Glitch Art and the cinematic articulation of the ‘shot’: the convergence of datamoshing with the long take

ABSTRACT

The contemporary digital video art genre of ‘Glitch Art’ enables artistic research with motion pictures to address liminal questions of articulation that were impossible in traditional analogue media. The Glitch Art technique of ‘datamoshing’ exploits the encoding of digital media to create a paradoxical separation of ‘image’ from ‘movement’ that demonstrates the central role of audience perception in parsing experience. This paper considers how artistic exploits of digital glitches enable novel analytic questions about the identification of kinesis and the role of the ‘frame’ and the ‘shot’ in cinematic articulation: [1] the relationship of the ‘long take’ where editing is minimized to the continuous progression of the ‘datastream’ in digital media, and [2] the role of differentiation between succeeding frames in the audience's identification/construction of ‘shots’ that are foundational to the technique of continuity editing.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital art
• glitch art
• post-structural aesthetics
• post-seriality
• intertextuality

Disclosure statement

This paper employs the author's own motion pictures in the discussion.

Notes

1 The author is one of a small group of artists who pioneered these procedures and techniques starting in the 1990s. The praxis that lies at the heart of this discussion derives from years of experience and studio work with Glitch Art. Parallel to this practical research is a substantial body of semiotic theory addressing motion graphics and Glitch Art, also by the author, that the present discussion applies to the analysis of his praxis.

2 Giles Deleuze's proposals of the ‘movement-image’ and the ‘time-image’ address something entirely different than the current discussion, and so fall outside its scope. His theory of cinema is expressly concerned with the works of the ‘great cinema directors’ (as he notes in the Preface to Cinema 1) by which he means he is only concerned with a narrow selection of narrative, commercial, feature length films produced after World War II in the twentieth century. Both these constructs are highly dependent on narrative functions produced by their articulation of causal relationships between shots clearly edited together via montage, an additional factor that limits the application of his analysis to the situations being produced in The Kodak Moment.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Betancourt

Michael Betancourt is a Professor of Motion Media Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design, and a board member of the Art of Light Organization. His research concerns media history, digital technology, and capitalist ideology; he wrote the first history of motion graphics from its origins to the commercial appropriation of avant-garde film and video art in the United States, published in 2013, as well as a number of other books on media art and animation. A pioneer of ‘Glitch Art’, he has engaged the links between theory and practice since the 1990s.