As the autumn truck rolls with a devastatingly inexorable momentum into a town near you, it brings together - like Tango & Cash - two seemingly unmatchable miss-matches of datamoshing and the common cold and makes an unarguable link between the two; there's a lot of it about.
It's so common this common cold that they called it the common cold, so allow me to rename this so-called databending (the now common practice of dicking around with the underlying code of a visual file such as a JPG or MPEG and outputting it to get some sometimes Pretty Ugly random results) the common databend. Pedant note: it's also referred to as datamoshing or glitch art - or as I prefer, the common datamosh or the common glitch art.
My favourite common datamosh comes when the process is as untouched by the human hand as possible therefore removing any conscious 'artistic' influence and letting the aesthetic chips fall where they may. My common datamosh effort above was created by opening up Google Chrome to watch Jerry Seinfeld's latest project Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee and hitting the exposé button in OS X. When the window resized - et voilà! Instant glitch art. Completely random and un-replicatable. Unique.
More from the common databend can be found here:
Glitch art created by 'databending' - Duncan Geere
Auf einen Augen-Blick - Simon Crab
Databending and Glitch Art - Owen Priestley
Data Moshing and Glitch Art - Sam Smith
Compression Reel - David OReilly
Kanye West [Welcome to Heartbreak] - Nabil Elderkin
Evident Utensil - Chairlift