle of colour with little or no narrative. This in turn recalls the
early cinematic mode of production and exhibition defined as monstration by Andre Gaudreault
(1990). According to Gaudreault (inter alia), early films showed rather than told; that is, they were
a form of monstration structured around simply depicting movement. The pre1907 films that he
discusses were not made up of separate shots as narrative cinema came to be through the development of montage, but instead (predominantly) featured single shots, as might best be characterised by Louis and Auguste Lumie`res first films, including Larrivee dun train a` la Ciotat/
Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1896). Since the datamosh is not visibly made up of separate shots,
but instead of various changes in colour only gradually from which does a recognisable shape
emerge, then, so too, might monstration be a suitable framework through which to understand it,
not least because it shows colours punctuated by monstrous shapes, but also because using this
concept of monstration allows us to consider datamoshing within a longer history of audiovisual
media production and artistic practice.

Datamoshing goes mainstream?

Other examples of datamoshing include Konigs Download Finished! made in collaboration
with Bitnik, which is a website that, in the artists own words, transforms and re-publishes
films from p2p networks and online archives,3 and David OReillys Compression Reel

Downloaded from con.sagepub.com at UNIV OF CHICAGO LIBRARY on July 13, 2015

Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies

(2008), which incorporates the artists own earlier animation work such as Octocat Adventure
(also 2008), and which involves a vertiginous onslaught of almost incomprehensible moshed
images (including words) that lend themselves also to the embodied experience that is moshing
at rock concerts.4
More recently, however, datamoshing has been incorporated into commercial music videos for
Kanye West and electro-pop group Chairlift. Directed by Ray Tintori, Chairlifts music video for
Evident Utensil (2009) uses datamoshing to create a psychedelic, mind-bending trip with the
members of the band, while the video for Kanye Wests Welcome to Heartbreak (also 2009)
involves a grittier take on the technique. The video, directed by Nabil Elderkin with contributions
from Ghost Town Media, involves West and contributing singer Kid Cudi melting into each other
as an otherwise photorealistic image becomes pixellated/moshed before reforming as another
photorealistic or nearly photorealistic image of the other singer.5 Given that the song is a (banal)
lament about the difficulties of being a multi-million dollar-earning rapper, the technique as used
in the video does lend itself to existential interpretations: as West melts into, becomes dominated
by and then re-emerges from the background colours that surround him, viewers might get a sense
of the difficulty that West has in asserting his individuality in the world, because this seems literally to be what we see as West is swallowed up by and intermittently emerges from the backdrop of
pixels around him.
Finally, datamoshing has also found its way into the mainstream film industry, although still
through the music video form, since the technique is used in the video to Linkin Parks song, New
Divide.6 New Divide is the title song from Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (Michael Bay,
2009), and the video features the band and the disguised robots from the film morphing into each
other in a now-familiar swirl of colour. Despite the vapidity of the film, again the technique here
seems appropriate in that the constant transformations that come about as a result of the datamoshing reflect the unsteady nature of the robots in the film, an unsteady nature that challenges the conventional notions of cinematic subjectivity as being fixed or stable, and which instead recall
Mitchells Benjamin-inspired biocybernetic age in which the dividing line between the machinic
and the living, between the organic and the inorganic, is being challenged. Furthermore, to borrow
a concept from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1984), this datamosh (and perhaps the film more
generally) might suggest a subjectivity that constantly is in the process of becoming, to which we
shall return later, particularly as it relates to the concept of emergence.7

Datamoshing, glitch art and time

First, however, we shall place datamoshing within the wider and more established practice of glitch
art. In an argument reminiscent of Malinas discussed earlier, Olga Goriunova and Alexei Shulgin
(2008: 111114) propose that glitches are computings aesthetic core, and that by disrupting the
ways in which computer-generated art conforms to the conventions of human spatial organisation,
glitches allow us to rethink computer art and, we shall add, space and time themselves. This
rethinking may not, as Goriunova and Shulgin themselves admit, be one-hundred percent compatible with customary human logic, visual, sound, or behavioural conventions of organizing and acting in space. This indeed seems to be true when we look at Monster Movie, Welcome to
Heartbreak and New Divide. Their contents are hard to describe in terms of where and when the
different shots take place and how they are related to each other, that is to say, using the conventional
criteria of spatiotemporal measurement in much the same way that, after Manovich, they are hard
to define using the conventional terms of shots, actors, and narrative, which in turn means that a

Downloaded from con.sagepub.com at UNIV OF CHICAGO LIBRARY on July 13, 2015

Brown and Kutty

concept from early silent cinema, monstration, seems a more appropriate theoretical framework
through which to understand them.
Demanding as these works are of an unconventional reading, we shall also propose that, in
addition to the Benjaminian and film historical readings offered earlier (via Hansen and
Mitchell, and Gaudreault respectively), a Deleuze-Guattarian reading is also appropriate. As per
the earlier reference to becoming, the contents of datamoshes suggest the schizophrenic subjectivity that lies at the heart of Deleuze and Guattaris work on Capitalism and Schizphrenia
(1984, 2002). They argue that through our interactions with other people and objects (or the
assemblages with them that we co-constitute), we are constantly changing/becoming. As a
result, we do not have fixed subjectivities, nor are we reducible to a single essence, but instead
we are defined by complexity and plurality; in effect we are all of our relations, not one or some
of them more than any others. Since the characters or monsters in datamoshes are similarly
without a fixed subjectivity, instead being able at any moment to melt into or form an assemblage
with the background/another image, what Deleuze and Guattari would term a schizoanalytic
interpretation, whereby no one image or (part of the) frame is more accurate than the others,
seems most appropriate.
What the schizoanalytic approach in turn suggests is that the time of the datamosh is not a
linear time dominated by human action. If, within film studies at least, audiovisual media are
traditionally understood as involving a chronological temporality, the rhythm and tempo of which
is dominated by human action/movement (see, for example, Deleuzes Cinema 1: The MovementImage, 2005a), then it is not that human movement disappears from the datamosh, since we at
times do see human figures moving (for example, we see musicians performing). Rather, it is that
the human temporality comes into contact with a different temporality, that of the background
into which the humans and monsters melt and from which they subsequently emerge. If earlier,
after Mitchell and Hansen, we described this humanbackground relationship as an ecological
one, this is not because we are seeing humans interacting with nature when we watch a datamosh.
However, this relationship is ecological in the sense that we are seeing humans interact with/
assemble with, or from, pixels; that is, within the frame of the datamosh, the human and monstrous
figures have an ecological relationship/form an ecology/form a network with computers (for more
on such media ecologies, see Matthew Fuller, 2005). And the computer has its own temporality.
In a comparison of computer time and human time, Steve Goodman (2008: 256259)
explains that, after Henri Bergson (1944 [1911]), humans do not experience time in discrete units, a
conception that led Bergson so vehemently to attack the cinematograph for its breaking up of
duration into the units that are frames, but that the computer does. Indeed, if each moment in a
humans life passes from one into the other in a chronological fashion (but in such a way that we
cannot easily distinguish when one moment ends and another begins), the computer organises time
in such a way that different moments can be accessed not in a uniquely linear fashion, but in a
random manner, akin to a database (see Manovich, 2001: 219221). The datamosh sees these two
temporalities interpenetrate each other, not least as the human and the background seem to do
literally that. Datamoshing involves a rearrangement of the humancomputer assemblage as the
(digital) environment comes to the fore, engulfing and swallowing up those human (or, in Monster
Movie, monstrous) figures that typically we might think of as agents. Furthermore, this rearrangement takes place as the films dart back and forth between characters and perspectives in a
swirl of colours changing in time. As a result of this visual expression of two interpenetrating or
assembling temporalities, we feel tempted to argue that the datamosh constitutes, after Gilles
Deleuze (2005b), a sort of digital time image.

Downloaded from con.sagepub.com at UNIV OF CHICAGO LIBRARY on July 13, 2015

Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies

The emergence of digital complexity from digital chaos

Although he is not referring to Holly Willis work, Adrian Mackenzie reminds us of Willis
assumption concerning the perfect reproducibility of digital data when he says that technology is
often framed as neutralising contingency by increasing technological mediation (2002: 218).
Since the datamosh takes p-frames from one image and inserts them into i-frames from other
images, the practice reflects on how compression leads to precisely a contingent change in the
otherwise perfectly reproducible image, which the artist subsequently reworks into a novel form.
If the degradation of artworks through compression (and glitches) can be equated to entropy,
then this degradation can be linked to chaos the decay that digital information undergoes over
time, as mentioned earlier via Paolo Cherchi Usai in the context of the source files for Toy Story.
However, if a new and artistic form is created out of these supposedly degraded images, then,
after Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers (1984), datamoshing can be seen to constitute a form
of digital order out of chaos.
Claire Evans film, Digital Decay III (2007), was created in response to artist Douglas Davis
pronouncement that digital bits can be endlessly reproduced, without degradation, always the same,
always perfect8 a pronouncement that featured in his 1995, Walter Benjamin-inspired essay
The work of art in the age of digital reproduction (Davis, 1995). Evans film features this sentence
shown in hundreds of repeatedly more compressed versions until it becomes illegible, suggesting
that, contra Davis, entropy is as much a part of the digital lifecycle as it is a part of reality.
The second law of thermodynamics suggests that entropy, or increased levels of disorganisation
or chaos, is inevitable within a closed system and that this process is irreversible (for an overview,
see Gleick, 1998: 931). The typical example given is that two liquids are held in a container in two
separate compartments. This initial condition is deemed to be a highly ordered state: the liquids are
perfectly separated. When the partition that separates the liquids is removed, the liquids mix and
will continue to do so until there is an even spread between them, such that they are considered to
be in the most disorganised state possible (in spite of the fact that the word even in the phrase
even spread lends itself to notions of order, and not disorder). This process is irreversible because
it is highly improbable that the liquids will at any point spontaneously separate out again and
reachieve an ordered state. In a similar fashion, then, it is highly unlikely that a compressed or
corrupted digital image file will spontaneously reorganise itself into the ordered and recognisable
image that once it was.
However, while according to physicists entropy is seemingly inevitable in closed systems
(water within the container; the digital file on a computer), the biological world, in which
complex organisms and, on a grander scale, complex ensembles of complex organisms emerge,
would seem to disprove this (Prigogine and Stengers, 1984: xxix). After Humberto R Maturana
and Francisco J Varela (1991), self-organisation or autopoiesis occurs; or, as biologist Jack
Cohen and mathematician Ian Stewart argue, chaos collapses and complexity emerges (Cohen
and Stewart, 1994: 251252).
What is it that marks this shift from chaos to complexity? Firstly, if chaos theory applies only to
closed systems, then perhaps complexity theory applies more rightly to open systems. What is
allowed to happen in an open system is the possibility for order to emerge out of chaos, with
emergence proving a key term in this process. And yet what is it that defines a system as open as
opposed to closed? With regard to biological complexity, life is of course a key ingredient, in that
life involves what we might term a will to organisation that is not often attributed to inert matter.
But to name life as this ingredient is not enough, for this is in some respects as vague a term as

Downloaded from con.sagepub.com at UNIV OF CHICAGO LIBRARY on July 13, 2015

Brown and Kutty

openness and it simply transposes the question from what is openness? to what is life?
Rather, what seems to differentiate the closed from the open system is time, the element that
Prigogine and Stengers feel must be rediscovered in order for physics to meet the challenge that
biology sets before it (1984: 213232). Time here is not simply clock time, but it is the differing
temporalities that are at the base of human perception and experience, and which lead Bergson to
his concepts of duration and creative evolution. In the spirit of Prigogine and Stengers, but
drawing also upon contemporary string theory, according to which the smallest particles of
which the universe is made, quanta, do not so much differentiate in kind but in the frequency with
which they oscillate (i.e. they differentiate according to their temporalities; see Greene, 2000),
everything can be said to have its own duration, its own temporality. From this perspective,
complexity, order out of chaos, or life, is what emerges from the interpenetration not of matter
itself, but of the differing temporalities, the differing tempos in which that matter oscillates. The
simultaneous coexistence of different temporalities, then, is what keeps a system open and which
allows for emergence to take place.
If everything has its own temporality, then complexity, or the emergence of order out of chaos,
which here we are also equating to life, does not apply simply to living organisms. Mackenzies
definition of transduction is here useful, in that the dissolution of the boundary between the living
and the non-living (2002: 173176) is necessary if we are fully to understand what it is that technology is and does. Mackenzie, like Mitchell with his theory of Benjaminian biocybernetic reproduction, sees the human/biological and the technological as inseparable, and life is what emerges
from the interaction between the two, not as something brought to the assemblage between them
by the biological alone. Given the foregoing discussion, particularly at the level of quanta, we
see the interpenetration of temporalities that are the conditions for life not as the interpenetration
of specifically biological and technological temporalities, but as the interpenetration of temporalities tout court.
With regard to datamoshing, it seems that we are confronted with a visual expression again of a
certain complexity theory. Digital images may undergo entropy when left alone (i.e. when in a
closed system, as per the Toy Story files), but this does not mean that they are not susceptible to
interventions here, on the part of an artist. What the artist does is to reappropriate the chaos of
the corrupted/compressed file and to turn it into an artwork, or what we shall argue here is a new
order. The same seems to happen visually in the films: from the digital soup and swirling colours
changing in time, patterns seem spontaneously to emerge, such that a new aesthetic meaning
occurs. In the same way that the process of order out of chaos seems in many respects to defy
common sense logic, which is predicated upon stability and an absence of change, so, too, do the
datamoshes visualise a non-common sense logic of changing subjectivity, swallowing up and
emergence, or what in short we shall call, after Manovich (2001) and Deleuze and Guattari
(1984) combined, colours becoming in time. What to some observers is an error or a thing of ugliness, precisely because it appears to be disordered, is to others a thing of beauty, a new type of
order that challenges and allows our conceptions of beauty to evolve.
Glitch art and datamoshing may both lie at the margins of computer science, art and filmmaking, but it is precisely on the margins or boundaries that an otherwise closed system is open to
and will first of all experience the effects of change, that is, the effects of the future, of time itself. It
may be here on the margins that the illogical predominates, but it is the mixing of the different/
illogical temporality of the margin with the logical temporality of the mainstream that enables
creativity, or evolution, to take place. In this sense, datamoshing as a practice is a necessary outlier
that belongs to a different temporality, perhaps what we can call the future. The entropy of digital

Downloaded from con.sagepub.com at UNIV OF CHICAGO LIBRARY on July 13, 2015

10

Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies

data may from a certain point of view be inevitable and irreversible (and cause for dismay/
pessimism), but from another perspective, it is an opportunity to redefine art, to create something
new, and, to reintroduce a word that has in this essay been problematised via Walter Benjamin,
and which we do not wish now to deproblematise, to create something original. Counterintuitive to many though this may seem, therefore, we put forward the notion that datamoshes
constitute a new type of time-image, one that will inevitably fade, but which for the time being
remains an image of the future in our present. They are, as argued at the outset of this essay, an
art form that deliberately embraces a loss of aura in order, paradoxically, to have, after Mitchell,
even more aura.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank their anonymous reviewer(s) for the excellent suggestions made in
improving this article.
Notes
1. To complicate matters further, it is unlikely that two monitors or web browsers in the case of online films
will reproduce colours exactly. In other words, it is very difficult if not impossible to assert with authority
that one can watch the original version of any film.
2. Monster Movie can be seen online at http://www.youtube.com/watch? vt1f3St51S9I (consulted 12
March 2010).
3. Download Finished! can be seen at http://www.download-finished.com/ (consulted March 2010).
4. Compression Reel can be viewed at http://www.vimeo.com/2564771, while OReillys website is at http://
www.davidoreilly.com/ (both consulted March 2010).
5. Welcome to Heartbreak can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch? vwMH0e8kIZtE (consulted
March 2010).
6. New Divide can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch? vysSxxIqKNN0 (consulted March
2010).
7. Of Wong Kar-Wais Ashes of Time (1994), Ackbar Abbas (2006: 86) writes that [t]hings have now been
speeded up to such an extent that what we find is only a composition of light and colour in which all
action has dissolved a kind of abstract expressionism or action painting. It is not possible, therefore,
to discern who is doing what to whom. What Abbas says of Wongs film may extend to a number of
contemporary films, particularly those using digital technology and whose style is defined by what
David Bordwell (2002, 2006: 117189) would term intensified continuity. That is, the datamosh being
colours changing in time makes clear a major practice taking place within digital and narrative filmmaking practice: namely that it, too, is no longer uniquely structured around human agents, but also colours
changing in time.
8. Digital Decay III can be viewed at http://rhizome.org/editorial/2115 (consulted March 2010).

References
Abbas A (2006) The New Hong Kong cinema and the Deja` Disparu. In: Eleftheriotis D and Needham G (eds)
Asian Cinemas: A Reader and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 7299.
Benjamin W (2004 [1935]) The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In: Braudy L and Cohen M
(eds) Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings (6th edn). Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.
791811.
Bergson H (1944 [1911]) Creative Evolution (trans. A Mitchell). London: Modern Library.

Downloaded from con.sagepub.com at UNIV OF CHICAGO LIBRARY on July 13, 2015

Brown and Kutty

11

Bordwell D (2002) Intensified continuity: Visual style in contemporary American film. Film Quarterly 55(3):
1628.
Bordwell D (2006) The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies, Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Cherchi Usai P (2001) The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory and the Digital Dark Age. London:
British Film Institute.
Cohen J and Stewart I (1994) The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World, London:
Penguin.
Davis D (1995) The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction: An Evolving Thesis 19911995. Available
at: http://cristine.org/borders/Davis_Essay.html (accessed March 2010).
Deleuze G (2005a) Cinema 1: The Movement Image (trans. H Tomlinson and B Habberjam). London:
Continuum.
Deleuze G (2005b) Cinema 2: The Time Image (trans. H Tomlinson and R Galeta). London: Continuum.
Deleuze G and Guattari F (1984) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (trans. R Hurley, M Seem and
HR Lane). London: Athlone Press.
Deleuze G and Guattari F (2002) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (trans. B Massumi).
London and New York: Continuum.
Fuller M (2005) Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture. Cambridge, MA and
London: MIT Press.
Gaudreault A (1990) Showing and telling: Image and word in early cinema (trans. J Howe). In: Elsaesser T
and Barker A (eds) Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative. London: British Film Institute, pp.
274281.
Gleick J (1998) Chaos: The Amazing Science of the Unpredictable. London: Vintage.
Goodman S (2008) Timeline (Sonic). In: Fuller M (ed.) Software Studies: A Lexicon. Cambridge, MA and
London: MIT Press, pp. 256259.
Goriunova O and Shulgin A (2008) Glitch. In: Fuller M (ed.) Software Studies: A Lexicon. Cambridge, MA
and London: MIT Press, pp. 111114.
Greene B (2000) The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate
Theory. London: Vintage.
Hansen M (1987) Benjamin, cinema, and experience: The blue flower in the land of technology. New German Critique 40(winter): 179224.
Hansen MB (2004) Room-for-play: Benjamins gamble with cinema. Canadian Journal of Film Studies
13(1): 227.
Keane S (2007) CineTech: Film, Convergence and New Media. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Mackenzie A (2002) Tranductions: Bodies and Machines at Speed. London and New York: Continuum.
Malina RF (1990) Digital image, digital cinema: The work of art in the age of post-mechanical reproduction.
Leonardo Supplemental Issue 3 (Digital Image, Digitial Cinema: SIGGRAPH 90 Art Show Catalog):
3338.
Manovich L (2001) The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press.
Maturana HJ and Varela FJ (1980) Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Boston, MA and
London: Reidel.
Mitchell WJT (2003) The work of art in the age of biocybernetic reproduction. Modernism/modernity 10(3):
481500.
Pfeiffer A (2009) At last, artists harness the internet. The New York Times, 11 September 2009. Available at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/12/arts/12iht-rcartech.html?_r1&partnerrss&emcrss&pagewanted
all (accessed March 2010).
Prigogine I and Stengers I (1984) Order out of Chaos: Mans New Dialogue with Nature. London:
Heinemann.
Willis H (2005) New Digital Cinema: Reinventing the Moving Image. London: Wallflower Press.

Downloaded from con.sagepub.com at UNIV OF CHICAGO LIBRARY on July 13, 2015

12

Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies

Biographies
William Brown is a lecturer in Film at Roehampton University, UK. He has published on digital technology
and cinema in the book Film Theory and Contemporary Hollywood Movies (Routledge, 2009), Animation: An
Interdisciplinary Journal, Studies in European Cinema and New Review of Film and Television Studies. He is
the author of Supercinema: Film Theory in the Digital Age (forthcoming).
Meetali Kutty is an independent scholar based in Delhi, India. Her research interests include Indian cinema
of the 2000s. She holds an MA in Film from the University of St Andrews, UK.

Downloaded from con.sagepub.com at UNIV OF CHICAGO LIBRARY on July 13, 2015