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

Abstract

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.