Datamosh — a video that melts and tears

On screen

What Datamosh shows

Datamosh mimics the glitch of a video that lost its keyframes: the pixels of the previous frame keep being pushed by the motion of the new one, and the picture melts, tears into sixteen-pixel blocks and bleeds into the next. The source is a bright video that changes scene on every bar: the cover zooming, the cover tiled in a grid, spinning neon shapes, the title in giant capitals, a tunnel of colour.

On the strong beats a clean frame snaps everything back; in between, the colours of the previous scene flow into the shapes of the new one. Blocks freeze, posterize, the image tears into bands, the colours split. In the build-up clean frames grow rare and everything melts; on the drop, a blazing frame, a flash, then a bar of blocks exploding outward. For bass music, techno, hip-hop, trap, electro and hyperpop.