I am taking courses working on a Masters Program for Creative Publishing and Creative Journalism at the New School Social Research department. For Melissa Friedling’s Re/Lab: Re-emergent Media Research Lab, we were asked to create a short movie incorporating data glitches and moshing that had to be compressed to under 5 MB.
I took some old miniDV tapes as a starting point since they are already glitchy by nature, and I like the display info played over the shakey, fuzzy film. While I was digitizing, the tape’s plastic case broke and got immovably stuck inside the player. It didn’t bother me too much because I had realized that the old videos were frankly quite boring even though, in my mind, I thought they would be packed with great content of debaucherous raves of the ’90s.
The bit I chose is a quick zoom through the Flyer office on Varrick street, which had an incredible view of the world trade center.
This Github python code added more data moshing through mac’s terminal: https://github.com/OwenDavisBower/DataMosh. My line of code after switching the path to the download folder was python DataMosh.py 2023–03-10datamoshv4.mov 1000 1000 1000. It turned out not to work with very high numbers above 1000.
Then I compressed it in Handbrake and eventually Media Encoder to get it below the required 5 MB.