Kanye West is moshed with trippy editing technique datamoshing.

“Who did it first?” is a common refrain in the world of music videos. A cleverly-conceived clip comes out and the commenter cavalry materializes, armed with examples of pioneering promos featuring similar styles or stunts.
Typically the “who did it first?” debate is quick to devolve into a self-serving exercise in one-upmanship, yet for the image-conscious artist, it’s still important not to be perceived as a trend follower. One such artist is, of course, Kanye West, who prematurely released his video for “Welcome to Heartbreak” last month after a video for indie band Chairlift using the same visual technique made the rounds online.

“We know there is another video out there using the same technique,” he explained on his blog. “So we were forced to drop it now.” The technique is “datamoshing”, a messy, digital glitch effect achieved by removing keyframes during editing from compressed video files. The result resembles a frozen, pixilated digital cable channel or a washed-out YouTube clip.

First seen in the work of video artists such as Owi Mahn and Laura Baginski, Takeshi Murata and David OReilly, datamoshing proved a trippy transition in Kris Moyes’ music videos for The Presets and Beck and was recently used to overwhelming effect in Ray Tintori’s aforementioned Chairlift video, “Evident Utensil”.

With “Welcome To Heartbreak”, datamoshing went mainstream. Director Nabil Elderkin and Ghost Town Media editor/VFX supervisor Ryan Bartley sought to push the technique into the commercial realm by layering moshed and un-moshed footage of West and Kid Cudi performing against a green screen for a cleaner, more fluid effect than seen previously.
“It’s a song about the destructive nature within,” says Elderkin. “Amongst many other techniques used in this video, datamoshing was a great way for transitioning movement and journeying from one scene to the next.”

Elderkin thought the effect’s error message association complimented both West’s Auto-Tuned vocals and lyrical frustration. To emphasize the “broken” feeling, he also surrounds West with signifiers of faulty video technology: static, color bars and scrambled signals.

“Kanye has to see himself so it can’t be just muddy, crazy and all over the place,” says Bartley. “The video was not completely about the effect, so we had to make the situations that Kanye and Kid Cudi are in extremely interesting and artistic in their own right.”

On his blog, David OReilly criticized the recent attention given to datamoshing as unnecessary hype. “It was obvious it would eventually hit mainstream and join the ranks of interesting effects which become embarrassing after they’re easy to do,” he wrote. “My goal aesthetically has always been the broader aim of simply not hiding the artifacts of software, the same way Bacon didn’t hide paint strokes.”

Bartley also sees “Welcome To Heartbreak” as a kind of technological image deconstruction – it’s just a more commercial example. “This [effect] is something that normally pisses people off when they’re watching Time Warner. It’s something that makes people upset, so we wanted to use it over and over to suggest the beauty in its movement,” he says. “We would love to see it evolve and we want to see who can take it to a more artistic level or use it in a new way.”

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