datamosh
datamosh verb: to intentionally corrupt a digital video, creating a surreal effect.
Verb
datamosh (third-person singular simple present datamoshes, present participle datamoshing, simple past and past participle datamoshed)
- To intentionally corrupt a digital video, creating a surreal effect.
- To understand datamoshing, you need to know about I- and P-frames. Digital video files are made up of sequences of different types of frames. I-frames (also referred to as keyframes) are full representations of a single frame of the video.2009 April 28, Ben Baker-Smith, “Datamoshing – The Beauty of Glitch -- Bit_Synthesis”, in Bit_Synthesis (blog), archived from the original on 16 Nov 2010
- Still frames from a datamoshed (glitched) MPEG video showing time–motion displacement (the graphic, repeating elements).2016, Michael Betancourt, Beyond Spatial Montage: Windowing, or the Cinematic Displacement of Time, Motion, and Space, Routledge
Noun
datamosh (plural datamoshes)
- A video that has been datamoshed.
- Murata creates his glitch video from software packages such as AfterEffects and the DivX codec (a program used to read or write media files), though the pixel bleed effect has become so popular that developers and artists have recently introduced datamosh plug-ins for existing software.2015, Gregory Zinman, “Getting Messy: Chance and Glitch in Contemporary Video Art”, in Gabrielle Jennings, editor, Abstract Video: The Moving Image in Contemporary Art, University of California...
- Contrary to the notion of continuous space put forward in the last chapter, characters in films do not melt into their surroundings and become lost in a soup of colour – except perhaps in the datamoshes that Meetali Kutty and I have explored elsewhere in relation to theories of chaos and complexity...2015, William Brown, Supercinema: Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age, Berghahn Books, →ISBN, page 52
Examples of datamosh in a sentence
- In datamoshed works, time seems to stall, streak or speed ahead in unpredictable ways.2017, Allan Cameron, “Facing the Glitch: Abstraction, Abjection and the Digital Image”, in Beugnet Martine Beugnet, editor, Indefinite...
- The chorus lyrics, when combined with West’s intensified vocal expression and the datamoshed images, communicate the subject’s desperate need to intervene in his life and make a change.2017, Marc Lafrance, Lori Burns, Alyssa Woods, “Doing hip-hop masculinity differently: Exploring Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak through...
- Exhibited as a three-channel video installation or as a theatrically projected single-screen work of experimental video, The Memory of a Landscape features an array of datamoshed images.2019, James J. Hodge, Sensations of History: Animation and New Media Art, University of Minnesota Press, →ISBN:
Forms of datamosh
| Verb | |
|---|---|
| third-person singular present | datamoshes |
| present participle | datamoshing |
| past participle | datamoshed |
| past | datamoshed |
| Noun | |
| plural | datamoshes |
Origin of datamosh
From data + mosh, coined in 2007 by the art collective Paper Rad in their Video Art project umbrella zombie datamosh mistake (copied from orignal title circa 2008).
Questions about datamosh
- What does datamosh mean?
- Datamosh means to intentionally corrupt a digital video, creating a surreal effect.
- How do you use datamosh in a sentence?
- In datamoshed works, time seems to stall, streak or speed ahead in unpredictable ways.
- What part of speech is datamosh?
- Datamosh can be a verb or a noun.
- What is the past tense of datamosh?
- The past tense of datamosh is datamoshed.
Words near datamosh in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: datamosh (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “datamosh.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/datamosh. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.