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.

tape capture deck at New School

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.

World Trade Center 2000, view from the Varrick Street Fyer office

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.