Takeshi Murata is probably best known as a media and video artist, but after seeing “Untitled (Pink Dot)” (2007), I suspected his aims and interests, if not his practice, may intersect with my own. While I have been told that my own work resembles film in some ways, in many cases I find the similaries end with the aesthetic. In Murata’s work I find the opposite: While the aesthetics may not be at all similar, he has a series of works in which I find the mechanisms familiar.

Murata created a series of video pieces that explored the underlying limitations of digital encoding technologies. The technologies involves removing key-framing information in a digital recording; An exploitation of the fragility of video compression codecs. The aesthetic effect is somewhat unpredictable, due to the nature of the technique, but generally the effect is a real-time digital decomposition of the video from frame-to-frame. This technique has since become known as “Datamoshing”. Sven König, the creator of a number of projects using a similar technique, described the technical process in his documentation for “aPpRoPiRaTe!”:

“Any frame that is not a key frame is calculated out of the last key frame and all following delta frames. By simply manipulating / deleting the key frames of a movie file it’s easily possibly to transmogrify that file with minimal effort.”http://popmodernism.org/appropirate

Beyond “transmogrification”, this decomposition destroys the often-flimsy metaphor of digital video as film. That’s not to say such a metaphor is always and completely without value, but in the interest of distinguishing digital video, and especially the film-to-video process, as an artistic and technical entity unto itself, it can be useful to see the ragged edges. The ragged edges of technology provide a means for the viewer to piece together a process from the artifacts of failure, pulling back the curtain on digital video and revealing its sometimes-flimsy superstructure.

Providing an “in” for the viewer to dissect the process is something I try to implement in my own projects, especially considering some of my projects can reasonably be compared to video work. I think it’s a mistake to assume because a display may be computer-driven that it must take physical input from the user. Far more often than not I find that this can easily confuse the project to the point of being un-readable.