Datamoshing

Posted: February 23rd, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Art, Data Vis | No Comments »

When you think you’ve seen it all, along comes a visual technique that really makes you sit up and take notice. ‘Datamoshing’ with its seriously terrible moniker, hit the mainstream recently with the new Kayne West ‘Welcome to heartbreak’ video.  It breaks in from black into this riot of colour that is so blocky and compressed you think that youtube is actually broken. But it isn’t. It is the intent of the director who employs this techique of glitching out the video and blending the motion together to create something quite mesmerising.

kayne1

But this effect isn’t new. It is very very very old. If you’ve every played a divx video without the right codec installed, you get these compression artifacts because your computer doesn’t understand how to render the video.  I’ve seen it many times when you skip through a video and the frames start to ‘blend’ together, but never investigated if some bright spark had applied it in some creative way. Well, with the Kayne video coming to light, a lot of the design blogs are point towards David OReilly as being one of the first artists/directors to intentionally glitch video.

oreilly

After immersing myself in the world of compression glitching I’m really loving how this technique instantly puts you on edge and unsettles you.  Taking it further and glitching the edits or blowing the compression so much you can’t actually tell what you are looking at really makes you look harder. A brilliant way to subvert the medium.

chairlift

Chairlift – Evident Utenstil

pulsate

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angykitty

Angy Kitty

References -

Shape + Colour

Create Digital Motion

Motiongrapher


NY Times API

Posted: February 20th, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Art, Data Vis | No Comments »

The NY Times have recently released an API allowing developers to access a huge archive of news and data. This is a perfect example of how an open attitude to intellectual property increases brand awareness because people hack/mould/mash/visualise the data in interesting ways.

The brilliant Jer Thorp has starting putting together some stunning data visualisation with processing.

This is a visualization of the frequency of the words ‘socialism’ (orange) and ‘capitalism’ (green) in New York Times articles since 1981.

This visualization reads like a clock. 12:01am is January 1st1984 and 11:59pm is January 1st 2009.

Built in Processing (http://www.processing.org)

See more at flickr.